Jonathan

Organized Religion: An Obsolete Thronging Device

 Posted by on Fri, 11/18 at 12:23pm  proposal  No Responses »
Nov 182016
 

As the world continues to shrink at an exponential rate due to the increasing accessibility of the internet and global transportation, the idea of organized religion may be something that we as humans need to put behind us. Whether dealing with social issues such as same-sex marriage or issues involving global politics such as the unrest in the Middle East, organized religion is perpetuating intolerance among people of different upbringings and attempting to discredit scientific advancements. The topic has been debated by scholars of scripture, philosophy, and science since the beginnings of religion.

In order to really delve into this topic, this paper is going to distinguish between personal faith and organized religion, address the social and political implications of organized religion, and examine why it’s dangerous to cherry-pick beliefs from Holy Scripture. Ultimately, this paper will argue that organized religion is severely detrimental due to semantics. People who are inherently good will find the good in whatever they practice, and vice versa.

Backlash on Coexist

 Posted by on Sun, 11/13 at 2:48pm  Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 132016
 

There are numerous articles written by conservative journalists condemning the Coexist movement. The reasons, nine times out of ten, is the fear that the final outworking of the Coexist movement of pluralism, tolerance and universalism will lead to a global abandonment of all “faiths.” In my opinion, that may not be the worst thing in the world, but I can see how it bothers people with a strong faith in a god. There also seems to be a misconception that it is directly targeting Christianity and it isn’t “fair” because Christians aren’t causing the problems. That belief is summed up in the image below:

While it’s ineffective to the cause to simply buy a sticker to parade how giving and generous a person is, if someone is actually donating and helping out at events there may be some good coming out of the movement. Just buying a coexist sticker is no different than just buying one cancer awareness sticker. Unless the person is making continued contributions and/or helping out at events, there probably just doing it to fill up their bucket, so to speak. It gives people the illusion that they are contributing to a bigger cause when in reality, they really aren’t.

Coexist Coffee

 Posted by on Sun, 11/13 at 2:22pm  Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 132016
 

While stumbling through the cultural artifact essay, I came across an article that made me change how I felt about the Coexist brand. While I still think that the bumper stickers aren’t any better than a cancer awareness ribbon, I did find that the company behind the stickers is doing some great work around the world.

Coexist began as submission by Piotr Młodożeniec in 2000 to an international art competition. The now CEO of the Coexist Foundation, Tarek Elgawhary, was living in Egypt during the emergence in popularity of the sticker. At first, he was turned off by it but eventually he looked past the crunchy exterior and the underlying message resonated with him.

Being the savvy entrepreneur that he was, he jumped on the opportunity and sought out Młodożeniec to buy the rights and licensing. Now, Elgawhary’s Coexist Foundation is a large, non-profit company that (between donations and purchases) have raised close to $30,000,000 for programs and started 33 projects in 9 countries for efforts including quality education, gender equality, youth empowerment, and economic opportunity.

The staple of the company is obviously the bumper stickers, but a lesser known product that they carry is coffee. The Coexist Foundation website boasts that purchases will not only go towards their efforts of unity, but also supports small farmers.

 

https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/01/25/theres-a-coffee-company-behind-those-coexist-bumper-stickers/

Some Positives

 Posted by on Sun, 11/6 at 10:12pm  ideas  No Responses »
Nov 062016
 

While most of my posts are questioning the validity of holy texts and criticizing practices, I feel somewhat obligated to attempt to see it from a different lens. I’ve mentioned before that people who are inherently evil will find ways to justify them and carry them out; however the other side of the coin is also true. People who look to religion as a therapy may be making themselves and their communities better as a result. Drug and alcohol addiction are prime examples of what I’m talking about. There are plenty of born again christians who were drug addicts and would have died without “god.” I think therapy could be a suitable replacement, but giving people guidance (as hold as it hurts nobody) isn’t bad. It also can become a support group which is also great as long as no one is being harmed.

Coexist

 Posted by on Wed, 11/2 at 11:03am  artifact networks & relationships  No Responses »
Nov 022016
 

1. My chosen artifact is COEXIST signs.

Classify your artifact. Classifications are helpful to understanding your artifact. Once you’ve placed your particular artifact in a larger group, you can make connections between your artifact and the general characteristics associated with that group. In addition, sometimes describing your artifact from within a larger, more generalized framework makes it easier to identify important features. Usually, an artifact can classified in various ways and placed in a number of groups.

2. How do you classify your artifact? In what groups can you place your artifact? What connections can you make to other artifacts in the group?

I classify my artifact as a thoughtful idea that didn’t address the problem. I would compare it to a doctor who prescribes antibiotics for a viral infection.

Compare and contrast the artifact. Comparing your artifact to others allows you to generate new ideas about your artifact.

3. Identify points of similarity between your artifact and others. Then identify points of difference with other artifacts. How is it similar? How is it different?

