Confucius also came up with it as well, although I believe it was the Silver rule…
Also, I don’t think it’s been successfully argued that “all humans are brothers and fundamentally equal” is actually a biblical position. You’d have to pick and choose and ignore verses to come up with that.
No, I don’t. Once again though, you’re shifting the goalposts. Nobody denies that the Roman Catholic Church enforced mass conversions on a large scale. The question is whether this describes the bulk of Christian growth. It does not.
Again, irrelevant. Nobody denies the atrocities that were committed by the Roman Catholic Church. The point remains that these were the actions of a SPECIFIC denomination, and they do not reflect Christianity as a whole.
Certain people here know this, and yet they refuse to acknowledge this distinction. After all, it’s much easier to take potshots against religion in general, and Christianity in particular, when one does not have bother with nuances and attention to detail.
In today’s society here in the USA where people take pride in saying “We are a Christian nation”, then try to use words that insinuate that Obama is not Christian, and by some of the emails I get, are surely not what one would consider a Christian thought!
Our Prisons are filled with many so called Christians. Look to the examples some religious leaders are giving their people. Some are child molesters, some adulters, some even have murdered. It is not what their religions have taught but it didn’t seem to help them any. I know Good christians and many good Atheists. For some reason (in some cases guilt) Religion seems to have no affect on many people. So I doubt that religion is the basis for being civil. If humans were truly Civil we would not have to lock our doors, or need hand guns in our home. Apparently (in my way of thinking material possesions, land, money etc, are the religions of our society.
People years ago did wrong things, the population was less,so perahps that is why there was less crime, but religion seems to have failed to make society a better place, and here in the USA in the past several years people seem more interested in pushing their religious beliefs into law, then practicing the faith they claim to believe!
How so?
Please do. I say the same thing every time. Morality is a personal aesthetic.
In a way they do, but you are excluding not only the middle but the other end. Not all religious conversion has been done using genocide or wholesale destruction. Not even all CHRISTIAN religion (which is what I feel you are still talking about) was spread that way in all cases.
People are naturally xenophobic and clannish. Without something to have in common with outside groups they will not band together into entities larger than a family hunter gatherer band (IMHO). Religion provides that unifying kernel around which larger groups could form. It also motivates peoples to band together to do larger things (monumental architecture) and acts as a repository for knowledge (the priest or shaman/druid class generally are that repository for a peoples history and knowledge).
You are focused on only the bad aspects, and generally of the later, more modern and more wide spread religions, as if by pointing out that they did bad things that means that they didn’t do anything good. But even a cursory knowledge of archeology pretty much demonstrates that this wasn’t universally the case. Whether you think that on balance this was a positive or a negative (and I know you think it was a negative) is irrelevant to THIS OP, which is stating that religion has given us ‘nothing’. That is horseshit, and I know that YOU know more about this subject that your knee jerk reaction has been in this thread.
I’m no big fan of religion, personally. I was raised a Catholic, and as I grew up I was bored by the seemingly endless religious classes as I was forced to go through the whole FHC and later Confirmation. Blah! Later, I was appalled by the horrific acts the church perpetrated against various peoples throughout it’s history. It sickened me. That said, though, anyone saying the church has done nothing positive is spouting bullshit (or is genuinely clueless about history, architecture, the arts and, well, just about everything else related to human society and culture).
Well, no…you aren’t following what I’m saying. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m explaining myself poorly, or you are only hearing what you want to hear, or some combination of both. Simply put, I’m saying that religions unify people with a common belief system. That’s been true of ALL humans throughout history, at least as far as I know. The fact that there are examples of religions also converting by the sword, or destroying peoples really doesn’t bear on the broader question of religion as a unifying force, since in general both sides were unified by their individual religious beliefs. The indigenous peoples HAD religious beliefs that unified them long before the Spanish found them.
