(Sorry if some of my posts are repeats, I just joined :))
Just another post on the bible being contradictory…
The other day my friends were telling me that it’s against the teachings of the bible to kill. They say that “God” is the most holy person ever. Yet, this “person” has sparked hundreds of wars around the world. I don’t understand how a “being” is so against killing, yet there are hundreds of wars just because this “being” told them a piece of land belongs to somebody. It would seem to me that all these people would learn to solve their issues in a way that the bible supports.
Few Christians claim that the Bible holds injunctions against killing. Murder, yes.
Also, few Christians claim that God is a “person,” holy or otherwise.
Otherwise, religious matters are discussed extensively here in Great Debates . . . if the server is working well you should be able to get some good past threads from the search function.
In addition to the obvious personhood of Jesus, whom Christians regard as a “person” even in the most restrictive sense of “biologically a member of the human species”, there is the technical theological usage “persons of the Trinity”; finally, the God of the Bible and of classical Christian theology is clearly a “person” in the sense of a being with will, consciousness, purpose, moral attributes, etc.
As to the Bible and killing–the Bible contains numerous supposedly divinely ordained prescriptions for both capital punishment and for warfare. These are primarily Old Testament, but New Testament passages like Romans 13:1-7 speak of God-ordained governmental authorities “bearing the sword”, and have traditionally been used by Christians to support their participation in governments which make and enforce laws and, where necessary, wage war.
Most Christians don’t consider God a person in the sense of being the “most holy person,” a guy, a guru, just like us only holier . . . (which was the impression I got from the OP. ) He’s not some guy who’s holier than all other guys, he’s God.
But I might well have misinterpreted the OP. Sure wouldn’t be the first time.
-first, Hijack-when did you become an admin, Gaudere? Congrats!
God isn’t a person, as we are-but more a being, a spirit. Just as the Catholic church believes God is neither male nor female-at least, that’s what I was taught. God is everywhere, and his presence is much bigger than a “person”, if you will.
Well, I think apologists for religion would say there were no purely religious wars before the last 300 years, either. (The Thirty Years’ War involved all sorts of complicated geopolitical issues and startling cross-sectarian alliances on top of the straightforward Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other; there were questions of control of trade routes and getting rid of inconvenient younger sons of the nobility in the Crusades; etc.)
Just to take one example, I certainly don’t think the religious aspect of atrocities committed before, during, and after the Partition of India (including some very recently) can just be ignored. We are talking about Hindus and Muslims burning each other alive over whether or not a particular plot of ground should be home to a mosque or a Hindu temple, after all.
War is most frequently waged over specific resources. Ideology aside, war is a big risk, and the leaders of a nation need a good and sound reason to take it. The promise of more of whatever it is that that a nation needs, be it drinking water taken from those rival cave-dwellers over there, to a couple of rich provinces on the border of a neighboring nation.
Ideology may be called in to gain popular support for the war, either amongst the nation’s own people, or the neighboring states who’s intervention will affect the outcome.
It all boils down to somebody having something that someone else wants, and both somebodies being willing to use force to decide who gets it.
Uhm, by this explanation, you are only confirming that it is a religious issue here Hindus vs Muslims. If your identification, of Hindus and muslims being classes in their own countries, were correct it would still be a conflict between the same classes of two different countries.
Class distinctions are made on the basis of wealth/property. There are rich hindus, poor hindus and very poor hindus so ‘hindu’ cannot be a class distinction. Furthermore there is NO religious suppression in India. India is a secular state.
Pakistan proclaimed itself an independant state because it did not want to be part of a secular state , it wanted to be a muslim nation.
Kashmir: yes that is a territorial conflict but religious as well. The province saw a lot of immigration from Pakistan and now those muslim immigrants want the province to become part of Pakistan.
Not in this case.
India just fails to see why it should give up part of it’s country, just because a lot of immigrants have moved there.
Again, not in this case. Here it is the other way round. It is the people (or portions of it) that try and escalate the situation. On the whole both governments have been very reluctant to go to war (again). Lately, the bombing of parliament by Pakistani backed muslim terrorists has hardened India’s attitude.
In addition to the obvious personhood of Jesus, whom Christians regard as a “person” even in the most restrictive sense of “biologically a member of the human species”, there is the technical theological usage “persons of the Trinity”; finally, the God of the Bible and of classical Christian theology is clearly a “person” in the sense of a being with will, consciousness, purpose, moral attributes, etc.