It aims to be similar to an olive branch because it aims to offer peace. It’s different than an olive branch, in practice, because most of the people that have them appear to not practice religion anyway.

Create an analogy or metaphor for your artifact. Analogies and metaphors are ways of making connections between your artifact and other artifacts (anything goes… items of clothing, locations, holidays, texts, products, etc.). Be creative here… try to make (il)logical leaps.

4. What metaphors or analogies suit your artifact? (Explain if needed)

It’s the same as a breast cancer awareness sticker. You can put it on your car, but it isn’t really helping anyone.

Examine cultural narratives. Cultural narratives are common storylines used throughout culture, telling how things typically happen. Once you identify cultural narratives that apply to your artifact, you can examine them for assumptions and stereotypes. For example, stereotypes (or rigid, generalized ideas about the character and behavior of people with certain identities) are a kind of assumption (or set of assumptions). As with cultural narratives, you may think you are not affected by these assumptions and stereotypes. However, their pervasive presence in the culture means that everyone is affected by them. Naming these assumptions stereotypes can aid you when describing the impact of culture and values on your particular artifact (or your artifact’s impact on culture and values).

The assumptions operating in cultural narratives found in movie plots and song lyrics also get played out in social practices and social institutions. Social practices are shared, habitual ways of doing things. A variety of guidelines exist for the social practice of dating, for instance: who will initiate the date, who will decide where to go, who will pay. Social institutions are larger, more formalized organization the direct our shared social structures. Questions to explore (pick and choose):

5. How is your artifact characterized? (How do people/media/groups characterize it?)

Good faith and false hope. It’s a really nice idea, but it doesn’t actually achieve anything. Theres nop money going to help anyone, it was just an art project done by an artist in Israel.

6. What cultural narratives govern your artifact?

A cultural narrative that governs my artifact is

7. What assumptions, stereotypes, habits, social practices, and institutions frame your artifact?

If I saw a Coexist bumper sticker, I would immediately think that the person driving the car was a crunchy hippie that blindly says there should be world peace without understanding the reasons behind why we don’t.

8. What doctrines or practices affect your artifact? (Or, what doctrines or practices you’re your artifact affect?) Political parties and platforms? Religious? Ideological? Which ones? Are there cultural “rules” and practices? Which?

The golden rule of treating others the way you want to be treated is a cultural rule that the sign is trying to perpetuate.

9. How does your artifact affect culture? How does culture affect your artifact?

My artifact affects culture by (trying) to promote unity and understanding among different religions. Culture affects the artifact because it invalidates it. The Coexist sign is meant for people who aren’t accepting of other religions, which is most likely the conservative members, Coexist goes against their basic idea that their religion is best.

Hospitals

 Posted by on Sun, 10/30 at 11:33pm  Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 302016
 

 

This is obviously a satirical take on an issue, but she does make some decent points. Catholic hospitals are growing in number and in 2011, one in six patients were cared for in a catholic hospital. While catholic hospitals do a lot of good, problems arise when the individual healthcare conflicts with their religious beliefs. If a hospital is bought by a catholic facility, the doctors must adhere to the rules of the religion. This includes denying women an abortion even if her life is in danger.

There were multiple incidents where doctors went against the conservative philosophies and performed the abortion anyway and the people involved were punished by losing their job and/or being ecommunicated by the church. This is one of the more repressive issues i’ve come across. We made medical advances that can save lives and certain hospitals won’t even give women the option to make that decision for themselves.

The easy answer is to just go to a hospital that isn’t run by Catholics, right? Well many Americans don’t have access to anything else and this can be deadly in some cases. toward the end of the video, she refers to these advancements in medical technology as miracles and I don’t think I can argue that.

Cultural Artifacts

 Posted by on Fri, 10/21 at 9:39am  ideas  3 Responses »
Oct 212016
 

1.) The Golden Rule: All of the major religions revolve around the idea that you should treat others the way you want to be treated. This is good idea, but there are people who think that it’s their way or the highway and discriminate against other groups.

2.) Israel: Jerusalem is the Holy Land for multiple religions and groups in the middle east and they have been fighting over it since the beginning of recorded human history. If religious organizations were as peaceful as they preach, wouldn’t the conflict have been resolved a long time ago?

3) CoeXisT: Those bumper stickers on the back of every opinionated hippie’s car. I wrote a post earlier about their counter-productivity and (while they seem like a good idea) thow they are actually no more helpful than any other bumper sticker at fixing the problem. While everyone SHOULD be able to get along, regardless of creed, history shows us that it won’t be the case. So “coexisting” is still a long way off from where humanity could be.

☾OE✡IS †

 Posted by on Sun, 10/16 at 1:52pm  reading  No Responses »
Oct 162016
 

While continuing to google my way through this topic, I came across a particulary interesting article throwing shade at those nice little bumper stickers you stumble upon in a “Trader Joe’s parking lot.” Judging by the title alone, COEXIST’s Bonehead Bumper-Sticker Politics, you can probably tell what direction the writer, Michael Schulson, is going to take this.

