I went to a catholic school for 12 years and a protestant church for a couple years. If you think Catholic churches are bad just go to a protestant one. Half the people at the church are in a drug like state raising their hands to a god that isn't there. It is almost haunting. The main disagreement i have with Pavlina is that he basically thinks a good majority of religious people are radical zombies. It's quite the opposite. Out of the 40 people in my graduating Catholic High School class about 3 or 4 of them took the religion seriously. Everyone else half believed the stuff just because they did not want to dissapoint their parents who did not want to dissapoint their parents ect ect ect. In Catholic churches everyone is just going through the motions. In Protestant churches half of the entire congregation are born again Christians who basically use to be drug addicts. This is just their new addiction. Religion is about as logical as abusing drugs. I dare one religious person to tell me the difference between abusing drugs and becoming emotionally manipulated through a false belief in a god. Once i could see the actual physical and mental fix religion gave people i knew the whole thing was Bull Shit.
I am not the most religious person in the world, but it is easy to see the difference between someone who is addicted to heroin and someone who goes to church on Sunday because they enjoy it. As far as a false belief in God, I think you mean a belief in a God that you believe doesn't exist. The belief of the religious person is real. Whether God is real or not will probably never be proved one way or the other. It is so dumb to argue for either belief if you ask me. Too see radicals on both sides trying to make their case that their belief is the truth is funny.
One needs to make the difference between believing in God and organized religion. A lot of people believe in a higher power of some sort, and there in nothing wrong with that. Organized religion is a different animal - it was invented to control the masses, nothing more nothing less. Today organized religion is a HUGE money-making business. Going to some of these mega-churches is like going to an Amway meeting, and the mindset is pretty much the same. Organized religion is to blame for almost all the Wars in the history of the world. It is to blame for most oppression and atrocities. It is to blame for prejudice and class warfare. Organized religion is a crutch for the weak-minded and facilitates decisiveness and hate.
Are you intentionally being obtuse? Science is all about the quest for knowledge. Ethics is about dealing with others fairly and compassionately. They are not related, but they are not mutually exclusive either. Get a clue.
Check out this quote: "When you subscribe to a religion, you substitute nebulous group-think for focused, independent thought. Instead of learning to discern truth on your own, you¡¦re told what to believe. This doesn¡¦t accelerate your spiritual growth; on the contrary it puts the brakes on your continued conscious development. Religion is the off-switch of the human mind. Leave the mythology behind, and learn to think for yourself. Your intellect is a better instrument of spiritual growth than any religious teachings." What's funny is that the 'I am spiritual but not religious' crowd spews out the the same stock arguments: 'Christianity is evil and has done no good for humanity. Just look at the crusades!' They are the ones who are not doing any independent thinking. Actually some of the most brilliant intellectuals in the world have ended up believing in Christianity - C.S. Lewis who attended Oxford. He was not 'told what to believe' - Christianity was his conclusion after all his analysis.
"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be â or so it feels â welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside." CS Lewis "A grief observed".
The basis for our need to love lies in the experience of separateness and the resulting need to overcome the anxiety of separateness by the experience of union. The religious form of love, that which is called the love of god, is, psychologically speaking not different. It springs from the need to overcome separteness and to achieve union. In all theistic religions god stands as the highest value, the most desirable good. That concept of god comes from an analysis of the character structure of the person who woriships god. The development of the human race as far as we have any knowledge of it can be characterized as the emergence of man from nature, from mother and father. Man still clings to these primary bonds. He finds his security going back and holding onto these primary bonds. Man progresses through stages of identifying with nature to stages of using his own skills. When man is not dependant any more exclusively on the aspects of nature, the fruit he finds and the animal he kills, man transforms the product of his own hand into a god. This is a stage when of man projecting his own powers and skills into the the things he makes an accomplishes. At a still later stage man gives his gods the form of human beings. This can happen when man has become more aware of himself and when he has discovered man as the highest and most difnified thing in the world. Religions can be looked at from mother-centered to father-centered. In the mother centered religious god is instead a goddess. This god will entail everything that has to do with motherly love. Mother's love is unconditional, it is all-protective, all-enveloping; because it is unconditional it can also not be controlled or acquired. Its presence gives the loved person a sense of bliss; its absence produces a sense of lostness and utter despair. The belief in a god therefore is the need for motherly and fatherly love. People have sculpted god in a way in which he has both the highest ideal powers of father and of mother. The question is to what point has the believer in a god grown. One thing is certain, the nature of his love for man, and furthermore, the real quality of his love for god and man often is uncouncious, covered up and rationalized by a more mature thought of what his god is.
I can see I have typed it correctly and incorrectly in the past. More times correctly. 7 to 6 by the computers count. I would have to say thanks for the correction.