Why is religion winning? Read the article linked to below and respond?

Read the article linked to below and respond! Survival of the Sacred - Dinesh D'Souzahttp://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20071111/news_mz1e11dsouza.htmlI will give a better score to those who demostrate they have read the article. Asked by Christian 50 months ago Similar questions: religion winning Read article linked respond Society > Religion & Spirituality.

Similar questions: religion winning Read article linked respond.

Because ignorance is the defalt state, and things, when left to themselves, tend to roll downhill. There is a saying among educated people; namely that, "Religion is the poor man’s philosophy. " In other words, it costs significantly more to educate a person to the point of philosophical maturity than it does to indoctrinate him into the received myths of his tribe.So, whether the relative numbers of educated people are rising or falling at any given point in time, has less to do with the survival value of an educated intelligence in the evolutionary scheme of things, than it does with resource management in a particular civilization at a given point in time.

When the civilization is in the ascendant, it values its intellectual elite, cultivates and supports them. When the civilization is in decline, the opposite is true. Civilizations have life-cycles, just as human beings do.

When a civilization becomes complacent and its intellectual elite becomes disengaged from solving the real problems of the empire (most of which have already been solved), it tends to pursues virtuosity, fashionable sophistication, it grows effete, becomes derivative and eventually loses its grip on power. Things coast downhill until everybody has a rude awakening with the sudden appearance of Visigoths at the gate demanding, "Your money or your life." The historian Thomas Cahill, in "How the Irish Saved Civilization" gives a crisp and entertaining account of the fall of Rome, which fell not because the educated elite had become indifferent to religion and stopped reproducing, but because they had become lax, self-indulgent and had begun to indulge in the same superstitious thinking of the 4th Century Christians around them.

A century later they had become almost completely irrellevant because, like most people, they too were now preoccupied with their spiritual salvation, withdrew from public affairs, causing the empire to whither from internal neglect until it collapsed from an external push. Now, if the fall of Rome and the thousand year Dark Age that followed can be considered "winning," in evolutionary or any other terms, well then score one for the Christians. But I don’t think that’s quite the way to look at it.

Christianity served the empire because it helped turn people into more obedient and docile slaves. It stunted people’s intellects, it made them indifferent to their poverty and subservient earthly condition, and it provided an expendable surplus population who would cheerfully go to their deaths as soldiers of the empire. Islam did the same for its empire.

Indeed, religion is a great form of propaganda. It psychogically equips and mobilizes populations for war--which is exactly what you need when you are a barbarian hoard being played off by the civilizations around you. But woe to the civilization that is caught napping and lets the slaves get in control.

Daniel Dennett quoted in the article thinks that religion seems "useless from an evolutionary point of view" because "it costs time and money and induces people to make sacrifices that undermine their well-being. " What Dennett fails to grasp is that religion, by rendering a population obedient to authority, places that population in a symbiotic relationship with a parasitic ruling elite. Obviously religion is going to look "useless" if you look at it exclusively from the slave’s point of view, but if you look at it from the point of view of the whole host-parasite relationship, it makes a great deal of evolutionary sense.

As for Dennet’s notion that religion is expensive, one has to ask, "compared to what? " From a social expenditure point of view, it is certainly less expensive than giving everybody a college education and them letting them try to goven themselves democratically.By comparison, the labor to build a pyramid is a trifiling investment, especially when you consider that its purpose is to overawe the mere mortal and to induce him to accept the grandure, the prestige, the authority and the absolute power of the god-king pharaoh. Its scale and permanence makes any other form of political power literally unthinkable, and it makes neighbors think twice before attacking.

As for people foregoing certain foods in observance of religious taboos, that only serves to remind them of their subservience to authority, and to normalize their obedience to their "betters." There is a concept in epidemiology (the study of disease and disease risk factors in populations) called "epidemiologic transition. " It comes from studying how social investment in such things as education and improvements in public health effect such things as population growth though changes in the health and longevity of the population.

In impoverished countries, people are sicker; they don’t live as long and they have to have high birth rates in order to offset their mortality. However, because these societies don’t invest much in things like roads, hospitals, technology and the education to build them, their numbers tend to outstrip food production, so they are chronically underfed and susceptible to disease. Because there is no "social security" people have as many children as possible in the hopes that enough of them survive to provide for them in their old age.

