Why Discuss The Validity Of Religion?

The reason some atheists are outspoken about disproving religion is because religion propagates false information about the world, has brought great harm to humans throughout history, and continues to do so. Just a few of many examples:

• The Catholic church continues to discourage the use of condoms in Africa -- despite the fact that such use would prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women and children every year due to AIDS.

• The majority of Americans falsely believe the Biblical interpretation that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and that human beings lived with the dinosaurs.

• Men motivated by their religious beliefs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, as were most of those who managed the American military response.

• Jim Jones and The People's Temple.

• Marshall Applewhite and Heaven's Gate.

• The Salem witch trials.

• The Inquisition.

• The Wedge Document (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy).

Christopher Hitchens has written, with characteristic candor and eloquence, that "[r]eligion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

Sam Harris points out: "For millennia, the world’s great prophets and theologians have applied their collective genius to the riddle of womanhood. The result has been polygamy, sati, honor killing, punitive rape, genital mutilation, forced marriages, a cultic obsession with virginity, compulsory veiling, the persecution of unwed mothers, and other forms of physical and psychological abuse so kaleidoscopic in variety as to scarcely admit of concise description. Some of this sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape."

To suggest that atheists have no need to disprove religion is to ignore the incalculable harm that religion has done over the centuries.

It's true that religion is responsible for much evil -- till Communists the champion murderers were probably animists from Central Asia: Turks and Mongols before their conversion to other religions, Islam in particular (when they remained as brutal) -- but since there are few specifics built into human consciousness and since religion can't be disproven to most by logic we can't very well blame most people for having been religious. Most simply knew no real alternative.

I see religion as a "theory of everything" that has gradually proven inadequate. The eventual proofs were not obvious and often counterintuitive. Religion also was a means of education and structuring lives. Skills were specifically developed in the service of nonexistent beings -- much architecture and art as separate from shelter and personal adornment.

Don't get me wrong, my position is that religion has reached the limits of its usefulness, but there's no universally appealing alternative yet. Most people don't have the time or inclination to do the mental operations involved in disproving it. They aren't necessarily stupid, they just lack background, education, time, the personal nature to do so.... And religion now serves most as a kind of existential shortcut: it lets them know what to do when someone dies, it enables them to express emotions and wishes and hopes in an approved formula (prayer and ritual) without "acting out", and it provides quick answers to the questions people will now and then ponder; today I'd bet most simultaneously hold pragmatic scientific ideas and religious beliefs and assume it all fits together somehow.
We do need to provide alternatives, or have them available, but by forcing people to give up beliefs, insulting them, doing such things as praising a photo of a crucifix in a glass of piss, and so on we're making them defensive and stubborn. The so-called "revealed" faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have internal mechanisms for handling with persecution.
Further, you'd do well to understand the import of some teachings. I've noticed religious people tend to have a clearer idea of people's motives and behavior than people befuddled by inane psychobabble and mind fads.
Even the people who claim a fear of deities is all that keeps people from being criminals are really telling you that they themselves can't behave without being scared shitless of some powerful entity. What are you going to do about them? Torture them and cage them or let them be kept in line by imposed fear?

The greatest enemy of religion is a combination of prosperity and security. The more safe people are, the more their needs are met and wishes granted the less religions. (Prosperity is also best for the "environment" since wealthy countries' birth rates decline to a low level.) The maintenance of a capitalist free market, which brings prosperity will work to let religion gradually mutate and it's pernicious forms fade away.

Polygamy, by which I think you mean polygyny, is standard in all but a few societies, at least till recently. I don't see what's wrong with it except to the extent that it leaves a number of young men without wives and thus unsettled and belligerent. I assure you that getting rid of religion will not in itself make people behave better. I see cutting out and killing the unborn as a bad thing -- with effective contraceptives easily available there's little excuse for unwanted pregnancies -- and keeping adult murderers alive at my expense counterproductive at best.
Those are not religious convictions but common sense. Lack of religion in itself has brought its own evils and perversions, though in the long run losing religion is best.

Just keep alternatives quietly available, hold off making vicious attacks on religion, work to insure an open society with the least possible government and maximum prosperity and I assure you religion will fade in a few generations.
Remember when religious pundits announced that "test tube" babies would be "born without souls"? Possibly not, but childless couples who want their own kids and who are religious now regularly resort to it. Pragmatic results will help.

"I don't understand the reason many atheists continue to try to disprove religion. If it ain't true then it ain't true. No need to keep gnawing at it."

sadly, religions unholy influence is still the cause of so much hatred, ignorance and violence in the world.

lets criticise the stupidity and ignorance contained within the pages of its 'holy' texts, lampoon its obvious foolishness and the silly, weird and pretentious manner of dress of its officers and their acolytes. their pompous ceremonies and their fatuous prayers.

lets mock the meaningless clichés that they repeat, and the lies about the miraculous feats of derring-do of their 'saviours'.

and lets hope that its enough to bring to a speedy end to the carnage that these superstitions have inflicted upon the human race since the day that they were first invented. a carnage that they still inflict upon unfortunate people in many parts of the world, and one that we, in the 'advanced' west have recently engaged in!

we have a moral obligation to try and free people from the thrall of superstition and the accompanying brainwashing that usually begins in vulnerable childhood.

freeing the world of superstition is as much of a human rights issue as freeing it of any other kind of oppression or dictatorship.

we cannot destroy religion, but we can marginalise its influence and limit the harm that it does.

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 30 July, 1816

rjk2001

Marginalize it in your life and set an example of being normal and as successful and happy as you can.

The problem with ridicule is that it makes people defensive and makes them hate you. I would bet that one reason for massacres and terrorism is years and decades of ridicule; the rage finally breaks through and the victims find a means of expressing it. (Another reason is simply to terrorize people into submission, with no genuine anger, but rather the urge to dominate behind the behavior. Most people don't easily tell the difference.)

I'm all for expressing your position and defending yourself -- but that's exactly what the other guy is doing.
Making a life habit of attacking religion is counterproductive and in today's world, where religion is likely on the retreat, will make you outdated and ultimately useless like the white liberals who yammer yammer yammer incessantly about race, thus remaining racists long after most people aren't. People who, having helped solve the issue, cannot give it up.