What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

I'm not sure it's unprovable. There is a lot of universe left to explore.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Actually it's neither then the fact that you're here should make the "real" answer obvious

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

That's my general attitude. I really don't care what anybody worships (or doesn't). However, when they tell me "UR DOIN IT RONG" then I get all defensive. As a Fundamentalist Agnostic, oddly enough I find it's the Atheists who do that the most (as this thread beautifully shows).

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

You make a good point, and I think it speaks to basic personality types. People of faith are, by definition, comfortable with faith. Hard analytical types aren't. The hard analytical types want facts and scientific debate. This isn't going to work when it comes to faith. There are no hard facts to debate. It drives the analytical types crazy, and triggers a desire to impress order on the "fuzzy thinking" of the faith based people.

This isn't limited to religion and god, but can be found in other areas such as art, global climate change, economics, and whether men actually went to the moon. Some of these debates are ridiculous, some not, but it doesn't change the basic personality disconnect between the two groups.

People are entitled to their own ideas and beliefs, even the crazy ones, provided they don't cause harm to others. This is the key issue, where personal liberty meets public welfare. It is a difficult balance, but an important one. When one group wants to take over government and reform it in their own image, then we have a problem. When another group wants to rewrite the history textbooks to reflect an altered view of history, we have another problem.

There is no set formula for making it all work. Society is complex, because people are complex. Kindness and tolerance go a long way in making it work. Let's not let a few crazies and hot heads spoil it for the rest of us. Be kind to each other, but keep the crazies away from the controls.

Tom

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

That's my thinking too. But it's really hard to keep quiet when people of "faith" are getting hurt, REALLY hurt such as from the perverted priests and fundamentalist imams who teach "death to the infidels" (this hurts all kinds of people including Muslims, and not just those with faith).

P.S. Tom Cruise's church of scientology doesn't seem so bad if you consider the amount of harm they've done as compared to those "main stream" religions.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Exactly. Personal freedoms and freedom of religion is not a blanket shield from the laws of society. We tolerate too much in the name of not offending religious sensibilities. I would expect truly religious people to lead the charge against the nut cases hiding behind religion. It gives them all a bad name. Likewise if atheists started bombing churches I would be among the first to stand up and condemn them. Not condemn all atheists, but condemn nut cases using atheism to justify aberrant behavior.

Tom

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Guess what, the vatican and so many bishops from so many countries were found out to be just doing the opposite of what you suggested: hiding the facts.

And for what the taliban and al queda had done the Muslim authorities/communities should not be just condemning them but should be out right actively leading/organizing activities such as huge protest rallies and making "education/information against these creeps" to their faithfuls/children mandatory. I'm not holding my breath.

The only thing they are "leading the charge" is cha-ching from your wallets

 

Are people free to believe things that aren't true? I would hope the answer is no. Are people free to believe things they can't prove are true? That's a subtly different question, likely with a different answer. Perhaps my thoughts serve only to indicate I'm of the analytical bent. I have a hard time accepting "because I said so" as a satisfactory answer. Speculation, intuition, possibilities and probablities...absolutely. But utter refusal to accept reality? No.
In fairness, I suppose the frustration goes both ways.

All well and good in theory, but if faith-based and fact-based are equally acceptable, where's the basis for determining reality? How do we know who's crazy, and who gets to decide?

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Depends on how you want to use the term "opiate".

If you are looking at the ability to cause violence - I think religion beats sports by a very large margin, though that is not what you probably mean.

BTW, you should include ideology to the mix as well. Marx apparently didn't realize that his ideology could be as much an opiate as the religion he was talking about.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

By what's at stake.

When the stakes are high, or, I should say, obviously high, life and death in immediate hands, such as commercial aviaton, medical practice, food production, we brook no nonsense at all. We demand practitioners in those fields to be thoroughly educated and vetted, and we keep a close regulatory eye on them. And every inch of that education, vetting and regulatory oversight is 100% secular, and 80% sound science. When it matters, we've learned well enough across the centuries to bar the crazies from the controls.

What we haven't fully learned yet is where the stakes are high but not obviously high, and in those arenas, such as politics, we tolerate the loons because the cause and effect isn't direct but diffuse.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Sport is more like marijuana, it makes the crowd silly and high, and forget their pain of living. (Yet a lot of times they still need the cups of beer in their hands!)

Almost all politics have to cling themselves to some sort of religion to legitimise their rule. They need religion to spread fear and hide the pain. Ideologies themselves are not opiates. Only when they are treated as religions then they become opiates.

Religion is EXACTLY the super-opiate that numbs the pain from all it's followers' suffering and even death, all caused by, guess who, religion itself.

The verdict? Do I still have to spell it out?

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

In our society people are free to believe whatever they want to believe, true or otherwise. Currently we have no mandated thought control. What people do with their beliefs is a different story. If you want to sit quietly and ponder your false beliefs, no one will care. As soon as your false beliefs cause trouble or create a risk, society needs to step in and put an end to it, whether by law, elections, or some other mechanism. Unfortunately this is an area that needs improvement, given our societal tendency to not ruffle feathers or step on toes, especially when it comes to religion.

I don't see them as equally acceptable. People are allowed to have their own ideas, no matter how goofy, but when it comes to public policy, ideas need to stand on merit - pure, secular, demonstrable merit. No voodoo, no "god told me to do it", no "trust me because I know the enlightened way." Just show me the facts.

If that doesn't work for you, you can always ask me. I get to decide who is crazy.

Tom

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

I'm afraid the answer is yes, provided they are not harming other people.

Problem is, those who believe things that aren't true would declare that you have no rights to declare those things aren't true. In their mind, those things ARE true, no matter what scientific, or any other method you use to prove them untrue. You can say they are "utter refusal to accept reality", but they'll say that your "reality" is wrong, and that their believes are just "can't be proven" using your methods.

