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Tag: "evil"

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Connection between certain religious beliefs and the willingness to torture

There appears to be a correlation between some types of religious beliefs and the willingness to torture, according to a recent PEW study.

Skeptico looks at these results and asks some well-considered questions. He concludes:

Even so, significant or not, these results hardly support the view that religion (specifically Christianity) provides a moral compass, or that reading the Bible or going to church is necessary for one to be moral or good.

Skeptico also recommends a visit to the page where the Skeptics Annotated Bible collects Bible passages concerning torture. And no, not all of these passages promoting torture are from the Old Testament.

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Foolish and vile atheists

This video is a couple years old, but it makes a worthy point for those of us who sometimes get weary of hearing how foolish and vile we are when we are accused of these things by people who don’t even know us.

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Judging the violence of others

Judging the violence of others

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent multidisciplinary work on the meaning of life, entitled The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006). I am presently reading Haidt’s book for the second time, paragraph by paragraph.  This is clearly one of the books I would take to a desert island if I were [...]

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The recipe for religion gone bad

In “The Death of Conscience (Part One),” (Free Inquiry, April/May 2008 –not available online) Shadia B. Drury makes it clear that not all religion is bad.  She recognizes the religious backdrop to the successful efforts to repeal slavery, to promote civil rights and to create the Red Cross. “As these examples show, religion cannot simply [...]