No, it indicates a "strength" of religion that it can adapt like the Borg and never be killed except by direct confrontation. Meanwhile christian "morals" and "values" continued apace in society, undermining progress wherever it could.
The Borg adapt because what they were doing before had become, for some reason, ineffective. They adapt to failure, they don't arbitrarily change from strength to greater strength without a catalyst. Similarly, religion has suffered, over the centuries, a devastating series of setbacks. However, religion very rarely regains the ground it's lost to secularism and science. They used to burn heretics- now they don't. They used to say the earth was flat- now most of them don't... that qualification depresses me... anyway, they used to sanction racism, sexism, discrimination, slavery and child abuse openly. Now, even when a church engages in them actively or passively and the charge is laid, they're quick to defend themselves. Before they'd have just done whatever the hell they wanted and your condemnation be damned. The fact of the matter is that they
can't always undermine progress. Every time science and secularism makes a stand, even though religion comes back, it doesn't come back in the same way. Inevitably it is weaker, more malleable, easier to defeat. The ideological holes that we so easily exploit in religion these days were ripped open by our forerunners, but it seems this current backlash of religiosity is seeking to undo a great deal of the progress we thought we'd already made, which is why it's the responsibility of atheists to beat it back even more viciously. Christianity is a cancer, and we're chemotherapy.
I see you forgot all those lynchings of blacks that continued almost until the modern day. Slowly inching towards secularism my ass.
Well, let's see. A hundred and twenty years ago the whole town would turn out to see a black man lynched, and very commonly take souvenirs from the body to commemorate the occasion. Sixty years ago the lynchers were limited to a few fringe groups in the town, and they were commonly brought up on charges. They got off quite a lot, sure, but they were charged with murder. Thirty years ago they'd be convicted unless there was an egregious miscarriage of justice that would cause a massive uproar among the populace. Nowadays, such a miscarriage of justice is almost inconceivable. QED you're still a fucking idiot.
The Dover Trial used the same arguments against evolution that modern "Intelligent Design" blowhards keep spouting today. You were saying?
I hope you're not referring to Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., because that was in '05, and is part of the same religious movement that started in the late sixties, gained serious traction in the seventies, and by the eighties was the dominant force in American politics. I'm sure you meant to compare Kitzmiller v Dover to something like the Scopes Monkey Trial. You're right. They did use many of the same arguments. The difference is that in the Scopes Monkey trial H.L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow kicked the ever living snot out of them cruelly, painting them as incompetent, backwards fools. Now the rhetoric of Darrow and Mencken would not play well in the court or with the public. So religion is resurgent now, but this surge, as I said, is odd, because they seem to be trying to make up lost ground for once.
That's just a restatment of the old prodestant belief that the rich are rich because God is rewarding them using pseudo-scientific terms. You really think that's a result of secularism?
Yes, because the Protestant justification for it didn't have any traction, so the protestants who had those ideas had to cloak them in the garb of science. Like creationists these days cloaking themselves in ID theory. Why do they do that? Because in some circles- not all- it's not really appropriate or effective to use the Biblical justification. Works on Sunday morning, but when you're standing in front of the Supreme Court you need to have a better excuse for that shit.
Let me make that more clear, because I just know you didn't get it. Certainly religion contains material galore to justify racism, but a religious justification was not as effective as a Darwinian justification. That is not the case today, so at some point in the past, religion must have been less effective, less influential, and less powerful than it is today.
And yet we can show that their actual motivations were religious in nature, not secular at all. That's not a point in your favor because i'm not talking about the justifications used throughout history-- I'm talking about influence. There is a difference.
Emphasis added
Let me just elaborate on this phenomenon one more time for those just joining us. You're talking about influence? THE QUOTE YOU JUST USED IS SPEAKING SPECIFICALLY ABOUT INFLUENCE. They
changed justifications because they
lost influence, and had to play by the rules of the dominant force, that being secularism. Are you arguing by slamming your head against the keyboard and running it through a spell check?
Your point? Seriously, I'm not suggesting that the ideas behind secularism aren't new-- I'm saying that they have had precious little influence on politics and culture. We didn't get to a situation where no atheist could possibly run for the office of the president and win in the just the last ten years. We got here because the religious segment of society has taken its sweet time entrenching itself into the public mind. And it has been entrenching itself since before the beginning of the country.