He starts off the article by addressing that the COEXIST bumper sticker is no different than than likes of “NRA decals, cartoon families, and (the) blatant ‘26.2’ ovals” in the sense that it is one of the most popular (and most obnoxious) ways for “Americans to broadcast their worldviews in one word or less.” He suggests that the people that post these stickers up for tailgaters to see are naive to the issues stopping the parties from coexisting. Schulson points to the unrest stemming from religious organization across the globe including ISIS, China’s cultural control over Tibet, Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Islamophobics, and the civil war-esq fighting between Christians and Muslims in Africa. He then goes on to wag a critisizing finger at “Americans asking these people to just get along.”

The main point that he works up to is that, while it may seem like a nice and harmless gesture, the coexist bumper sticker is a little counter productive in that it takes more to promote peace than simply slapping a sticer on your car and calling it a day; just like the cure for cancer isn’t hid inside a ribbon. It takes work, education, and a look back through history. “After all, there is only one sure-fire message that I can send by putting a Coexist sticker on the back of my car. Namely, that I am the type of person who puts a Coexist bumper sticker on my car.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/21/coexist-s-bonehead-bumper-sticker-politics.html

Science and Morality

 Posted by on Sun, 10/9 at 6:22pm  reading  No Responses »
Oct 092016
 

This is a TED Talk by Sam Harris, an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist, arguing against the illusion that “science will never answer the most important questions in human life… like ‘What is worth living for?’ ‘What its worth dying for?’ ‘What constitutes a good life?'” I found this to be relevant to the question of if “society would be better off without religion” because of the morality factor.

An argument made by Dinesh D’Souza in an Intelligence Squared debate entitled “Science Refutes God” was basically that science can’t measure morality because there is no quantifiable way to distinguish between “what is” and “what ought to be.” While Harris doesn’t directly attack this perspective, he does ceoncede that there is a misconception that “because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres… It’s often thought that there’s no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be.” He continues that values are a particular sort of facts pertaining to the “well-being of conscious creatures.” 

According to Harris, while “we (may not)… have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question… But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.” He alludes to corporal punishment in 21 states where thousands of children are exposed to legal beatings by a teacher “with a wooden board, hard, and where these beatings are allowed to raise large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin.” After pointing out that the “rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious,” he asks the audience if they believe that this is healthy for emotional edevelopment of the child… and the audience nervously laughs. But he points out that that is a real question and one that matters. Getting a question like that wrong because of blindly following a set of standards is wrong and counterproductive to proper development. 

My favorite portion of this speech  is when he makes an analogy comparing food to religion.

“Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there’s nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, “What is food?” does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions.”

He continues by alluding to women in eastern society being mandated to be covered up. He poses the question of “who are we to tell them how to live their life?” He points out the atrocities committed on women and then “180s” and asks “Well, who aren’t we to say this?” Voluntary wearing of a veil is not the same as being repressed and condemned to wear a veil because someone else is forcing their will upon them. He concludes by saying that once we admit that these moral questions do have right and wrong answers is when we can have serious breakthroughs.

Flaw in the Conclusions

 Posted by on Sun, 10/9 at 1:17pm  ideas  No Responses »
Oct 092016
 

It’s difficult for me to write a paper that is largely based opinion without inserting some biased conclusions. With that being said, I have made some mistakes in drawing some of my conclusions. Just to reiterate, my topic is on religion (mainly organized religion) and what I’m attempting to examine is whether it is helping or hindering the advancement of human society as a whole. Or, to put it another way, would society be more humane without organized religion(s). My opinion is yes. I think that the organized religion was something that was created by people in the upper class to keep the commoners in line. After watching Intelligence Squared debates, TED Talks, and reading articles online, I believe that government (statutory law) and religion (divine law) originated at the same time. The statutory laws were implemented (often by a legislation) to maintain order. But what happens when government officials aren’t watching? That’s where God comes into play. A higher being that sees everything you do and if he sees you do bad things, you’ll be punished in some way or another.

The flaw in some of my arguments (and those of athiest scholars) is that when I’m crtitiquing Holy Books and their followers, I’m using a literal translation of the books. This is detrimenal for a couple reasons. The first is that the books have been translated and re-translated and translated some more. This makes for inaccurate renditions of excerpts. The second is that a good portion of people who are affiliated with a religion don’t read it word for word and take the books literally. This argument was used by Dinesh D’Souza in the Intelligence Squred debate on if “The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion.” The side that was for the motion was critisizing the use of religion by reading sections of The Bible word for word, whereas the side against the motion was paraphrasing. I feel as though I have made a similar mistake in taking a Biblical Literalist approach to this topic.

 

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