How to reawaken the religion debate?

Beruthiel wrote:

That's a step too far imo - they should be turned into hotels, bed and breakfasts and the smaller ones changed into private homes.
I always thought a church would make a great home, the acoustics when you put on your music or surround sound cinema system would be the biz.

True, it would be a criminal shame to destroy the often immensely beautiful old relics of many cultures. These are monuments to the aspirations of people to become something greater than they are, in a roundabout fashion I'll grant you.

Beruthiel wrote:

I also agree that once religion and bigotery are removed from the planet it will be a much better place to live. I don't think that's going to happen though for at least a few more centuries - round about the time when jean luc becomes the captain of the enterprise.

Why? Religion isn't like a mountain you need to demolish one rock at a time; its all in people's minds. And people can change their minds on a whim. Essentially the entire human race could step beyond it in the time it takes to finish reading this sentence, should they feel the need to.

However a secular agenda is pursued, both it’s methods and object would have to be clearly different to religions. Where they use fear to gain and keep adherents, our agenda would have to be reason. So no Church burning, which in any case only makes people identify more with their religion of birth.

I’ve sometimes thought there’s a need for a sort of Atheist bible, containing a positive statement of the secular outlook, but at the same time something that was the very opposite of scripture. Where scripture is generally a block of text that cannot be changed, the model for an Atheist source book would be wikipedia. It would start just with such understanding as any average non-believer might have, and accrete and change as knowledge changes.

I’d see it’s as starting with acknowledging that giving credence to the senses is the first step of any attempt to make sense of reality. There should also be acknowledgement of how human ideas are formed, and hidden assumptions and gaps in perception. Where religion seeks to find a fictional certainty, the secular view needs to be all grown up and borrow some of Johnson’s attitude.

The object would be a simple, coherent statement of what we know about Life the Universe and Everything, relating in non-technical language that relates the statement to the proof i.e. ‘We know the universe is expanding, because astronomers can see that galaxies are moving away from each other. That suggests at one stage everything was closer together. We know from the distances travelled that the time taken for the Universe to travel out this far is billions of years.’

It would also attempt to set out some kind of ethical conception – in one sense the most difficult part, but at the same time I’d start with the UN Declaration of Human Rights and see where people took it.

There would need to be an absolute limit set on the length of the text - say 100 pages. Otherwise, we could just point in the direction of your nearest University library and say ‘there’s the Atheist Bible’ because that's what we'll end up with.

I’d see that as the start of a coherent movement – conscious that reason is the basis of the movement, and how it will spread, but also conscious of the need to not be a religion of non-belief, and conscious of the need to avoid nailing doctrines to the ground and having schisms over how many atheists can dance on the head of a Bishop.

That’s a dreadfully long post. Please put the word ‘Marmalade’ into any subsequent post if you got to the end.

Schuhart wrote:

I’ve sometimes thought there’s a need for a sort of Atheist bible, containing a positive statement of the secular outlook, but at the same time something that was the very opposite of scripture. Where scripture is generally a block of text that cannot be changed, the model for an Atheist source book would be wikipedia. It would start just with such understanding as any average non-believer might have, and accrete and change as knowledge changes.

The idea of a book that is not a book is a very interesting one. I found this essay on Lovecraft's Necronomicon (a fictional book) recently, and it seems to be along the lines you are discussing, although the author is apparently a "practising magician". If you can get past all that, he has some very good points to make. Warning, its lengthier than your marmalade.

This is not the kind of answer that many people want to hear however so I have made the more satisfactory argument that the Necronomicon hinted at from the contextual framework of Lovecraft’s fiction is not a book that could have existed in the ancient world. It is an outcome of Lovecraft’s modern consciousness of the universe. It has attained a powerful mythic credibility precisely because it squares the circle: in a modern world where no grimoire has authority, the Necronomicon has this awe-inspiring authority while still being a grimoire.

It is like the Cretan who stated that all Cretans are liars. An essential aspect of its authority is that it is content free - had Lovecraft provided any substantial content other than the vague hints we have, we would tear it to pieces like any other supposed work of authority.

Schuhart wrote:

Interesting link, and I did have that feeling of someone approaching the same issue from a different starting point. I liked the sense of 'evolution' in his thought that in the past it would be impossible to have a book that explained our place in the cosmos, but it could be envisaged at some stage in the future.

Yes, I find it helpful to look at issues from as many angles as possible. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, as Aristotle put it.