Does your religion make you a better person?

[Zamo]

What exactly, constitutes a 'better person'?

 

Not being religious.

[BluePolo]

You must be a good person if you're believe in a supreme Deity. After all the Church would never sanction you killing anyone - if you don't count all the crusades where the religious leaders encouraged the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Jews because they worshiped a different God.

 

Obviously the Inquisitions were not bad - they just encouraged the imprisonment / torture / death of non Christians didn't they?

 

Also it's obvious that the Church became the owner of so much land because they asked for it - not because they scared the original landowners into believing that they would be going to Hell if it wasn't left to the Church.

 

Incidentally, when my wife & I were being interviewed by a social worker prior to being allowed to foster, after I said I didn't believe in God, she said it was better if she marked me down as being a Christian! I don't know if that meant the social services believe that you must be Christian to be a good person.

[RootsBooster]

The world would be better off without any religion whatsoever. Then we could all live in harmony together and be nice to each other.

 

Angel1.

I'm no fan of religion. I believe we may have been better off if religion was never invented to begin with, but to take it away now after so long, with so many current believers, may not be a good thing.

 

There are people who say their religion made them a better person..

Yes, my religion makes me a better person.

 

Not better than you, or him, or her; but better than me without religion.

 

What would these people become if their faith was removed?

 

There's people who think we need the Bible (or other holy texts) for our morals, that without their god were would descend into a world of chaos, full of murder, rape and robbery. Imagine what these people would become without their fear of God to keep them in check.

[dutch]

The world would be better off without any religion whatsoever. Then we could all live in harmony together and be nice to each other.

 

Angel1.

 

Karl Marx tried that.

His intentions were similar as yours.

"Religion is the opium of the people"

Edited March 17, 2016 by dutch

[SnailyBoy]

Karl Marx tried that.

His intentions were similar as yours.

"Religion is the opium of the people"

 

The real quote

 

"The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

 

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

 

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

[dutch]

Thanks snailyboy

 

Here is another one from Karl Marx but I don't think abolishing religion in communism was the solution to his problems.

He also thought it would make people happy but it didn't.

What Marx is ignoring is that not everybody out there has the intelligence or insight that he has. Many out there are not developed enough to understand him and they need an illusionary sun, cross, or stone to pray because they don't know any better.

Even when someone realizes the meaning of religion does not mean that others have realized it also.

My insights have come through my experience, others will have to have their own experiences, not mine.

Karl Marx wants everybody out there to get on his boat.

 

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself."