Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Slinger
You seem to presume, though I could be wrong, that "the betterment of the individual and the community" can only effectively be executed through religion. If so, why? If not, and you believe that this can be acheived outside of religion, the result is that religion is not required from an individual or community perspective and it is therefore stripped down to nothing more than 'belief'. If theism and aetheism are able to accomplish the same goals then the only difference between the two world views is faith in a higher power. While religion requires faith, faith does not require religion...
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I would choose not to say that "the betterment of the individual and the community can only effectively be executed through religion." I would rather argue that the pursuit of these ideals is distinctly "religious" behaviour. In the video that Gozer posted above, Alain de Botton clearly argues that secularists do not do a good job of enacting these ideals. I am hesitant to agree that the same effects can be achieved apart from organized religion, simply because it is within organized religion that this occurs most prominently. There are likely billions of people on the planet who do not agree that religion is merely optional. In my own church, there are hundreds of people who have undergone incredibly healthy and helpful personal and familial change that they cannot divorce from their religious experience. There is no doubt in my mind that they are better off in every way for their religious conversion, and I am quite certain that most of them are at a point at which they do in fact "need" their religion. It is not absurd. It is not nonsense. For many, it yields unparalleled results.
I think that "religion" is a corrupt institution like any institution, but that our modern organized religions contain vestiges of things that we have collectively ignored and forgotten in our aggressive pursuit of individual life, liberty, and happiness.