Also:

How does Block not recognize that communism tried to put down other religion because they were a religion themselves?!?


The state is god, etc..

It seems his only valid point is that anyone who has thought independent from the state can be a check against it. Going from this argument all we get is we should be glad that at least religion can make people oppose the state. Thats a far cry from the stronger argument that we should be glad for religion that he puts forward.

"Just how many people were killed by religious excesses, such as the Inquisition? Although estimates vary widely, the best estimates (see here) are that the number of deaths during this sad epoch, which took place over several centuries, was between 3,000 and 10,000; some experts, here, place the number as low as 2,000."

Did anyone else notice how he misrepresents this? His sources are only about the Inquisition and comes from Catholic sites.
If the state had any part he writes it off as not religious in nature such as the crusades or the French Wars of Religion that killed 3 million. How about St. Bartholomew Massacre This massacre touched off a six-week bloodbath in which Catholics murdered about 10,000 Huguenots. http://www.theskepticalreview.com/JAHPoliticsDeathToll.html

I'm currently reading The Authoritarians which I think I pointed to in another thread. Much of his study is applicable to religion and that is why it applies to this thread. It tends to describe, if not explain, the contrdictory behavior evidenced in Block's article. The book is the author's summary of a lifetime of studying how people's brains work, comparing authoritarians and those who are not. He's a professor in Manitoba. One of his conclusions is that the authoritarian brain is very adept at compartmentalization, and so it is not much bothered by contradictions as the contradicting ideas are always kept in "separate file folders" and so do not clash with each other in real time. And the thing which he finds really interesting is that the authoritarians will continue to ignore the contradictions even when confronted face-on with them. It's a really interesting book and I recommend it. Free download. About 260 pages.

By the way, I find his testing methods exemplary in that he tests large groups and divides his groups in half, reversing the wording and potential bias in each half so that the errors based upon the way the question was worded, and our propensity to agree when uncertain, get balanced out.

- NonE

Block's article about how true libertarians should support Ron Paul was quite weak and disappointing, and this particular kind of defense of religion is equally so.

I understand the argument that religion has worked as a balancing power re the power of the state, and I reckon it has in fact worked that way in the West, but that leaves out what an alternative to religion could have achieved.

and some of the points that Nielsio selected from the article are just kind of silly. Block can do better than this.

(I do agree with the last paragraph about all the good people at the Mises Institute etc. who are religious and I don't see a necessary problem with being religious. but the arguments in this article are just sloppy)

There is no such thing as "religion" or "the family" at least not as monolithic entities. There are individual religious beliefs that are artificially linked into one religion or another, but these beliefs vary greatly. They could be true or untrue. So I really don't see any reason to support or defame "religion" in general.

Its amazing how different the thread is here compared to the one on FDR. It starts with "good news", I guess because it will bring people to FDR. Its titled something like "A Well Known Libertarian Said"

To be sure most see it there just as critical as here. Yet I don't think we see the bad argument as a good thing.

Irony if a bad can be good.