Korean Job Discussion Forums

[maximmm]

My take on religion is this:

While, yes, one religion may bring people together and unite them in many ways, diversity of religions does much more to divide people and fuel animosity between them.

Religion causes people to see themselves as being superior to all unbelievers (heretics?), or believers of other faiths.

If the human population were to become secular, politics would then be the foundation of control and intimidation of the masses. I was born in USSR, and we had Lenin who, while being a non-religious figure, was viewed as an idol of a sort. Myths and legends were created and taught in school as facts to demonstrate his 'perfect' ideals. In that environment, anyone who chose not to prescribe to similar beliefs was deemed an infidel (sent to prisons/face death penalty).

Of course, for that reason and many others, I see religion and politics as equal means of brainwashing people to perpetuate control of the masses. This brainwashing is equally effective in the west (in USA it's a combination of religious and political brainwashing techniques, thus twice as effective).

[mzeno]

"God Is Not Great", by Christopher Hitchens, should be required reading.

[Captain Corea]

[Rteacher]

Professor Antony Flew [former atheist philosopher] writes:

...The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents � or rather lack of contents � of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as �an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view�).

The fault of Dawkins as an academic (which he still was during the period in which he composed this book although he has since announced his intention to retire) was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form. Thus we find in his index five references to Einstein. They are to the mask of Einstein and Einstein on morality; on a personal God; on the purpose of life (the human situation and on how man is here for the sake of other men and above all for those on whose well-being our own happiness depends); and finally on Einstein�s religious views. But (I find it hard to write with restraint about this obscurantist refusal on the part of Dawkins) he makes no mention of Einstein�s most relevant report: namely, that the integrated complexity of the world of physics has led him to believe that there must be a Divine Intelligence behind it. (I myself think it obvious that if this argument is applicable to the world of physics then it must be hugely more powerful if it is applied to the immeasurably more complicated world of biology.)...

http://www.bethinking.org/resources/flew-speaks-out-professor-antony-flew-reviews-the-god-delusion.htm