Science investigates the origins of religon

But can anyone really believe that people today would be acting better if Christ had not taught? If anything, the belief that there is a Higher Power that will help you overcome your faults; the desire to please (and to not displease) that Higher Power; the commitment to living a moral and just life; and the prescription for right living that all come from participation in Judaism, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam and Baha'i, all tend to make people better citizens of the earth who are more, rather than less likely to get along with their fellow beings.

It is the influence of forces such as our inherited ape-like drives, including greed, lust, anger, and desire for power, along with intellectually created influences like materialism and marketing, that lead us to be careless of one another and to do harm. Those are the forces that the core teachings of religion are meant to overcome. Those are the forces that corrupt religions in practice to the point where followers are told that God approves of promoting superstitious interpretations of scripture, or of becoming a "martyr" by strapping on a bomb and killing yourself along with innocent bystanders, or of performing human sacrifice. If we weren't so creative and capable of diverging from the norm, we would be no more in need of ethics or morals than are monkeys, but we have that measure of what we call "free will" that allows us to invent new behaviors for good or ill. Those religions that claim to originate from the One God are founded on principles that are for the good.

If you can come up with well substantiated, scientific evidence to disprove this hypothesis of mine, please do. Your contrary opinions are valid as representative of who you are and what you think, but they have no more bearing on the nature of reality than that.

This is a HUGE fallacy. There has been research done and evidence collected that societies where religion plays the highest role in the society it tends to be more violent or have more crime. Places where there is less belief, there tends to be less violence and crime. So where you are getting your theory from is just funny because NONE of the evidence supports your claim.

If you were right, then by all means, prisons should be filled with atheists or pagans. But we find just the opposite. Why are there fewer atheists in prisons? Shouldn't there be more?



There are societies that have never had any concept of god and they have flourished. You are being completely dishonest here with your claims. I like how you don't even mention the fact that religious prosecution and wars enacted even in the bible were religiously motivated. Maybe because it doesn't support the fallacy you are trying to spread here?



I would say that this claim here, is also dishonest. I know because I have pointed it out to you on several other threads that what you are claiming does not fit with the evidence collected. You honestly do not want to hear the evidence but instead want to just make stuff up.

So, you say that "there has been research done and evidence collected". Kindly direct us to the source of that knowledge. The statements that you are objecting to were obviously my own opinion, but when you assert that there is such research, then perhaps you could bring that research to the table.

Am I here to do your homework for you? I am suppose to supply articles and suggests books for you to read? Well you can pretty much do that yourself can't you? You have a powerful tool, and it is capable of looking stuff up. You could claim any article or book I suggest is biased or providing misleading evidence. So do some research on the subject, hear both sides of the argument. I have done my homework, and I state what I have studied. You have admitted that you haven't done any investigation, perhaps this is where you should start.

Here is maybe something to get the ball rolling:

http://www.bobkwebsite.com/prisoninmaterlgn.html

There has been research done and evidence collected that societies where religion plays the highest role in the society it tends to be more violent or have more crime. Places where there is less belief, there tends to be less violence and crime.

I am sorry to have to tell you that your assertions are still looking like a bluff. Anyone can say, "I have evidence," and, "there is proof," but whether they are asserting that Bigfoot exists, that aliens from UFO's have abducted people and experimented on them,

or that , it is up to the person making the claim to provide the evidence. This hardly counts as evidence! Please don't ask me to waste my time trying to prove your assertions for you. If you have seen actual, scientific research from an unbiased source that supports your assertion, please share it with us! I want to know the truth as much as anyone, and I believe that you also want to be certain of what is true.

Debating whether religion is causal in crime is surely a soft science if ever there was one. There are so many variables and so many possible interpretive schemes that you could produce surveys and studies supporting all kinds of conclusions. It would take a lot of meta-analysis to even come up with some kind of standardized result across a range of cultures and times. But if you start off with the presumption that religion is evil, you will always find ways to 'prove' this is true. What about the hundreds of millions that are fed and clothed every day by missionaries? I suppose whatever good they do is cancelled out by the insidious evil of their merely being religious. I have seen this debated on the Dawkins forum, and everyone comes to that conclusion. They all know that religion is evil, so there must be a way of rationalising any apparent good they do.

"When a true seeker determineth to take the step of search in the path leading unto the knowledge of the Ancient of Days, he must, before all else, cleanse his heart, which is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God, from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge, and the allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy. He must purge his breast, which is the sanctuary of the abiding love of the Beloved, of every defilement, and sanctify his soul from all that pertaineth to water and clay, from all shadowy and ephemeral attachments. He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth. Even as thou dost witness in this Day how most of the people, because of such love and hate, are bereft of the immortal Face, have strayed far from the Embodiments of the Divine mysteries, and, shepherdless, are roaming through the wilderness of oblivion and error.
That seeker must, at all times, put his trust in God, must renounce the peoples of the earth, must detach himself from the world of dust, and cleave unto Him Who is the Lord of Lords. He must never seek to exalt himself above any one, must wash away from the tablet of his heart every trace of pride and vain-glory, must cling unto patience and resignation, observe silence and refrain from idle talk."

I would be interested to know why you think that Christianity remains such a potent and divisive force in Communist China, after more than half a century of ruthless propagandizing and suppression. Why does the CCP have to continually struggle to contain and control underground Christian churches and put their pastors in jail for attempting to preach? If religion is such an unmitigated evil, why have all those lucky people who have been liberated from it flocking back to it in droves? I've got an idea. Maybe we could organise a special printing of The God Delusion, in Chinese, to explain to all those aspirants that it is all a big mistake. We could arrange to print a copy and leave it in every hotel room in China. We could call it 'The Gideon's Delusion'. That might help.

Wow, very funny. You can make claims about god, yet you use probably an argument you heard dozens of times and now you try to use it on me? I am not trying to convince you of aliens or Bigfoot. It is something that data has actually been collected from. You just refuse to look at the data. You won't believe it even if there were a thousand such pages because you have already determined what you want to believe. That's how you operate. You don't rely on evidence for anything, it's just a matter of what you want to believe.

Every source I provide will be biased. But that doesn't mean that the data is not accurate, instead your own belief doesn't allow you to accept the data. How many pages would it take? I bet you'll say none, because nothing will convince you, since you are already convinced that you are right and the evidence is wrong.

You want another one? I bet this one will be biased too, that's because it is. Are you biased with your belief without evidence though?

Looking at Link Between Religion, Prosperity at National Level | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

I am sure that you know that in the social sciences, no one study is ever considered conclusive. If I have time and access, I will look at some of the papers from the bibliography of the paper you supplied.

To be fair, one could also say that if you start out with the presumption that a particular religion is good, and others false, that this bias will lead one to find proofs of such beliefs whenever "your" religion is compared to "their" religions. I am of the opinion that it is best to attempt to look at such things with no attachment to any belief