Booko
Deviled Hen
MidnightBlue said:You're assuming, along with most of the people participating in this thread, that religion is theistic.
Only because this is the West, and criticisms of religion here are almost univerally criticisms of theism.
If there's a need to get more specific, that's fine.
Theism is superfluous to many forms of Buddhism.
True, but it does not lack a belief in the supernatural, which many atheists would take you to task for. 25 years ago, I would've. Belief in a soul or in reincarnation, for example, is just as unfalsifiable as belief in God, and just as unacceptable.
The eminent archaeologist William Dever, though a convert to Judaism, is not a theist.
So I've heard. One wonders who he is praying to 3 times a day. :sarcastic
Many Unitarian-Universalists and many Quakers are not theists.
Their roots are firmly in theism, and the non-theism a recent trend. This might bear further discussion. Although at what point does a religion become a social group, I wonder?
Jainism is nontheistic.
Jainism has a belief in the soul, so it does not lack the supernatural, and would therefore be open to criticism. Some forms of Jainism have practices that are indistinguishable from mere superstition, at least to an atheist.
It's unreasonable to oppose religion to atheism, because religion and nontheism have large areas of overlap.
It's equally problematic to draw a firm line between religion and philosophy.
I think that's why I said my top crazy criticism of religion was when a person is really criticizing something about a segment of religion X, but applies it to all religion as if it were true of all religion. Which, as you point out, ain't necessarily so.
[quote EDIT: And I forgot to mention Taoism. [/quote]
Depending on who you ask, it's a philosophy or a religion. In practice, at least in Asia, it can be rife with superstition.
Criticisms of religion in general are rare, and even more rarely do they actually apply to all religions.
Well, criticisms that actually apply to all religion are rare. But I can assure you when I was an atheist reading up on comparitive religions I was not shy about criticizing any and all of them, though I tried to aim the criticisms more specifically.
If you'd like a sample of criticisms of religion in general, go hang out on Internet Infidels for a while. Not all of them apply, as you say, but occasionally you find someone rigorous enough so that the criticism does apply.
There's the criticism leveled by Richard Dawkins:"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
And the one leveled by Bertrand Russell:
"Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm."
That isn't a criticism of religion. It's a criticism of humanity. Hypocrites are hardly reserved to religion. Check out politicians sometime. And even philosophers of the non-religious sort would have the same problems "clergymen" can have.
I don't think that either of these criticisms is crazy; on the contrary, these are very real dangers that all religious people ought to be aware of and avoid.
I consider them general truths that would be important even if there were no religion of any sort.
Uh..if you want to get really technical about it, neither of them could be leveled against my religion. We have no clergy, and we are commanded to think for ourselves.
In practice, of *course* it's possible to find hypocrisy among us (duh....we're as human as anyone else), so the danger is there. And there is still a very human tendency for people to be intellectually lazy at times.