Magic, and you did this in the other thread and its one of the reasons I dont usually bother with your posts anymore, you where not giving religion credit because you first denied that there was any proof positive relationship between religion and ethics at all, I would suggest because you have a grudge against religion generally, and when you couldnt sustain that any longer (see highlighting) you breeze over what's a pretty major blind spot to suggest with a lot of characteristic verbosity something vague, maybe its about consistency, maybe its about asserting something about atheism, who the hell knows.
What I said was that religion was not necessary for ethics and ethics was not necessary for religion. That in and of itself does not say that there isn't a positive correlation because it speaks only of necessities. This is the same as the fact that there is a strong positive correlation between being American and speaking English but neither necessitates the other. So even granting there were a positive correlation, it would refute my assertion not one bit.
That being said, I do question the positive correlation, going back to my point that being religious and being ethical both seem to be very common things, thus there is a very large number of ethical religious people. But the frequency of non-ethical religious people, and ethical non-religious people, seems to suggest that an actual correlation is not that strong. There may be none at all. It must be said that part of the issue might come from distinguishing the academic concept of a religion from the tendencies of actual religious people. It's a thought.
My advice to you is the spend less time trying to figure out where the other person is coming from and more time thinking about their statements. I suspect you take me for someone more rabidly atheist than I am. I am hardly a Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Either way you seem to use your notions about how I am as a reason to think less about what I say.
Not typically from what I understand, except for a few applications of Buddhism that approach it as a philosophy. There are atheist Buddhist, for example.
This is sort of what I'm getting at.
I see the disagreement over my claim that religion has no method. I can see how they sort of do, though my issue with that would be the following. Religion as a whole is not a thing with a singular method (and it follows that it can't be defined by such a thing then), the methods themselves are in no way systematic, and usually religious people are not even aware that they have such methods and may even take offense at the suggestion. In that way, these so-called methods are quite different from science, but I can still see how it would qualify as religion having methods.
But the point of my last question is to illustrate a difference from science. Although there is something we call a scientific consensus, like the heliocentric model or the theory of evolution, there is no specific belief about the universe, be it a true/false statement or a good/bad statement, that one must have to use the scientific method, to think scientifically, or be called a scientist. That makes it quite different from religion by my reckoning.
Thank you for this. Good post.
To me it seems somewhere between taking a piss on art because a lot of artists are douche bags, and rejecting education because the USA's education system is broken. It seems to miss the central point with possibly negative consequences.
