Why do Atheists care about religion?, page 47


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reply posted on 11-6-2013 @ 11:37 PM by Cogito, Ergo Sum
Originally posted by hadriana
Everyone cares about religion - it's the same urge in all of us, just athiests feel the urge to deny it.
Its like you can think about God and how great God is...and you can start to see some infinity going up up up, and atheists are thinking the same way really, but they are focusing those feelings on denying that anything supernatural exists...so they focus down down, science, reason, to a microscopic level, going down, down.



In many ways, it's really quite the opposite of what you say. People who don't give in to the simplistic notion of "god" (particularly as explained in the ignorant fantasies of ancient desert dwelling peasants and goat herders) can ponder the same things but instead of accepting an imaginary friend, seek to understand it. I know many so called "atheists" who are open minded this way, they just don't accept the explanations given by popular religions.

While there is no such thing as a perfect society, it also seems that in general religion correlates very strongly with societal ill health. It is known that religious populations are less tolerant, less peaceful, less accepting of science, less healthy, more likely to divorce, have higher incidence of teenage/unwanted pregnancy and far more prevalence of STD infection, have higher income inequality, care less for their sick and less fortunate etc. etc. Not saying religion is a cause of any of this, it could very well be the other way round, a very human reaction to find hope amongst inequality and/or oppression, an "opium of the people".

It does seem odd that a section of a modern, educated western society would like to impose scripture (fairy tales) in science classes, showing similar fanaticism as say.....that of Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Which seems what atheists/ proponents of science such as Dawkins and the like, seem to be against. Though I'm not sure atheists have such a problem with the average cultural observance type of religious belief.

Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle.


................examined reasons for the wide variation in teenage pregnancy and birth rates among five developed countries: Canada, France, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States...........................In addition to having a higher adolescent pregnancy rate, the United States has higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among adolescents than most other developed countries............................The annual incidence of gonorrhea among all U.S. adolescents (572 cases per 100,000) is 10 or more times the level in the other four countries.


www.guttmacher.org...

www.truthdig.com...

moses.creighton.edu...

edit on 12-6-2013 by Cogito, Ergo Sum because: for the heck of it.

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