Civilisation does NOT need faith in God

[Prisoner Of Ice]

You're just ignorant and blathering. What kind of fuckface sits there and says to someone that their moral code is evil and causes violence, one that emphasizes self sacrifice. Everything you say is fucking retarded and has nothing to do with anything. Pope did not cause 'reforms' or want them, or have any choice. The only effect they had on bloodshed was to break down the system that kept bloodshed under control between nations. IE christianity. Contrast this to muslims you idiot, where at this same time they constantly eradicated whole cultures. Yet you try to paint the crusades which were DEFENSIVE as acts of evil. And islam is not bad because it's a religion, but because it's not a religion. It doesn't reallyc are about souls, it just cares about your ass.

Fuck off already, what a crock of shit. You don't even understand the shit you are parroting.

Ultimately above it all, I have seen what society has become without any moral base. That is what leftists want to undermine, because with no moral base you are nothing but a slave. You don't object to anything they do, don't value humaity, your culture or your people. Sound familiar? There is no future there.

That is why whatever you think about religion you should be smart enough to see how full of shit the premise of this thread is. The only society that can be sustained like that is hunter gatherers or overarching tyrrany where a tiny group owns you completely. And the population today is too big to make it with a hunter gatherer mentality, just look at Africa. Yes, that is the lifesyle they are preaching, for you to be a dumb slave-nigger that doesn't even know right from wrong which can be absolutely controlled.

[Drakoblare]

Humans are spiritual beings and shall always be like that. No matter what happens, they'll always try to find the truth and religion shall be here. I'd rather have Christian dominated socieities than that new-age bullshit.

[Desaix DeBurgh]

Humans are spiritual beings and shall always be like that. No matter what happens, they'll always try to find the truth and religion shall be here. I'd rather have Christian dominated socieities than that new-age bullshit.

Speak for yourself : I'm not spiritual at all. I'm not a spiritual being and will never be like that. Fact is religion is literally false, in the scientific sense, and God probably doesn't exist.

The argument from the multiplicity of religions: There are dozens, and perhaps even hundreds or thousands of religions, all of which claim to be 'absolutely true', and all of which contradict one another in fundamental ways. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from this is that all of them are absolutely false. In recognizing the above facts, those of an ecuminist bent have argued that, while all religions are probably false in some ways, the fact that all (or at least most) have the same core beliefs about God and morality imply that the true religion is constituted of these core beliefs. While this argument has a superficial appeal, it does not in fact prove the truth of the core beliefs, but only -- at most -- their usefulness: It proves that human beings are similar in the basic moral rules and mental props (god-belief) needed for a stable society. So belief in God may not be needed for an unstable advanced society but it seems to be needed for a stable one because the average person is pathetic.

[Hexachordia]

Faith is faith, it does not necessarily have to confess in a single god. Believing in spirits and animism is another sort of thing, animist people will practice cannibalism, inbreeding, all sort of filthiness and descend into australoid and negrito conditions. But southamerican indians are different, they live ethical lives, anthropologically modern human-beings and very healthy too. They are not animist but religious, their 7000 years long history of mummifications, extensive cultivations of the land prove this. Tribalism=/=animism, but civilization also =/=religious and faithful. But mongols in mongolia are animist, ghengis khan was also an animist, and he was one of the cruellest dictator in human history too. A civilized animist is the most terrible thing to happen, therefore civilization is not always a good thing. Faith is more important, but faith can be counterfaited too, people can fake everything, it is why truth is important, yet we can not ask for too much. Some people are better at truth, some are at faith, some are at religion, respect each other and togather we can make great things beyond our own definitions.

[sean]

Lots of cultures have no gods. The Pirahã people in the Amazon basin had no gods whatsoever at the time of first contact. But they did have a belief in spirits. They believe that these spirits take the form of animals and natural phenomena and they believe that they see those spirits, who appear as creatures in the environment, unlike the typically unseen God of Abrahamic religions.

But they aren't really a civilisation, since they don't have a complex state society and stuff like that. Everett was a Christian missionary who found it impossible to convince the Pirahã that there was a God. Eventually, after decades of trying, he realised that the task was futile because it was just some idea made up by his culture and he became an atheist.

