Metal Reviews

Sometimes, religion leads otherwise good people to do bad things. But I think a lot of people really use religion as justification for wrongdoings rather than motivation for them. A lot of wars were really started for the sake of personal power and wealth. And people would just use religion as an excuse for starting them (since religion is so powerful, using it to justify pretty much any wrongdoing would make you more likely to get away with it).

Yeah, but without religion they'd have had a much harder time starting those wars, committing those atrocities, etc. You have a good point in that it's difficult to know the exact cause of things... if Constantine would've chosen paganism over Christianity, would things be different? Or would history follow the exact same course, and we'd be all saying 'crush the heathens!'.

Stalin wasn't an atheist? Alright, supply me with enough evidence.

So either he was being very cynical and sneaky, or he was a closet Catholic. Personally I think it's a bit of both....

I have to disagree with you somewhat. Every scientist ultimately wants to know whether or not God exists (even so-called "foxhole atheists", deep down, want to know). This particular question, when you get way down to it, is the root of worldly discovery. It's a big part of what pushes science forward and fuels curiosity. And it's where religion ultimately comes in. Religion attempts to explain what's outside of the material universe, which Science can't touch since it can only go as far as the material world can take it. It also attempts to explain why we're here, and what universal existence is really about. Even though science and religion often clash (largely because theories like Evolution, at least superficially, contradict religious beliefs like Creationism), you really can't have one without the other.

As Albert Einstein once said, "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

Actually the Bolshevik Revolution is a good example of my point. Under the Tzar, ordinary Russians were so oppressed both economically and politically that Lenin was able to mobilise them to commit, or at least support, violent acts against those portrayed as "class enemies". Obviously this is a gross oversimplification and ignores the massive Western invasion of revolutionary Russia, but it's one example of a pattern repeated hundreds of times throughout history of oppressed peoples rising and causing a bloodbath (Palestine, anyone? Or is that a bit controversial ). Of course our liberal historians like to then retrospectively present the people that rose up as the offenders, rather than the people they rose against. A good example of a revolutionary movement being whitewashed by histroy could be the French one, I guess. Those mean peasants and their guillotine, and the poor King of France, what did he ever do to them?

In short, Frigid is wrong and their are plenty of violent bloodbaths that are caused by political and economic factors and have nothing to do with religion. Probably not Keynesian capitalism, per se, but certainly the imperialism of Keynesian capitalist states provoked some violent consequences. In fact, you could extend this and say that events we typically associate now with religious fanaticis sometimes have more secular political undertones. The Iranian Revolution, for example. It only later became an Islamic fundamentalist movement when Khomeini seized power. Prior to this it was an uprising of the Iranian people against the Western-backed dictator, the Shah.

Anyhoo, I am not a communist, Zad, stop being silly.

Yes, but you could say revolutions have elements of religious frenzy about them. The Terror, in the French's? And on a side point, you must admit that things tend to get out of hand in a revolution's aftermath...

Agreed overall. You should know I like winding you up about your communistic beliefs by now...

But then you're using a pretty broad definition of "religion"... certainly not in the way that Dawkins or Hitchens would define it.

I don't believe in sin and I'm not dangerous!




Believing in God as such is not anti-democratic, but when religion is mixed up with politics it is. It may be important to understand that these secularists lives in America where politicians use religious rhetoric more often than other western democratic sociaties. I myself am a secularist, and I believe that is the only way to ensure personal freedom, democracy and the democratic principles.

Just about no wars in the ancient world were started by an attempt to "crush" a religion, or to kill "heathens" (heathens is a pretty modern, Christian concept) You can count some of the centralized persecutions of Christianity in the third and early fourth centuries and, say, the persecutions of the Druidic cult in the first century AD, which were mainly done as attempts to maintain power and ensure that the Gods were happy (as well as to scapegoat disasters on), but "pagans" (another anachronistic word) didn't generally persecute cults or other religions. It still would have sucked balls for us to live in the ancient world, with wars every other week. You don't need religion for atrocities. If anything, just as many or more "atrocities" (I hate using moral terms to judge history) were committed during the ancient world by just about every society than in the middle ages, if only because they had more resources. You can take something like the Crusades, and clearly some aspects of it were motivated by religion; the children's crusade, and the people's crusade. On the other hand, a lot of Crusaders just wanted power and money. To blame atrocities solely on religion, without looking at other factors, is extremely silly.

"Sin" is basically a synonym for "wrong doing." As long as you believe in right and wrong, you believe in sin. At least according to how Mr. Hedges described it.



To be honest, I don't think it's possible to completely seperate religion from politics. Because peoples' views on a lot of socio-political issues (such as abortion and gay rights) really do depend largely on their religious beliefs. For example (and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense), an atheist is probably more likely to be pro-choice than a Christian. Just as a Christian is more likely to be against gay rights than an atheist.

