Quote Originally Posted by speedminded

The only person you should believe in is yourself. If someone can't do that yet then yes they need "God" until they can.
Believe in yourself for what? What does that mean? Believe in yourself to go out and serve the needs of others. Believe in yourself to do the right thing. Sure people can do that. No problem and you don't need to be religious to do it, but I am not sure where this entire statement fits in the flow of this thread.

How does that make you any different than people who believe that a car bomb is the will of God or people who believe in themselves who think that religious people should be purified (erradicated). What tells me that your beliefs matter when our two beliefs in self conflict? What tells an army in africa that their belief in self does not give them the right to torture rape and steal from the communities. What tells the people in asia that it is not right to prostitute young girls, or people in europe that sex trafficing is wrong.

so when your worldview says, believe in yourself what do you mean because not all help is help, not all change is good, not all quests for peace are bloodless. What is the belief in self fix for these things?

My point is that if life is about self and interpreting good for others then that can easily be oil and water and if we are waiting for people to believe in self what happens when their "self belief" violates yours?

I mean understand the good side of what you are trying to focus on but this does not change the human condition. We are a really bad society overall and there is no shortage of scholars today or through history that believe we are very capable of pushing ourselves towards extinction because of a promoted world view of self interests. So how is this a good world view?

dont get me wrong, I am not saying that a religious world view is better. I am saying that you are completely ignoring the human element of all world views. This is why I believe people need a common standard to uphold. Without one, we have seen that we cannot function and to ask for a world without one is to ask for more genocide and more persecution because our history tells us that most of the people in this world are NOT humanitarians, and the ones who are not have the biggest guns pointed at the ones who are.