These societies are very traditional and conservative, and often plaged by religions that are resistant to birth control (or anything else we consider progress). So, it is only in some academic twilight zone that the high birth rates found in the underdeveloped world could be considered indicative of evolutionary "fitness" or "vigor. " They are a symptom of severe maladaption to the environment.

When you put investment into one of these backward societies, the health and longevity of the population improves, there is more social investment in economic productivity, the population undergoes what is called a "phase transition," which is to say, it bootstraps itself up to a higher level of development, it stabilizes its growth rate, and it sustains a higher level of population at a higher state of health and affluence. Because nearly everyone survives to adulthood, there is no reason to have a high birth rate, and so birth rates decline. It has absolutely nothing to do with religion and atheism (or indifference to religion), although as people become more affluent and independent, they tend to have less and less use for subservience and dogma.

China, which is probably the country most indifferent to deistic religion both historically and at present is struggling mightily to achieve this epidemiologic transition. I wish I had time and space enough to refute all the shoddy scholarship and pernicious nonsense in the article, but it shows a shallow grasp of history, population dynamics, and evolution (no surprise there). Take, for example, the following quote: "storians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the 14th century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague.

Lacking the strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out." First of all, modern Europe is not undergoing a sudden one-third drop in population. Even if it did, that would not necessarily be a bad thing.

After the Black Death there was a period of great prosperity and development as the people who survived invested what they inherited from the people that didn’t. Second, Europe is not "atheist. " In fact, Europe has predominance of countries in which Christianity is the official religion.

It’s people may be indifferent to their religion, but this speaks more to the fitness and relevance of Christianity in Europe than hypothesized prevalence of "atheism." As for Europe being on the way out, on the contrary; Europe is thriving. Its trade ballances are in its favor; its currency is strong and rivaling our own; everyone has national health insurance, social security and four weeks paid vacation; its people are educated, and it has a much lower crime rate than we do.

Now, if you want to hold up our "born again" leader as an exemplar of what religion can do for national fitness, and you want to gloat that this is "winning," I can only say "nos morituri te salutamus." (We who are about to die, salute you. ) If there is any country in decline it is us--and it is largely because of the faith-based policies of George Bush and his cronies. We are so dependent on foreign oil that we had invade Iraq in order to secure supplies.

But, we have acted unilaterally and in defiance of international law, so our former allies barely tollerate us. As a result, we are so over-extended militarily and diplomatically, and our effort in Iraq is not going well. We have serious and continuing fiscal and trade deficits.

Close to 50 million working Americans have no health insurance; we have the highest incarceration rate in the world and our crime is still higher than that in Europe, Canada or Japan. And we have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the developed world because people are too disgusted with the system to vote. If this is the advantage that religion confers on a civilization, I don’t want any part of it.

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D'Souza cited some interesting trends, but only hinted at the biggest point I would assent to the sociology, with one important caveat. (I speak here as a Christian; couldn’t do otherwise. ) Christian folks may produce a glorious host of Christian *children,* but if they send their children off to be educated for 17+ of their most formative years in a context where Christianity is regularly dragged into view as a target for ’scholarly’ scorn and derision, and otherwise banished from the public sphere, a significant number of those kids won’t be religious, let alone Christian, in any publicly meaningful sense by the time they enter the workforce.

There may be fewer atheists than in the past, but if they stick to the universities and schools where they’re safe, they can have a social impact wildly disproportionate to their numbers, and they can reproduce without going to the trouble and expense of having their own kids. In fact, Christian parents will *pay* these academic atheists to turn their Christian kids into atheists, or as close as makes no difference. By far the biggest point in the article, and the real reason I think atheism is doomed, is the closing jab.

Atheism cannot even account for itself, and sooner or later that point registers with most people. Christianity, on the other hand, can account for itself, and for atheism too. I like C.S. Lewis’ exposition of this last point in "Is Theology Poetry?" (available in _The Weight of Glory_), and Greg Bahnsen’s exposition of it in pretty much every apologetic work he produced.

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Propaganda is half of it... Just look at the author of the article - D’Souza is a Roman Catholic who is known for his writings and debates that defend Christianity (recently, he debated Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptics Society, about whether or not religion was a force for good or evil. Naturally, those that reviewed the debate gave the win to Mr. Shermer...why do you suppose that? ) The first paragraph is an outright lie.