No, we got here in the last 30 or 40 years; remember, both Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon were falling over themselves to seem more religious than their opponents, and they won elections because they were able to do it. Nixon was full of shit, but Reagan wasn't, and neither was Bush. Can you honestly imagine Sarah Palin being a serious contender for the presidency against Kennedy, the sexism of the era aside and focusing only on the merits of the candidates and the intellectual and religious influence. She would have attacked him for distancing himself from his faith and he would have skewered her for being a dumbass, backwards religious nut.
Taking its sweet time entrenching itself?
That's not what your mom said last night. That's not what you said at the beginning of this debate.
If anything we were far MORE religious in decades and centuries past. Some of the founders did indeed have their doubts about religion, but the vast majority of their constituents were puritanical, bigoted, religious fuckwads who those same founders had to pander to by hiding their skepticism.
So did we start religious and become gradually or even suddenly less so? Or did we start somewhat secular and has religion "entrenched" itself only rear its head in the past ten (actually, 40) years? Why don't you decide who's side you're arguing on and then we'll get back to this.
Oh, hey, look at that. You just enumerated one of the social mechanisms that keeps this nation religious. Good grief, you have no idea what I'm even arguing, do you.
Well if you don't how the fuck am I supposed to? Keeps the nation religious? That mechanism relies on a failure of religion in order to get started!
Look, moron, if you bothered to look up the Women's Temperance Movement, you would realize that prohibition was not a reaction to women's suffereage either. Do I have to spell that out for you?
Wow, I wonder who championed the Women's Temperance Movement... could it have been the
Women's Christian Temperance Union? It makes perfect sense for the Temperance movement to garb itself, as ever, in the clothes of its recent superiors. So having a bunch of outspoken Christian women promoting temperance would make perfect sense if the public was somewhat used to agreeing with the positions of women, a la the Suffrage movement, the leaders of which were............. Secularists and atheists. Fuck me, sometimes you prove my point better than I do. Sure I have to extrapolate and repackage it because it would be rude to expect all our peers here to sift through your babble on their own, but hey, thanks for the leg up. Fool.
They changed laws, but they failed their main goal-- change society on the level of its basic culture. Sure, they made some progress, but at the end of the day as you yourself admit religion and the status quo won. Racism is still around, in modified form. Sexism too. The anti-war movement was an abysmal failure in the strictest sense-- the country learned absolutely nothing from Vietnam and made the same mistakes errors fuck it, the country is still a warlike failure to humanity. There is no other way of putting it.
Failure? Blacks are free, women can vote, blacks can vote, and the anti-war movement brought the troops home from Vietnam despite a general failure to accomplish their stated goals. Why does it argue against the general idea of changing influential dominance to say that the religious nuts frequently fucked up the social gains of their secular opponents? It's simple damage control. They have to be on the side of
some of the recent social change, but they can certainly try to cut it off there, and perhaps even take a little ground back.
My point is not that any of these secularist movements won in perpetuity and religion rose from the dead, what I'm saying is that these movements made significant social progress because their influence was greater than that of the religious side. That the religious side counterattacked actually proves my point that the influence has swung from one side to another over various decades.
Only because religion is slow to react, but powerful when it does. However, its power has demonstrably remained throughout history-- there is no Golden Age of Secularism you can point to, only relative periods of it.
Relative periods of secularism followed by religious revivals are all that I was pointing to, jackass. Can I go ahead and view this as a general concession of defeat?
As an aside, I'd like to say that you've really depressed me. You're the first stupid atheist I've really met. I knew there had to be stupid atheists (Lee Strobel comes to mind), but actually having that thrust in your face is like realizing as a teenager that girls fart. Sure you knew on some level, but it didn't really register until later, and when it did, it kinda ruined that rosy-hued image in your head. You just shat on my impression of atheism. I hope you're happy.
You mean you have never heard of Marxists?
No, what he means is he's so impressed by one fucking book he can't see the perspective of anyone else but its author.
I've heard of atheists being mistaken and buying into some sort of junk thought fad among intellectuals at one time or another, but anyone can make a mistake. Furthermore, many of those atheist fellow travelers and whatnot had renounced their hold with communism by the fifties.
Actual stupidity though; an inability to coherently generate thoughts based on input? That's what's surprising.
The book, in this discussion, is relevant. I'm sorry I couldn't use "My Dog Spot" so you'd be a little more familiar with the material.