To clear up the matter - religion uses various practices to help mold our instinctual responses to situations. These practices are used to promote natural loving reactions over our animalistic selfishness.

As for kindness, well, do you prefer hate? Friendship requires kindness. Just look at your life and ask yourself which you would rather have manifest - kindness or hatred.



To answer the first part, religion is not necessary. I can walk to the store, but riding my bike might be better. Similarly, I do not need religion, but religion might be useful.

To the second, we can have religion and promote love and kindness as the virtues they are. What I want to caution, though, is that promoting virtues on an intellectual basis alone only goes so far. People may accept, intellectually, that we should be compassionate, but to actually be compassionate at all times takes practice. Religion helps with this practice, with this cultivation of compassion.

Everything can be misinterpreted and abused. Relating these things to a particular deity is a way to express certain ideas in a way that some particular culture can understand and make useful.



You may very well be right that religion is abused more often than it is properly used. Nietzsche's big religious influence, I forget his name, argued that the history of Christianity was essentially the history of good Christian teaching being corrupted for political ends.



Because you take them out of context. The first and third do not suggest that adherents antagonize and hate those who are not adherents. When you read the other Commandments, you find a message that suggests we should most certainly not antagonize and hate others.

To answer your question: I don't consider kindness and hate opposite values. Each has its place. I consider the promotion of kindness in itself quite pointless, just as I do the promotion of hate. To what purpose should we approach people with a kinder, gentler hand? Perhaps what is needed in some cases is just the opposite...but not hate?

As far as friendship goes: I disagree that friendship requires anything close to what I take to be your definition of kindness. Friendship is a big, sticky mess of desire, mutual interest, identity and fear. Kindness may have its place of honor, as well, but I hate to see it assigned such imperious significance a priori.

Let me ask you this - would you prefer people treat you with kindness, disregard, or with hate?

Hate engenders more hate, kindness engenders more kindness. Disregard only leads to great disregard. The principle behind these claims is the power of moral example - more than words, our actions set an example that is far more impressive upon others.

The significance of compassion, love, kindness, is not a matter of a priori discourse. It's a matter of experience. We are all familiar with the negative effects of being disregarded and being hated, and we are all familiar with the positive effects of being treated with kindness and compassion. Based on our experiences of these various emotions, we realize that compassion is best. We prefer to be treated with loving kindness.

Rewind a minute: first we need to define kindness. I hate hunting gnats with butterfly nets.

Are we talking about true selflessness here? What is the motivation?

As far as indifference goes, I absolutely crave it from all but a few people.

True selflessness would be the ideal, but even acting kind with some slight kicker of self interest (maybe I'm particularly nice to some cute girl, for example) will work. Better than hatred or disregard.



I'm sorry. I can relate, though. I often find myself preferring disregard. But this preference is a manifestation of my own disregard for others and slight degree of hatred of others.

At this point, we must decide if "true" selflessness is possible, perhaps?



We're using different words here. Just thought I'd point that out. To me, indifference and hatred are unrelated as only one is really an emotion while the other is an absence of feeling (which you may not consider possible...affect perhaps?). I see no reason to hate other people (unless I have one), but that doesn't mean I want them talking to me on the bus. I'm not a hermit, nor am I shy, unattractive, unfriendly, rude, unhelpful, cowardly or socially clumsy, I just don't, you know, believe in selfless "caring". There are plenty of good reasons to treat people "kindly" that have nothing to do with kindness.

Evil only works well if you keep it under your hat most of the time, anyway. Muhaha?

Okay. Of course selflessness is possible. There is a thread, started by Boagie, around here somewhere that tackles this question.



Really? Do you have children?

Look, its obvious that humans have abused religion more than gained from it. Religion is a way of gaining virtue, no doubt about that, but it is not coalesced this way. But I did not start this topic for an argument of religion.


I respect religion as long as it respects other, and as such, I choose to simply not be a part of religion that has a bluebloody history [blue] [bloody]/.


Sorry Icono didn't mean to laugh, just came out. But to say that everybody has a spiritual side, ok sure. But as Icono said, why through religion? We simply do not need to be told by people years ago whos moral reasoning is obselete or lesser to today, what to do.


I'll try not to generalize here. * cough* Philosophy for each and every person is guilded by a spiritual side, and as insights are gained and wisdom accompanied, religion seems less appealing.


Religion are like the liberals. When you are young, it is easy to appeal to the liberal ideas as if the most virtuous and moral. But when one gets older they start to see a brighter side, one with little spirit, one that seeks to rely so heavily on other people, not the self. One with such interacting for money, food, shelter, etc. And then when one gets to be really old, (I am assuming), the big picture sets in when there is time on that one's hand. The liberal ideas were really intrinsic to to our being and just best to evoke rather than reprise.


Hey just a random thought here. Can you have centralized generalizing?


Does generalizing lead to depression?

Do you mean "The Selfish Nature"? The thread that's on about page 50 right now? That's a long footnote.



Yes, in fact. Love is an incredibly (notice I didn't say entirely) self-interested phenomenon and fully worth the price of admission. But I wouldn't break my back for somebody else's kids, because I only love my own. Love for my children is far from selfless.

In the interest of not being a jerk (and perhaps furthering the discussion), I will submit that in relations with friends and loved ones, the relationship, itself, becomes a part of our personal identity (of our "self") and thus at some point "selflessness" and "selfishness" become indivisible and meaningless as words or concepts. I cannot seperate my concept of myself from my concept of myself as father of my children, therefore every act I make in regards to the little buggers is inherently selfish and selfless.

I do not believe that pure "selflessness" (without love, then) applies to interactions with strangers, especially the faceless ones society tells us we should care for. There are exceptions, of course, people whose personal identity is tied to their relationship to all of humanity (and thus, again, a permeable barrier between selfish and selfless is created), but I'm not at all clear that stretching oneself (or one's self - is there a difference?) so thin is a good idea, for the individual or the society he wants to "be at one with".

I don't think "being at one" with all of mankind or life is the natural state of man. I won't attack the idea of such as prima facia wrong or bad, but I don't consider it unconditionally good, either. Is the soldier who willingly dies for his country not also "selfless" in some way? Even the Nazi?

"Love thy neighbor." I disagree. Who actually loves his neighbor - has actually broken the barrier between self and other with all of humanity? Nietzsche, who could be incredibly complimentary of Christians when so moved, said that the first man to have truly "loved man for god's sake" was the single example of humanity who had flown highest and farthest astray. Of course, Nietzsche considered sympathy one of man's cardinal virtues (little known fact).