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On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?
I think it depends on the religion. Some seem far more divisive than others, and others seem far more unifying.
On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?
I think it depends on the religion. Some seem far more divisive than others, and others seem far more unifying.
At a local level then can unite, but worldwide they divide.From where I'm sitting, religion, for the most part, while uniting groups of people, divides people as a whole into subsets.
But I do agree, it depends on the religion. Proselytizing religions tend to divide people more than others.
On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?
I think it depends on the religion. Some seem far more divisive than others, and others seem far more unifying.
Doesn't Christianity alone have something like 30,000 sects?
False analogy. Families are natural divisions of humanity, not artificially created divisions based on opinion. Without religion, those divisions would disappear. Not so with families.And doesn't humanity have 1-2 billion families...
False analogy. Families are natural divisions of humanity, not artificially created divisions based on opinion. Without religion, those divisions would disappear. Not so with families.
I welcome your return by greeting your post with a challenge.Religions are not a homogenous phenomenon oriented towards the same ends, so it is difficult to answer the OP's question in any definitive, all-encompassing sense.
Some faith traditions are predominantly ethnically based - like Judaism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism - and thus concerned almost entirely with the unity and solidarity of a limited subset of the human population.
Others, like Islam and Shintoism, have been guided by ideals of integrating the whole human race under the umbrella of a uniform, overarching cultural hegemony or common civilization.
In the Muslim case, this is because the Prophet Muhammad - while having a universal ambition for his faith - began as an explicitly Arabian preacher, delivering God's word in Arabic to pagan Arabs whom he aspired to unite within one huge commonwealth (the Ummah) by professing strict monotheism, mirroring the monolithic nature of Arab customs and language that still marks Islamic life till this day.
Christianity, for its part, originated in the vast cosmopolitan milieu of the Roman Empire, with its multi-ethnic and polyglot boiling pot of cultures held together under Roman law and governance.
Unsurprisingly, the Christian God is therefore a plurality-in-unity of three distinct Persons sharing one divine essence - in other words a reflection of the religion's social origins and ideology.
As such, the Christian message had from the very beginning an explicit emphasis upon the unity of humanity as a single but widely differentiated organism, rich in diversity of cultural traditions as at Pentecost but sharing one common nature, origin and supernatural end in God.
Christianity therefore de-emphasised the importance of cultural distinctions and borders while stressing the importance of unity of doctrine, as the glue binding disparate peoples together under one mother church, and as a result you could say that like Islam we preached human unity while dividing humanity into two blocs "believer" and "unbeliever" but without the dominating uniformity of culture, language and custom that is pervasive in Islamic thought.
I welcome your return by greeting your post with a challenge.
If the goal Christianity unity meant that there should be only two blocs, believer and non-believer, then has it failed? Christianity itself has been divided into thousands of quarreling sects. Then there's its quarrel with other religions.
I believe that human rights are universal but we would disagree on the kind of government. For example, I think democracies are passe but I do agree that governments for the people are needed.Do you believe that human rights are universal, and that it would be best for all governments to function as representative, secular and constitutional, liberal democracies where those rights can be protected and exercised freely?
I don't think the "Christian moral universalism" you refer to actually exists. IMO, Christian morals are improving along with non-Christian morals. The mechanism for change is conscience. I think it was the nagging of conscience that caused the abolition of legal slavery and is now pushing for the equality of women across the globe.I certainly do on both accounts but I'm curious to hear your answer to this, as it relates to the topic at hand - namely liberalism and humanism as "secular religions" in the tradition of Christian moral universalism, with a creed and sense of mission that followers of the liberal-humanist consensus seek to preach to the rest of the planet, in spite of its dizzying array of distinct values and perspectives grounded in non-Western civilizations.
An artificially imposed unity? Essentially, all my version of progress amounts to is an attitude of global citizenship and the idea that we humans will live a higher quality of life when we learn to cooperate.The global unity in norms, governance models and rights sought by secular liberals, is an artificially imposed unity just as much as religion. A good one that I passionately subscribe to, in terms of its rationale and outcomes, but one nonetheless. The very idea of sacrosanct rights is a Western construct originally derived from canonists of the medieval church.
The "concrete frameworks" aren't only based on intuition. They are based on the idea that conscience, as an intuitive judgment, should be used to decide questions of right and wrong and reason should be used to decide questions of fact.I understand that this somewhat touches upon our old moral intuition versus reason debate, which I don't really seek to rehash!
Regardless of intuition, concrete proposals and frameworks based upon intuition are widely different, with very distinct justice systems and political traditions in different countries, many of which aren't liberal or humanist.
I believe that human rights are universal but we would disagree on the kind of government. For example, I think democracies are passe but I do agree that governments for the people are needed.
I don't think the "Christian moral universalism" you refer to actually exists. IMO, Christian morals are improving along with non-Christian morals. The mechanism for change is conscience. I think it was the nagging of conscience that caused the abolition of legal slavery and is now pushing for the equality of women across the globe.
An artificially imposed unity? Essentially, all my version of progress amounts to is an attitude of global citizenship and the idea that we humans will live a higher quality of life when we learn to cooperate.
Religions are not a homogenous phenomenon oriented towards the same ends, so it is difficult to answer the OP's question in any definitive, all-encompassing sense.
I can't give you a short answer that will make sense but maybe I can have you see the core problem with democracies is that they fulfill none of these three criteria of a good decision-making model;Let's focus in on human rights then.
By the way, though, how does one envisage government accountable to the people without universal-suffrage parliamentary democracy?
I wrote FOR the people, not BY the peopleIf people cannot vote on what matters most to them and change governments accordingly, in elections once a mandate has ran out, I cannot see how we might foster "government by the people".
Although some cultures lag, we humans are treating each other better today than at any time in our history. I authored a thread on the topic. I'll try to find it for you.The idea of "progress" itself is not a given, many cultures throughout history have had no notion of moral or civilizational progress but of cyclical time and past golden ages that we are trying to return to.
It doesn't matter when men first became aware of it. Moral progress has probably been happening since the origin of our species. I think the intuition we call conscience is our key to survival.Progress is an idea derived from a Zoroastrian-apocalyptic Jewish-Christian framework, and then secularised by Enlightenment liberals. Joachim of Fiore, the medieval abbot, is called by many historians the man who "invented the future" for conceptualizing history as a linear progression of moral norms towards a future age of peace and plenty on earth.
Cultural biases won't change the judgments of conscience. If conscience dictates that women should be treated as equals, those cultures that don't now agree nevertheless own the same intuition for survival that we do. They will someday agree.And global citizenship presupposes the idea of a common human nature, community and a framework of "rights" which one is entitled to hold, again not universal concepts across cultures if you ask intellectual historians about their provenance. Citizenship being universal also presupposes equality despite differences in status, race, gender and so on - again, that's an historically traceable concept. Classical conceptions of citizenship were restricted to a class of free, elite males.
"All knowledge begins in the senses." Since we know that the difference between moral right and wrong can't be seen, smelled, heard or tasted, it must be felt. In other words, we humans would know absolutely nothing about morality if not for conscience.Enlightenment liberalism, beginning with John Locke in the late 17th century and culminating in the French Revolution, is directly indebted to the medieval canon law innovation of the primacy of the individual conscience, subjective natural rights (which didn't exist in classical philosophy) and government arising from the consent of the governed rather than "divine right" - a crucial precursor, therefore, of modern liberal theory (i.e. individual rights, the rule of law, equality and representative government).
I think all religions divide. Only Jesus Christ unites....On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?
I think it depends on the religion. Some seem far more divisive than others, and others seem far more unifying.