Religion should be systematically, peacefully, and totally eradicated over the next 100 years [Copperknickers II vs. Sicknero]

[Copperknickers II]

Gentlemen, I introduce the following motion, which I am supporting, and my honourable opponent Sicknero has agreed to oppose:

"Religion (including all current religions and also any conceivable future religions based on sensible and tolerant holy scriptures) should be systematically, peacefully, and totally eradicated over the next 100 years."


I am a little busy at the moment but I will post my opening arguments at some point in the next couple of weeks. Feel free to open a commentary thread if anyone has preliminary thoughts.

[Copperknickers II]

Religion.

It is one of the defining features of the human race, almost totally ubiquitous in all cultures, and still extant in the minds of even the most intellectual and educated people. It is on the up, with Islam and Catholicism in particular growing by the day. It has myriad forms, from the insanity of the bloodlustful Aztec gods, to the profoundly forward-thinking (for their time) Roman, Buddhist and Protestant Christian religions. Indeed, some of the most important tenets of Western society are drawn largely from the Bible, and Eastern society from the Tao, Buddhist and Hindu scriptures.

However, it is the belief of many that the time of religion must now come to an end. Such people propose that religion, that is every religion that currently exists, and all conceivable future religions, should be subjected to a campaign of education and legislation, with the open aim of:

1. dissolving all religious institutions, i.e. organisations that recieve any sort of public funding and employ any sort of preacher, legal advisor or political representative.

2. making it entirely clear that, whatever philosophical, scientific, or personal justifications they might have, religions should be regarded as almost certainly false, as divisive, and as generally counterproductive to a healthy society and to friendly and cooperative international relations.

The reason for this is quite simply, that religion is simply not compatible with a society in which it is necessary that people should trust science and other systematic, logical methods of gathering information about the world. It will never be possible to convince people that astrology, phoney snake oil medicines like homeopathy, endangered animal aphrodisiacs, etc, are all flawed and specious concepts (concepts which lead directly to people spending money that gets them nothing but false hope) whilst the governments of modern countries are seen to sanction fairytale cults in which:

• asking a divine being for clemency results in the absolution of moral guilt for a crime (Catholic Christianity)
  
  
• politics must have the aim of incorporating the laws and practices of 7th century Arabia, and all the sexism, violence and intolerance that goes along with it (Islam)
  
  
• life is a fleeting blip in an eternal cycle of lives from which the only escape is abandoning society and living in the mountains, trying to battle imaginary mental demons whilst doing serious damage to yourself by fasting (Buddhism)
  
  
• immense quantities of money must be spent each year on creating large effigies of outlandish deities which are paraded, serenaded with music, provided with milk and food, and necessitate almost weekly public holidays where people abandon their work to participate in the veneration of mythical elephant and monkey-headed entities in a language that only a select group of old men, covered in chalk, half-insane from drug taking and unable to walk without tripping over their beards, can understand. (Hinduism, though the same would have gone for various historical religions)

How can society expect that people take responsibility for their actions, that morality can move on and change, that society requires a realisation that life is unique, finite and precious, and that mysticism is just an excuse for ignorance, respectively to each of the above beliefs, if such religions are accepted? You might think the examples are a little exaggerated, and they certainly don't apply to all believers of the above religions, but they DO apply to many of them, in particular to the most extreme and most antisocial of them. And while governments continue to give patronage and recognition to religions, then such extremists will always have a legitimacy, a mandate, that gives them free reign to be nutters.

I am not claiming either that there is not a place, both psychologically and culturally, for ritual practices and spiritualistic beliefs in society. I think that Hindu religious festivals are immense fun, and there is definitely something to be said for the belief in an afterlife and a benevolent God as regards one's mental health. However, I am taking into consideration that it is not possible to ban religion totally as a thought crime: the important thing is that it has no legitimacy and no recognition except academically and as a historical footnote. By all means, keep secular versions of the festivals, and if you really want to, believe in something higher than the material universe. Just keep it to yourself, and don't let it overrule science and reason. But we cannot permit delusion continue to give 'divine' legitimacy to holy war, homophobia, sexism and the other ills mentioned above.


And in answer to some of the interesting points made in the commentary thread already: I do not claim to know what is best for humanity just because I do not believe in religion. What I claim, is that we are never going to FIND OUT what is best for humanity, until we unite everyone in the pursuit of knowledge, unfettered by irrelevant debates about which of the antique magic men in the sky is real, what his inscrutable Will is, and whether or not there is actually some divine reasoning behind hatreds and prejudices. Religion is a severe limiting factor to said pursuit of knowledge: Galileo was executed, unbelievers today are imprisoned, and free thought is suppressed by the suffocating power of religion.

Don't tell me that I am the one being oppressive, when thousands of Americans grow up unable to learn about science because their churches and schools tell them that evolution is a lie, that science is a load of crap created by God to test us, and that atheism automatically leads to genocide and suicide.

'It's the diversity of communication in the world of ideas that results in civilization', but its also the diversity of communication that results in Al-Qaeda, Westboro Baptist church, and the ethnic cleansing in Syria and CAR.

I wish it were not necessary to persecute what is for many people a comforting and harmless tradition, but the fact is that advances are sometimes made which make even the most ubiquitous beliefs obsolete, and sometimes those advances conflict with the idea of freedom.

And should there be total freedom? Should people be free to kill, rob, rape and cheat their way through life with no consequences? I don't think there are many people who seriously believe that freedom is the ultimate good. And if you answered 'no' to the above question about robbing and raping, you also must agree that some things must necessarily be suppressed for the good of us all.

And by the way, if, as I sincerely hope, you agree with me that suppressing freedom to kill and rape is OK, the argument 'ZOMG what if you suppressed GAYS or JEWS it sets the precedent for suppression and suppression = HITLER!' is invalid. My point is, some things are demonstrably safe, others demonstrably harmful, and the crux of the matter lies in whether you think the harm is sufficiently harmful, not whether it is advisable to suppress it based on whatever strawman and slippery slope consequences you can envision might happen if you did.

The notion that all ideas are equally valid, on the basis that multifaceted diverse societies are the most desirable ones, is clearly and demonstrably false. And even if that were not true, you can be the most hardened veteran cultural relativist and still accept that tabboos such as cannibalism, paedophilia and human sacrifice transcend cultures and those things can be clamped down on while still maintaining just as much cultural diversity as there was before.

And finally, due to the scores of conflicts, of attacks on science and progress by ignorant fundamentalists, of religiously sanctioned abuses of children, animals, the vulnerable, and minorities, of people given false hope and specious enjoyment, or more often cruelly dashed hope and the pain of pointlessly forbidden desires, of slain holy warriors and their considerably more numerous collateral damage, and, the utter strangeness of having a majority of humanity worshipping derivative, vindictive and contradictory divine beings who barely live up to the standards most of us expect from our fellow humans let alone what we would probably envision as the perfect being... for all of these reasons, religion is simply not compatible with humanity in its new phase of civilisation.

It is time to leave the past behind: freely accessible to any who want to know about it, but closed forever to those who would seek legitimacy and acceptance for evil and ignorance.