But then you wouldn’t have FAITH ! ! And of course, that’s all that really matters.
Well, yeah . . . Unless you count all the knowledge amassed and stored by monks and the disseminating of that knowledge by the Jesuit order.
And all the assistance to the poor by the Franciscan order.
And the Red Crescent.
And the Chaplain corps.
And homeless shelters.
And medieval philosophers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
But yeah, other than these I thought of right off the top of my head and about 20 other things floating around out there, religion’s never done anything for humankind. :dubious:
And this makes it evil how? Your parents tell you to do things too. If they tell you to do things like make sure you do your homework and don’t pick your nose in public, it’s good. If they tell you to do things like kill strangers who make fun of Mommy and Daddy, that’s bad.
If religion tells you to blow shit up that doesn’t belong to you, that’s evil. If religion tells you to heal the sick and feed the poor, that’s good.
Your definition of evil is pretty arbitrary here, Trihs.
And that’s my point. Sarahfeena summed it up nicely when she said that even if we didn’t have religion, we’d have some sort of -ism. It is a human construct, and as I’ve pointed out above, it has done a lot of good.
In other words, religion is just as neutral as science when it comes to good deeds and bad. It’s not religion. It’s the person wielding that religion. Sort of like the person wielding science to make the next cure for cancer that will save a hundred thousand lives or some sort of biological weapon that will end them just as quickly.
Wow . . . To think that all those born again Christian surgeons, Orthodox Jewish psychiatrists, and Muslim engineers all have a mental disorder. I’m afraid to step out of my house now.
Or maybe you’re just making this stuff up as you go along . . .
At least you’re not calling them stupid . . .
I never said that religion and science are exactly alike, I merely pointed out that both can be used for good for evil. Each is a tool to be used by humans as they wish. Contrary to your personal belief, much good is done by people in the name of religion. If you added up the good, and added up the evil, it would probaby be pretty close to neutral.
Seems pretty violent to me.
I think it’s actually necessary for people to have some kind of organized thing to believe in. As I said, if you don’t have religion, you have Communism, or Capitalism, or whatever. Usually people have more than one at a time. But you do need to have something that brings a group together to say “this is what we believe, and we think our lives and the world should be organized according to that principle.” Personally, I think it arises from the combination of our species’ social nature combined with our big brains that can come up with all of these isms in the first place.
Stop the generalization. You are being so disingenuous to the point of ignorancy. I don’t believe that “common lie”, and I am religious. And I sure other religious people here would/will agree.
One out of three ain’t bad, nor good either. Wait a minute…that is bad, but not worse.
Citey Cite McCite?
Well, for starters, there’s Joe Stalin and Mao Tse Tung. Two of the biggest mass murderers in history, responsible for brutal regimes that oppressed and murdered millions, and both stone-atheists who violently suppressed religion in their respective nations. That seems to be at least circumstantial evidence that man is more than capable of murder and atrocity with the imprimatur of magical sky fairies.
The problem isn’t that religion tells people to do things, it’s that people tend to do whatever authority tells them to do. You are, no doubt, familiar with the Milgram experiment, where people overwhelmingly agreed to torture and kill other people based on the authority, not of a man in a miter, but a man with a clipboard. Religion is a convenient lever to use on that unfortunate instinct, but it is not the only lever that is effective in that role, and it is certainly not the source of that particular defect in general. Getting rid of religion will not get rid of that defect, and focusing obsessively on the “evils” of religion is a useless distraction.
History has amply demonstrated otherwise.
If it makes you feel any better, I also don’t credit religion with anything good, either. Just as it is incapable of turning a good man evil, religion does not make an evil man good. Good and evil are both pre-exsisting in man, and it is his choice and his choice alone that brings it forth. Blaming it on an external belief system both excuses the evil, and trivializes the good. I prefer to address the root of both behaviors.
I am not what most people would call terribly religious (although I am compared to Der Trihs, I’m sure. I think this is a huge generalization, too, not to mention that it deliberately misses the point that Linty Fresh and I were trying to make. The point was never some kind of “lie” we were trying to tell about religion (I don’t even know what that means), but just comparing it to another thing that can also be used for much good or much evil, depending on the person using it.