So what do you do to them if you don't "allow" them to believe? Lock them all up like the Chinese goverment is doing to the Fa-Lung-Gong?

The society has no problem locking up the guy wielding a knife on the street saying all the people around him are crazy people who are attacking him. But the same society not just allows but reveres those who blackmail all the people with "if you don't follow me you'll go to hell" or "death to all infidels".

Maybe the whole society is REALLY CRAZY?

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

I've been a religious man almost my entire life and I see very little about religion that is organized. :amen:

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Very interesting comment, but I'm not sure it's determined so much by what's at stake, but at how measurable the outcome is. When you can't argue against the facts, as in aviation or engineering, the education is very secular. Medicine is actually a bit murkier, being so complex and variability between individuals, so you get some debate between factions, like hypno-therapy, the Atkins diet, acupuncture. We're slowly building up the base of what's known vs. what's still debatable - in medicine and in fields like climate prediction.

But in existential terms and what is consciousness/soul, there's a whole lot that science doesn't know, giving religions room for their beliefs/explanations. The problem is when an aspect of religion established centuries ago bumps into modern science. The Catholic church had to adapt to the concept that the Earth is not the center of the solar system and the center of the universe, even that the Earth is a globe. We gradually accepted the concepts that Heaven isn't literally in the clouds and Hell under the ground, like the Bible clearly implies (tower of Babel, Jacob's ladder, etc) and modern imagery still indicates. Now you get some holdouts saying the science isn't proven on evolution because that takes another rewrite of how literal is the Bible (specifically Genesis 1). My take on that is most educated religious people have quietly accepted that change, but there's a whole lot of (often vocal) people who have avoided education that would cause them to accept the change.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Here's my take in the possible concepts of conciousness/soul that might be another aspect of religion bumping into modern science. (stop laughing and start reading)

Ok, in terms of computers, they started off as dumb terminals with a dot prompt waiting forever for the operators to type in some commands. Then some geniuses created "resident and stay" programs that constantly monitor some areas like memory mapping to extended RAM, and still leave the dot prompt active. Those "resident and stay" programs are looping infinitely waiting for the right event for them to act on. Sounds like the beginning of the most primitive of "conciousness"? Then GUI comes along and we are chatting like now. We can now install applications in computers to actively monitor special devices such as modems, internet connections, or even home appliances and home automations. More conciousness? What's stopping the development of computers eventually becoming robots that can constantly monitor the environment around it and act accordingly to our human social specifications?

Oh wait, aren't we humans and even animals already acting like the above described robots: constantly monitoring the environment around us for sound, sight, smell, touch and taste to act accordingly to better our survival chances? Aren't we actually "ROBOTS", bio-chemical robots "created" by (arguably) God or as the outcome of evolution?

So if we are robots, then our body is our hardware, and our software (thinking) is our "soul". The religious believes that our soul does not end with our body. Could it be like a computer's software being archived in a storage medium like a DVD disk or backup tape? Could it be possible that the concepts of hell and heaven are really the off-line storage areas for our S.O.U.L. (Software Of Unit Life), where hell is like a garbage dump for useless corrupted software and heaven is for potentially reusable SOUL's to be re-incarnated to new babies on earth after extensive virus/malware removal conducted by some "Angels"?

Call me crazy but I think I might be the next prophet/messiah:rockon:

 

That's a pretty big job, you know. Are you sure you've thought that one through? I hunch you've got enough information to determine my sanity, but there are billions of people in need of assessment, and you don't even speak their language. By the time you're finished, it will be time to start over. Plus, such a daunting task would drive you crazy and then where would we be? No, much easier just to dispense pills and wait for the criminally insane to self-identify.

Given humanity's collective actions, that's a distinct possibility. After much thought, it seems the only sane conclusion.

I used to have the fantasy of being 'uploaded' to a computer. Oh, the places I could go and the things that I could do. Sneaking up on people and scaring them could be taken to whole new heights. But then I realised that so much of what I enjoy is physical, and I'd miss that. Living forever would become a curse. Our bodies are very much a part of our brains - one cannot exist without the other. Even thoughts, ethereal though they may seem, require physical processes involving moving parts. There's no ghost without the machine.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Of course you can't "upload" your SOUL to a computer 'cause the best computer in the world is too primitive to handle your software. You need another "devise" that's compatible and capable of handling the vast demands of a human brain to be able to do that.

You can't discount the existence of "ghosts" simply by stating the observations you see/feel with your existing senses. A lot of animals/insects posess extra-sensory "senses", for lack of a better word, that help them navigate seasonal migration and other activities. We don't feel the same senses they do but we cannot say therefore they don't really have those senses. The world was "seen" as flat for a long time even though Archimedes proved that it should be round b4 200BC.

However, my "ghosts" theory does not imply they "live" forever and can "go wherever they wish and do whatever they want" without the hardware of a human body. My "ghosts" are simply archives of human SOULs to be re-processed / discarded.

Now even that does not imply there cannot be ghosts that hang around this world and haunt people. Maybe the uploading procedure of the dead people's SOUL encounters software glitches once in a blue moon and left behind part of a SOUL as a stored procedure in one of the object oriented programming methods of the haunted houses.

Maybe the so call hauntings are simply those damaged SOULs trying to reach out for help (like in the movie "The Sixth Sense"). Maybe those psychics who can "see" ghosts are actually receiving "streaming audios and videos" from those entities.

Maybe God did "talk" to Moses using "streaming audio and video" exchanges.

Maybe I'm really a ghost sending you chat messages right now. Who knows for sure?

 

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