How to resign from the Catholic Church - Germany

"God cannot be proven or disproven"

Not true. God could be proven but s/he seems a little reluctant to show his/her true face.

You can't disprove something that doesn't exist though which is why the argument will go on forever.

I do find it interesting that highly intelligent people are capable of believing something so obviously nonesense but it goes to show the power of social conditioning and the suseptibility of the human mind to being controlled through conditioning.

Maybe it's nonsense, maybe it isn't. What it definitely isn't (especially in the absence of science, or some other method of proof) is ours to judge one way or another. People who genuinely believe (fundamentalists excluded) seem to be pretty happy. Some social scientists say happier than non-believers even. Link to Abstract. and Link to PDF. Why the rush to judgment, when no judgment can be made?

With our current science we can neither prove or disprove God. God showing up and saying "Sorry I'm late." would be less of a proof on our part and more of an observation and a whole lot of soiled trousers. And since we have discovered that the argument will go one forever, we could just let it alone.

If people who belived did so freely without social conditioning then I would have no problem. It's not though. It's social conditioning.

Leave all religion out of the upbringing of a child to the age of about 12 and then see what happens.

Again. No amount of science can disprove a negative. The only scientific law of religion is false & false = true.

If children where not taught religion and then people made a freeminded choice to belive or not later in life then good luck.

As soon as religion starts being organised it becomes the will of humans controlling others. Base Evil.

And fairy tales.. don't forget the fairy tales..

Now that's interesting. So all Government is Base Evil? Because government is the will of humans controlling others. Especially democracy. Is democracy evil? I think it can be, but sometimes it also isn't. Just like Religion. Sometimes it does bad things, sometimes good. Religion is a tool. It depends on who is controlling the tool. People are animals. Hobbes says we're bad, Locke says good. I think most of the time we have the potential for both. Considering how rowdy we can be, some control is definitely called for. And the results in links I posted above show a correlation between belief and happiness that is far higher in believers than non believers. So in that case it isn't doing evil at all. Even at the extreme of accepting Religion as the opiate of the masses, keep in mind that when you have multiple broken bones, opiates are like a small miracle. It's only when you overdose or become severely addicted (i.e. fundamentalists and others who go to far) that things get ugly.

I agree that science cannot disprove a negative. We have had this discussion before on another thread.

But keep this in mind, there was a time without religion. Once we could conceptualize these things, we made up a way to express our feelings vis a vis the great unknowns. Without a religious influence, going back to that vacuum, we would just make it up again. Unless you allow conditioning against that sort of thing, which is another form of the Base Evil of conditioning to which you refer. If conditioning is really all that evil. It can be of course. But again, it's all relative.

The difference being that Democracy is sold on the concept of real people.

Religion is based on the fear of death and controlling people by saying that they will not go to heaven or be with God if they do not do the will of God. A God than nobody can see and is only ever the moral values of those in control.

Religion arose becuase it's an incredibly powerful tool for the control of people. It also explained a lot of things that were impossible to explain over the last few millenia. As science advances is should, and inreasingly is, become redundant. The trump card for so many people remains the fear of death and what happens after. As I've said many times to my religious friends. Have a child. It's the only way of living after your dead and immortality.

Is Government Base Evil. Looking around the world at the moment it would be difficult to argue against this as well. The term Evil is of course slighly provocative as good and evil are also only ever differences in peoples value systems. My own promotes the values of individuality and true freedom of will. Self determination. Not values religions tend to value.

One day something may arise out of humanity that isn't religion and isn't a political system as we see them now that allows humans to interact together as equals and live as free as they wish without harming others.