mistergraves

I wanted to post a response to a Catholic in my Social Change class. Do I sound a bit like a dictator?
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"I'll only respond to the bit about lack of religion creating a "soulless" society stated by Kerry and Lisa:

First of all, "Do unto Others" need have nothing to do with any God or "spirituality". It is completely practical. You treat people in a way that you expect to be treated.
Right now I'm challenging your idea that people need religion. I think they don't. You think they do. We're disagreeing. I have no problem being disagreed with.

The issue of "miracles" is something that is unimportant to social change in my opinion. I am an opponent of religion, not of personal experience. If there is anything "out there" or "in here", it is your own experience, not anyone else's, and thus an organization with rules and leaders (called a religion in this case) is useless.

A society can agree on certain codes of conduct without bringing religion into it. Religion and morality are not bound together by necessity. Read some of the world's better philosophers. They are godless and they have an ethic which guides them, and many of them have proposals for an ethic which can guide society.

Spiritual experiences are just that. If they exist, they are ethereal (non-physical?) and need have no impact on how society governs itself. If one's spiritual experience causes them to disobey a certain rule of society, do they deserve the punishment? i.e. Bush thinks he's led by God, but so does every other terrorist out there.

You can believe whatever you want about the neccesity of this supposed "spiritual drive" that people have, but it doesn't affect me, nor should it be assumed to be a drive that all people share. Everything I do, I do for myself, thus, I believe that everything anyone does, they ultimately do for themselves. Does this make me misguided, chaotic, or immoral? No. In fact, I'm the most morally consistent person I know because I follow only a few very simple, practical rules. But unless the majority of society agrees with me on my rules, they may still be "wrong".

Back to the issue of social change for a moment. Religion has helped shape our civilizations for thousands of years, yes, but Science has helped shape religion, not the other way around. Thus, it is science that we ought to put our Faith in, simply because it more resembles the Truth than any of the hundreds of thousands of seperate mythologies which we held to be the Truth before. Most of the people in the world have within them an awkward balance of Mythological truth and Scientific truth, but the only way to progress as a society is to let go of our fantasies as Truth. This does not discredit personal experience at all, even personal experience that is in line with a certain religion- it simply discredits those Doctrines whose time has passed. We can exist in peace without them. We can create are art for art's sake. We can learn to take responsibility for our planet rather than banking on a clean one in the Afterlife. We don't need organized religion to have what you call "spiritual" experiences. What we need as a human society to move forward is a set of rules that we make up, consciously (rather than those made up by humans thousands of years ago that we ascribe Divine status to), free of the guilt of our world religions and the fear of doing "wrong" by persuing the limits of what is physically possible.
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