Monday, September 07, 2009

Conversation Topic 11: Secular vs Religious Rationalization

I am away from my blog for a couple of weeks. This is an experiment in posting some conversation topics while I am gone.

The two questions to answer relevant to the statement below is are:

• Is it true?

• Is it important?

(11) There is not a single evil done 'in the name of God' for which a person cannot find a secular justification (rationalization) that makes no mention of God.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is only true for very loose definitions of "justification". I can justify anything by saying "because I wanted to". So, yeah. I guess it's true in that sense.

Eneasz said...

Hiya Kip. Totally disagree. Humans are great at rationalization, and the smarter they are the better they get at it. People have come up with justifications for killing those with different political views purely for secular reasons. Shouldn't be hard at all to find a justification for any action that doesn't involve any god.

And I agree that it's important because it means that simply stopping religion will not stop human evil. It therefore also implies that stopping religion should not be the primary goal.

Louis Gedo said...

It is a true statement in my opinion. Neither secularists as a whole nor religionists as a whole are devoid of good actions / behavior nor wicked actions / behavior.

Anonymous said...

I say true due human irrationality.