However, some non-literate tribes tend to have a vague creator god that they blame for everything. This is seen among the Andaman Islanders, the people who live in the Tierra del Fuego, the Namib Desert, and the Congo. Their god lives in the sky and could care less about humans.

Animism and ancestor worship do not necessarily have gods in the way that we tend to think about them, but both methods of belief are still practiced in parts of the world today. It's been posited by scholars like Joseph Campbell (who to be fair is not precisely a historian, but religion and mythology is his area) that the creation of a mythology and the existence of higher beings is central to human behaviour.

Burial practices and cave art, two of the oldest archaeological sources that we have, suggest that an awareness of some kind of metaphysical world is pretty universal and actually predate the existence of Homo sapiens. Later people have created philosophies that do not necessarily include gods specifically, but it seems that they are created after the existence of the gods themselves. One of oldest monumental structures for instance was a temple (Gobekli Tepe 10000 BC) and the first urban civilisations were organised around temples.

Neanderthals probably imagined gods of some sort. They definitely engaged in what can only be described as religious practices. The Neanderthals went extinct some 40,000 years ago. It seems likely that Homo heidelbergensis also imagined spirit beings. That, a couple hundred thousand years ago.

A belief in a God, in the singular, is much rarer, and seems to be much newer, in historical terms. It might have something to do with the survival instinct. The more we are able to control our lives, the less likely we need imaginary beings to protect us.

It's quite possible to posit some wacky origin myths or explanations for the natural world without the need for grand creator as well. The Babylonians thought that the world had been filled entirely with water, and that Marduk lay mats with dirt on them over the sea in order to create land. Look at the Nile delta theories themselves: the stories about the source of the Nile were sometimes pretty wacky, but many were reasonably naturalistic.

All far eastern religions like Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism and particularly Confucianism are a bit wishy-washy on the subject. All of those seem more concerned with what's here on Earth, with some allusions to spirits or heavenly deities which appear just as interchangeable with the forces of nature. None really have a grand creator as such. But they are merely philosophies than religions. Even Hinduism has atheist schools of thought.

Taoism existed mainly as a mandated religion/philosophy for a long time, and once it was no longer mandated, its popularity diminished and it was quickly replaced with religions that had gods or was practiced alongside religions that had gods.

Not to mention deification (apotheosis), where the memory of a real notable human evolves into a god over generations. You can see this all over the world where major historical figures are deified. This is found in disparate societies so it seems likely that the process of deification of a remembered historical figure is a fairly natural process, especially in the context of ancestor worshipping societies, prevalent in a lot of traditional religions.

Humans are deeply tribal animals, instinctually we're usually very supportive of our own group, and hostile to outsiders. Religion or faith but not necessarily belief in God could work as an extension of this, as a shared mythology would allow two or more members of the same group to quickly recognise each other as friends. Similarly, an individual who's religious practices are different to yours can be quickly identified as an outsider, and thus untrustworthy (as seen in brown people religions).

[Roy]

Speak for yourself : I'm not spiritual at all. I'm not a spiritual being and will never be like that. Fact is religion is literally false, in the scientific sense, and God probably doesn't exist.

The argument from the multiplicity of religions: There are dozens, and perhaps even hundreds or thousands of religions, all of which claim to be 'absolutely true', and all of which contradict one another in fundamental ways. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from this is that all of them are absolutely false. In recognizing the above facts, those of an ecuminist bent have argued that, while all religions are probably false in some ways, the fact that all (or at least most) have the same core beliefs about God and morality imply that the true religion is constituted of these core beliefs. While this argument has a superficial appeal, it does not in fact prove the truth of the core beliefs, but only -- at most -- their usefulness: It proves that human beings are similar in the basic moral rules and mental props (god-belief) needed for a stable society. So belief in God may not be needed for an unstable advanced society but it seems to be needed for a stable one because the average person is pathetic.

I concur. Also people tend to believe and practice some religion because they were heavily indoctrinated since their early childhood and they keep on doing it out of habit uncritically and they impose some additional meaning to it - that it teaches them how to be a good person etc. which is silly. Deities are BS.