Hey guys I’m new around these parts but i was wondering if you could give me some input into a school assignment I’m doing.
Is/ can religion survive in the modern world?
Unfortunately (well, you see now I’m heavily biased), it can. Wherever people lead a sense-emptied life, religious people will take religion to them to fill refered emptiness. It’s mostly a drug substituting another. A person who doesn’t find any sense in life has to fill it and give life a sense. Some take drugs, some find an ideal, and some just follow a religion. As much as I disagree with Karl Marx’s ideas, I think he hit the bull’s eye with this one: “Religion is the opium of the masses”.
Look around you. Is religion surviving? Do those millions of Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. all mean anything? 
Points to violent Fundamentalist organizations world wide, blowing shit up and killing people who don’t agree with them
The question isn’t “can religon survive in the modern world?” but “can the modern world survive religion?”
Damn, I’m feeling cheeky this evening… 
[Actually, religion isn’t the problem. Rather, the churches that spring up to “observe” said religions but end up leading people away from them. Substitute ritual for understanding, taking answers from an “expert” rather than exploring them yourself, doing or not doing certain activities out of fear of “what will the church group think of me” or whatever, blah blah blah blah blah…]
Excellent points, but what would you say about an increasing number of “non practicing” religious people. For example there are countless numbers of people who in AUstralian senus’, mark down as being christian, however do not practice it on a regular basis, my family being one. But is religion about practicing? or about belief and faith?
Being paranoid people will stop being religious because a small segment of the population keeps becoming non-religious is foolish. If you look at the middle east, you see people are only getting more religious. If you look at the god damn bible belt in the US, you see the effects of religion. Atheists are in the minority. Its just in certain places they might not seem like it because the people either A)know better B)don’t care C)have something against religion D)are weak, so they follow like sheep. I happen to qualify for the first 3 and despise people who fall in the 4th category, which there will ALWAYS be a majority of 8P.
Examples of problems with religion, christianity: the council of Trent rewrote the Bible to tie up “loose ends” and make it to their liking. Therefore the “teachings of god” (haw) are nothing more than the words of men (more so, since men wrote the bible in the first place). Men in power aren’t modeled after God, God is modeled after themselves. Nothing is more obvious than with the terrorists and Allah vs peaceful muslims. People who realize these things tend to start to dislike religion.
Go to www.sciam.com. A few months back, an issue had data on how religious people in the US are. I’m not sure if it’d be on the site anywhere, but it would be a great hard, factual source to use on the topic.
Originally posted by KaiserVonAlmasy
[b]The question isn’t “can religon survive in the modern world?” but “can the modern world survive religion?”
[/b]
That’s quite true.And I also agree wirh Cless Alvein…religion is thriving today, whatever culture it belongs to.Christians, Wicca, Pagan, Hindu, Muslim, Science…my comment does not necessarily mean that religion exists and is providing some stability for the world today, because of course it doesn’t.Innocent people die for “their God”, whatever religion their God exist in. A lot of the times, religion is ruling the modern world in certain places, like the Middle East. If religion was not surviving, would people be so damned touchy about it? Of course not.
I think one of the main reasons that people believe in a deity of some sort is that it makes them feel much more able to cope with life…we are just mortal, and the belief in an afterlife and a greater power mean that people feel more able to deal with these things.
Someone once told me something like, “Without faith, there is no hope. Without hope, what’s the point in living?”
I don’t agree completely with that, but I hope that helps some.
Originally posted by Evangelion
That’s quite true.And I also agree wirh Cless Alvein…religion is thriving today, whatever culture it belongs to.Christians, Wicca, Pagan, Hindu, Muslim, <b>Science</b>
Science isn’t a religion. Religion is something based on faith, and science is simply deriving conclusions from repeated and concrete evidence attained from experiments. People seem to like to say that Science is a religion because you have to “believe in science huhhuhuhu”. Except no.
Religion is very much alive, some just practice it more than others. I believe many are searching for their own version of faith, since many religions can seem straight lined.
Others are just plain irritating, like Jehova’s witnesses, who have to go around trying to shove their belief down everyone’s throat.
Then of course there are the fanatics.
Religion has bound people together throughout history, and it will continue to do so as long as humanity exists.
Originally posted by Cless Alvein
Science isn’t a religion. Religion is something based on faith, and science is simply deriving conclusions from repeated and concrete evidence attained from experiments. People seem to like to say that Science is a religion because you have to “believe in science huhhuhuhu”. Except no.
Many people like to agree, and disagree with my statement.The fact is, in Science, you ARE believing in something, and to be blunt, you’re believing in evolution (I said to be blunt…not everyone who backs Science believes in evolution…but bear with me). You are believing that no higher authority or God created the earth, and you are believing that humans and life were created over millions and millions of years to become the society we are today. Science, as a whole isn’t really a religion, but it can be defined as that, because Science may follow the same concepts as religion. It <u>can</u> but not always.The same with religion. Both have its flaws, and both are theory, and both cannot be 100% proven correct. A great mind can adapt itself and see and believe in both sides-science and religion- at the same time.
And faith is not only associated with religion, it’s everywheres in people who want to believe it. People who practice science have “faith” in what they believe in and what they think is correct.Some with religious society. Two types of faith, and I am making very loose comparisons, but the way I see it, it is there.
A religion is NOT a theory.
A theory is a set of hypotheses that have been tested and not been rejected. Example: the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, these are HUGE ensembles of hypotheses built upon observed fact and data. Religion is NOT tested. It is pure “faith”. And there is no hope without faith is pure sentimental bullshit. I don’t have faith, but I have hope anyway.
What religion and science BOTH are ways of observing and describing the world. I could make a religion based on the idea the world is flat. Would I be right? No. Why? Because there is evidence supporting that the Earth is NOT flat. Which brings up Creation science, which is not a science, but a lot of bs that people put together to try to teach creationism in school under the idea it has equal merit with evolution, which it does NOT because it is nothing more than a grab bag of ideas put together with scientific jargon in order to make evolution look retarded in the eyes of the religiously self-deluded who would feel good seeing religion play a part in the world. All “scientific support” for it crumbles under scrutiny. Even John Paul II said “knowledge has led to the recognition thatof the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis”.
Saying science hasn’t proven anything so its no better than religion is also bullshit. Modern science has been around for a couple hundred years and its kinda hard to also explain things which you can’t readily observe , like the creation of the universe. AT LEAST when scientists don’t know , they admit that they don’t know. Little science is based on faith.