First off, Im an atheist - but Im no Darwinist. I don't worship Darwin, I don't pray to Darwin and I don't think that Darwin was infallible. Secondly, Dawkins actually has an excellent hypothesis as to why religion evolved in early man, and has even coined the term "memes" to describe it.So, right there, Ive explained half of this article - propaganda and lies from a person who is known to support Christianity... The fact that this article looks at Jews and Christians and THEN asks what survival mechanism could possibly be advantageous for religion is a clear indication that the author is putting the cart before the horse... What we need to understand is that, BEFORE religion was invented, human evolved a particular trait - to BELEIVE whatever we are told by our elders as being utter truth.

So, when your elder told you not to go too close to the lions den or the edge of a cliff, we listened and survived and passed this trait onto others - or we didn't listen and ended up lion food. Years and years and years of this "advice" trained humans to ALWAYS listen to our elders. Eventually, our elders, being mistaken, informed us that we needed to sacrifice goats to appease the Sun God - and that BS stuck with us too.

And, those polytheistic Gods have morphed into a monotheistic God...that is nothing more than an evolutionary holdover from our early ancestry. Instead, D'Souza expects you to look at the Jew or Christian of today and answer what good sacrifice/tithing is.It provides no good - except to keep the church fat and in the money. In the real world, Ill tell you exactly what would happen to the Secular Tribe - they'd be killed by the Religious Tribe, who had the pre-existing ideaology that they are the Chosen Ones, only they are correct, and all other must DIE.

Thats what would happen in the real world... It is true that the religious are happier than the non-religious - just like it is true that a drunk is happer than a sober man. Thing is, it doesn't make it TRUE. Seeing as the drunk is happier than the sober man, does that mean I should run out and make myself a drunk?

Cuz that seems to be the argument Im getting here....that we should all run out and become religious since is makes one drunk with pleasure? Sources: Logic and reading skills.

Anecdotal Evidence that 'the religious population is growing fast, while the secular number is shrinking. ' It is the secularists/evolutionists who consistently press for abortion, homosexuality and smaller families, all part of their long-running ZPG agenda. It seems they take their own prescription seriously.

After all, if this life is all there is, why devote a major portion of your time and wealth to raising a next generation when you could be living the DINK* lifestyle and grabbing all the gusto you can get? In my American home church, which is part of the article’s "Religious Tribe" and mostly homeschoolers, I list 23 current and recent member families (A - W below) with the number of children in each. This averages over 3.8 children per family, and most are single income families.

When we meet together in our homes, usually about 2/3 of those present are children. A - 4; B - 3; C - 6; D - 7; E - 4; F - 2; G - 1; H - 5; I - 4; J - 4; K - 6; L - 7; M - 3; N - 4; O - 4; P - 2 Q- 2; R - 3; S - 3; T - 3; U - 6; V - 3; W - 2 Those who follow the Dominion Mandate, win - even if believing in a non-Christian religion like Islam. Also, apropos of the "Two Creation Stories" of the article, there is another important story that is told around the world: the story of Noah’s Flood.

I wonder how evolutionists can explain the remarkable commonality and perseverance of this story if not because of the memories of an actual worldwide flood that left mankind as descendants of only 8 people. Do we inherit this story in our DNA as a survival mechanism? Or maybe it actually happened, and Evolution is the real myth.

FLOOD LEGENDS *DINK = Double Income No Kids .

Feh D’Souza is one of the nuttier right wing racist smoke blowers and not exactly a reliable source of information. This the guy who claims that 9/11 was caused by Osama ben Raghead’s outrage at...America’s Liberal Left. He’s Anne Coulter without the legs.

The article boils down to "lots of people want to believe it, so it must be true. " That doesn't make it true, it just makes it a really handy device to control and motivate lots of people. BTW: The bit about Japan being the most "secular" country in Asia was pretty funny.

You'd think a guy from India would have noticed China somewhere along the line. Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Wolfe.t.html .

" (10 answers) "Your 'Change category' does not work. You put my 'computer' question into 'Religion & Spirituality.'" "Why isn't Religion & Spirituality listed under Main categories? I didn't realize the category existed.

" "Is there any religion that doesn't posit its way as the ONLY way?" "Is this by Walt Whitman? Note the bearing on the current threads re 'organized religion' as contrasted w/ spirituality. " "Set Up Your Own Religion... What would it be like.

Your 'Change category' does not work. You put my 'computer' question into 'Religion & Spirituality.

Note the bearing on the current threads re 'organized religion' as contrasted w/ spirituality.

Set Up Your Own Religion... What would it be like.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.