Ok, while talking about religion and God and stuff I've found some site . It's about some dude who has been metalhead but now he is a pastor so he dedicated whole site about explaining to the people that the devil seduces people with music that all music that doesn't cheers the lord is satanic and stuff. I have link in croatian but you don't understand a thing so until they do it in english then I'll send you link.

Hoo boy, he sounds like another one of those "I lived an insanely immoral lifestyle in the past, 'got saved', and now I must prove my superiority to everybody else" types.

This is exactly what the whole "God of the gaps" idea comes in. You say that science can't figure something out yet so automatically god explains it. What is out there that science can't explain and how do you know science won't one day explain it? It is also odd that you're blaming the curiosity in science to trying to find god ignoring that scientists sometimes just want to help people.

Whenever quoting Einstein in a religious argument it should always be pointed out that he is a pantheist.

Yeah, a religious person commiting an atrocity =! an atrocity commited because of religion

Nowhere did I say that God automatically explains what Science can't yet explain. What I was suggesting is that the key factor of religion is that it suggests the existence of a power greater than this entire universe (that means greater than every human being, every animal, every galaxy, even greater than time and space, and of course greater than superficial human perception, which again is as far as science can go). Interpretation of this power (ie. God) varies wildly from religion to religion - God isn't necessarily a "human-like figure", after all, just as Satan probably isn't a red beast with horns. But the point is that science and religion both attempt to explain very different things. And they both have IMO an equal amount of significance in the world.

You are correct that many scientists do just want to help people. But let's put this into perspective: The existence of God is probably the biggest mystery in the world (even more so than a cure for AIDS). If you cut that out, you're still cutting out a pretty significant source of both scientific and philosophical curiosity. Not all curiosity, of course. But a considerable amount of it.



There's actually a lot of debate over what Einstein's religious beliefs were. He was always deliberately vague about what he believed. But, from my studying the man, he seems like he was closest to being a Pantheistic Deist.

eh. i don't think the existence of God is really related to science because you can't really disprove something that is all powerful :\

Yeah, but you missed my point. Would those that had listened to too much Amon Amarth still be saying 'crush them!'? Would religion still be drawn along the same straight lines?

And ensuring gods are happy seems a pretty religious reason to me. I never said that religion's the only factor, but it is a huge one.

Of course it wouldn't. Graeco-Roman religion and other forms of polytheism are ideologically completely different in just about every way from Christianity or any modern religions. No holy book, no real attempts to regulate morality, complete merge of religion and society, ritual rather than belief based religion, thousands of local and worldwide deities, the ability to integrate local cults, an emphasis on lack of knowledge rather than truth, etc...
Roman religion, say, can't be defined by a "crush em'" mentality- how could it, when there's no such thing as heresy? Only cults that threatened state and cosmology, or seemed to (Druids and Christians during the third century Crisis) were persecuted, though once again, if you were a third century Christian, Rome would not care whether you believed or did not believe in Jupiter; all that mattered was whether you participated in the ritual which acknowledged Rome's dominance and which signified you were part of the Roman polity. So, Roman persecutions, rare as they were, were caused just as much (if not more) by political considerations than they were by religion. Take a Christian example: Edward I's expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. On one hand, this seems entirely religious; on the other, it was probably done because Edward needed money, many Jews were rich and succesful, and he could therefore seize their property. Don't be so quick to always point out religion as the major cause of persecution.

And granting that religion has led to persecution in itself, then why ban and fight only it? I would say that money and power have caused more violence and warfare. Why don't we ban money and power and become good old commies? We should probably ban ethnic nationalities as well. And property ownership. And thousands of other things that have caused conflict along with religion throughout history. Of course, all these things I've listed have positive aspects as well, just as religion definitely does. It seems so silly, though, for everyone to always focus on banning religion because of its negative impact on society when there are hundreds of other things that impact society pretty shittily as well. Humans don't need religions to be huge dicks.

1. We're pretty much arguing the same thing here. I agree that there's more to it than religion, and yet religion was a major factor. All I was trying to say in my original point was re the modern types of metalhead that said things like 'Christians to the lions' - would they still be saying that if pagans had been dominant for the past few centuries? You think not, I'm not so sure.

2. Hmm. I think you're defending religion a bit too much here. Just because there were factors other than religion doesn't mean that it could still have happened without the religion. Sure, Jews were rich and generally hated for it, but could mobs have been whipped up into pogroms without the Priests to tell them it was right? I'm not so sure...

It's all very well saying, 'well, let's banned everything that's ever killed anyone', but you have to be sensible. Religion's positives aren't that positive, after all...