No, you are asserting that mass murder, even if it wasn’t done by all religious at all times automatically nullifies any other effect religion had on humanity throughout time…which is ridiculous. It’s like saying ‘well, technology has killed billions of humans throughout history, therefore technology is evil and has done nothing for humanity, given us nothing and is worthless’. As I said before, religion has given us the good with the bad…which is a very human thing, since it stems from us, and is a reflection of our basic nature. Creator. Destroyer. Good. Evil. That IS what humanity is all about, and religion is just a tool that humanity has used throughout our history to do great things, and evil things. It’s like our technology…it’s been incredibly destructive. But it’s been just that little bit more creative to give us all that we have.
-XT
In what regard? What do you think it tries to do, but fails?
This is more than a bot much, even for you. Would you mind explaining your calculation here?
It’s impossible to accurately assess the good of religion against the bad. We have no way of measuring it. We have no way of looking into all the religious people in history and trying to determine what influence religion had over their good acts or their evil ones. It’s an excercise in futility. To say religion has given us nothing is the same.
One way would be to compare a strongly religious society of a certain era to a strongly non-religious society of roughly the same era. Please, no references to China or the U.S.S.R. from The Usual Suspects-I think “worship of state” should count as religion in this case.
Could you give examples of strongly non-religious societies from history? I can’t honestly think of any.
-XT
For the first few hundred years of its history, sure. After that, most conversions were mass conversions, as can be seen from how Christianity followed evangelical colonial powers - and how when Europe colonized states with an equivalent evangelical religion Christianity made little headway - see Indonesia, for instance.
I’m quite unaware of any general thing we can say about Christianity as a whole these days. Not all sects even do aggressive missionary work any more. As I said, back in the time of the Crusades these good denominations didn’t even exist - hardly a Unitarian to be found. I do think a common thread of Christianity is that those who do not accept Jesus are sentenced to an eternity of torment, and thus either forcible conversion or at least pressure for conversion is in the best interest of the poor heathen. Sure some denominations, even back after the Reformation, didn’t buy into this, but you can make a better argument that they weren’t good Christians than you can make that those in favor of forced conversion are bad ones. Even back in the 19th century the Pope (I think he was a Pius) forcibly converted a Jewish kid, and now Pius is up for canonization.
Possibly, but my guess is you’d find that religious and non religous societies both go through periods of peace and prosperity or chaos and violence.
Considering the history of mankind how many non religious societies will we find? Not only that how do we gauge all the other factors that affect a society and how they weigh against the religious factor in a societies success or failure?
Than I guess we really can’t gauge the effect religion has had on society, for good or for bad.
Why, yes…the “atheism is best” argument does seem to have more merit when No-True-Scotsman fallacies suddenly become valid on that side only. :dubious:
He was baptised by a Catholic and that made him in the eyes of the church, Catholic. You could not then have a Catholic raised by Jews so he was taken from his parents and raised as one of the faithful.
It’s not a scotsman if it’s true. State religions are still religions.
This “atheism is best” argument-I can’t seem to find it anywhere in my post. Did you perhaps mean to quote someone else?
Not really - I was pointing out the unfortunately common willingness to overlook fallacies from one side of the argument (whose proponents in this thread are notably Dio & Der) - and referring to that side of the argument as “atheism is best.”
Your line was just an excellent example of someone who I wouldn’t expect to give that nonsense a pass. Which is why I thought it worth responding to.
Frankly - if religious people are expected to defend idiots like the Westborough Baptists for their"religious" batshit-insanity, then why is it that atheists get a pass on self-identified atheists committing mass murder? (Or, better yet, getting to pass the blame to their opponents with the laughable “Communism counts as a religion, even though they self-identify as athiests!”)
You realize that there is a substantial difference between these two groups, don’t you?
The Westborough Baptists quote their religious texts.
The atheists have no texts to quote. You cannot get ‘atheists hates gays’ from ‘god doesn’t exist’. It’s a non sequitur.
You can get ‘god hates gays’ from a few passages in the bible.
Hence the difference.