And on the other side of the fence, I’m an atheist, and I don’t believe this “common lie” either. Neither do I believe that most people are suckered in by this either.
Yep, that verse by itself sounds pretty violent. But, if you take the whole context of the verse:
Then you would see that the sword is synonymous to a tool to divide believers from unbelievers.
Also, I have no plans to buy a sword anytime soon, nor plan on being violent with one, literally.
So would you allow that violent passages in the Koran are also taken out of context, and actually have philosophical meanings beyond the violence that is apparent on the surface? Or must we take them at face value, while parsing the words of Jesus to fit a non-violent preconception?
Sarahfeena and Linty Fresh, thanks for the affirmation. Something horrific and close to home must have driven DT to such a twisted view on religion to have the viewpoints that he has and I’m curious to find out what it is, if he his open to discussing it.
Although I have not read the Koran, I would make the effort to understand the context of any book that I have or would read. Otherwise it would make a horrible read. To me, it would make sense to treat the Koran like any other book/article/story/etc., and not pull things out of context to justify or bolster my POV with any dishonest response.
In England, and America, they were explictly a civil crime. It’s on the European continent that witchcraft got conflated with heresy, thus making prosecutions easier and the violence mroe widespread. I agree that there was a correlation to anti-heresy campaigns, but even there I’d argue that there were secular social and political motives behind much of the violence.
The Church itself was divided on the question of witchcraft, with many influential thinkers arguing that it wasn’t a problem. Even that bastion of progressive religious thought, the Spanish Inquisition, decided that it really wasn’t a problem.
I agree with many here. Religion is a tool to inspire and motivate. At its best, it inspires us to seek inner peace and serve our fellow man. At its worst, you get Crusades and terrorism. But both the good and the bad can be motivated just as effectively by secular ideologies.
:smack: Okay, yeah, that should have been obvious. I assumed “when” was a typo for “then.” Sorry, gonzomax, entirely my bad.
I don’t think it would be smart to take them at “face value,” having been removed from context, no. I’m sure I could read the entire Koran, and not come anywhere close to understanding everything about the Muslim religion and culture, and why some followers are terrorists, and why many are not. I think it is far too simplistic to just say “this religion is violent.” More likely, Islam is like any other religion…it can be used for good, it can be used for evil.
Luke 22:35-36
[35] Then Jesus asked them, “When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?”
“Nothing,” they answered.
[36] He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.”
[ nitpick ]
Witch trials were a Renaissance phenomenon. There were few, if any prosecutions/persecutions of “witches” in the medieval period. In fact, they did not originate within “the church” (if viewed as the Western or Roman Catholic Church). Witch trials came to full fruition (among all the resulting denominations) after the church had already shattered in the Reformation and the earliest witch hysteria, while preceding Luther and Calvin, began subsequent to the early upheavals from Wyclif(fe) and Hus.
Once they got going, Catholics and Protestants took equal glee in pursuing witch trials (in the relatively few countries where witch hysteria actually broke out), but they were not an outgrowth of Catholic or Protestant theology.
[ /nitpick ]
It means many things and fighting a war in the name of islam is one of them: **Jihad may also reflect the war aspects in Islam (Submission). The fighting of a war in the name of justice or Islam, to deter an aggressor , for self defense, and/or to establish justice and freedom to practice religion , would also be considered a Jihad . **
The same site concludes that Jihad is a media misnomer because war is never a holy thing. However, the terminology has taken on a broader cultural meaning because of it’s direct association with the religion. In the modern vernacular, “Holy war” is interchangeable with “religious war”. It is used by militant Islamic groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad so it is not a Western Media contrivance.
To address the thread, Islam is a religion that, in many parts of the world, has not evolved beyond it’s original social construct. it’s a peaceful religion as long as you follow the rules. It’s best if members avoid the following infractions:
Homosexuality
drunkenness
adultery
theft
apostasy (renounce the religion)
blasphemy
defamation