It’s my opinion that once you normalize faith in anything as a pathway to truth, you can get (certain) people to do all sorts of crazy, wacky things because they don’t know how deal with reality. They’d been taught their whole life to “go with their gut” over reason. Just my opinion.
You seem like a nice person. I guess I see humans as capable of both wonderful and terrible things and don’t really put one over the other. My religion teaches that people do bad things not because they are innately bad but because they don’t realize how interrelated we are. In fact, we are all made of the same stuff. If we could see that, and if we could see past our deluded viewpoints, the self-centered way we all are, we’d be a lot nicer to each other. And I don’t mean self-centered in a derogatory way. I just mean self-focused. Concerned with our own stuff. One of the ways to see our true nature as interrelated beings is meditation, but that is a slow process. I’ve only had momentary glimpses of pure egoless being. Maybe two minutes at most. But it’s there.
One way I think a lot of people suffer is concerning themselves with what other people believe and do. So those people imposing their religion on other people, I think they are ignorant. And to some extent we all are ignorant. And once I started letting go of needing to change other people, I started getting a lot happier.
I think alot of people are capable of incredible cruelty in the name of a belief system (including religion). Some of the greatest slaughters were for religious purposes. Some of them in the 20th century were in the name of a Godless system, too. When you get people to “otherize” certain groups, and make them appear less than fully human, you can do some damage.
Or you could just say: “God told me/says you should do this, so go and do it!”
Do you have any good reasons to believe in god? If you found out tomorrow that there’s undeniably, definitely, no god, would you except it?
You sound nice, BTW.
I do think that human nature is to be self-focused. There’s always a strand of self preservation that runs through everything. And this is why many people will stand aside and do nothing when someone else is being attacked right in front of them. I wonder how I’d act if I was confronted with that type of situation. Most likely, I’d get my kids and wife, and get the heck out of the area…I’d like to think I’d stand up against the agressor, but would I?
We are capable of both good and bad. On that, you and I agree.
A lot of people freeze up in violent situations and it’s physically impossible to move. It’s a neurological phenomenon called tonic immobility. So while we would all like to act, it’s important not to judge people who don’t. Self preservation is a powerful instinct. Personally I don’t think very clearly in crisis situations. My husband however is the calmest person in a crisis I have ever met. I think it comes down to temperament.
What a horrible view to live with.
And what a narrow-minded, short-sighted one. Out of the more than 100 billion human beings that are estimated to have existed since human beings began, how many of them do you think have done murder, rape, torture or genocide? And how many do you think were just ordinary people trying to get by, to achieve a little peace and dignity and to help their families and friends, without hurting other people?
I’m not surprised you believe in your god and your jesus.
One of the things that keeps coming up with my minister friend is that his view of human nature is so dim compared to ours. He thinks the apostles were like exceptionally bad people and they seemed pretty bog standard to me.
Yet he’s slower to attribute bigotry to people’s actions than we are. That’s his more conservative viewpoint. He was defending men, particularly Christian men who exclude women from their company (think Mike Pence) because men of faith are uniquely targeted by people wanting to create scandal, or something. No, they’re just sexist.
He’s a libertarian.
That’s most of us. Since we’re on the topic of evolution, we’ve evolved to take care of one another, especially people close to us, because it facilitates our survival. There are some people who are not wired that way, but most of us are.
Look, I’m not saying that every human being is equally responsible for the bad we see in this world. I’m willing to see good in everyone. I don’t walk around talking about everyone as if we’re all a bunch of little Hitlers.
What I’m talking about is the overall impact of what humans are doing in this world. When we’re not cheating each other for money, or having ethnic hatred and war, we’re cooking the planet with our greenhouse gases that WE emit. I just think the sum total of what people do on this Earth isn’t so spectacular, and that within all of us, there lurks the ability to hurt others (either explicitly or implicitly). I try and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I see us all as equal.
Makes sense. It’s probably innate to a point.
I’m wondering what it was like in WW2 in, say, Poland. You had a nation with about 10% Jewish population. And the other 90% - mostly Christians - just kept their mouths shut and didn’t rock the boat while the Nazis and their active collaborators were killing the Jews. It’s one Helluva indictment of collective combination of indifference & fear. There had to have been so many situations where they witnessed these atrocities, and just “froze up” and tried to bury it.
You don’t strike me as being anywhere close to a literalist, so the remark was not addressed to you. You seem secure enough to question. About our sinful nature, the discussion above established that, for sure. But who’s responsible for it? Did the sociopath somehow ask to be a sociopath?
It’s not a problem if you believe that some of us get lucky and some unlucky in the genetic draw. It is a problem if you think there is a powerful deity who cares about this stuff.
Why do you seem to want to put guilt for the Holocaust on people who didn’t want to die (eg: afraid to act for fear of being killed) as opposed to the people doing the killing, and the centuries of (largely religious-based) antisemitism that set the stage for them to come to power?
FWIW, I don’t think mere indifference is what set the stage for the Holocaust—it didn’t stop it, but it sure didn’t bring it about. It was the rabid antisemitism present throughout much of Europe and the Americas throughout history.
People being appalled by violence isn’t what brought humanity to the Holocaust.
Humans have two problems in this area:
One of them is that some small percentage of us are genuinely horrible people who love other’s pain because they’re built that way, and have no intention of fighting the impulse except when they think it necessary to save their own necks. There aren’t many such, but there do seem to be some.
However, they’re by far the smaller problem; because there really aren’t many of them. The much bigger problem is that quite a high percentage of “just ordinary people trying to get by” will, under some circumstances, do equally horrible things.
Those of us not in those circumstances may sit here and pat ourselves on the back about how good we are. And some of us, I expect, are among the few who would or even have resist(ed) those circumstances, even if it’s risking their lives (and sometimes the lives of their loved ones.) But most of us haven’t really been tested and shouldn’t be so proud of ourselves for not hurting others when not hurting others is easy. (And, to some extent, most or all of us are hurting others – we’re just doing it indirectly.)
No, I don’t think that makes all or most of us horrible sinners by nature – even if we limit sin to “hurting other people”, which most of the religious people talking about sin don’t seem to do. But I think that quite a lot of those 100 billion humans have committed, and/or assisted the committers of, murder and/or rape and/or torture and/or genocide. People used to take their little kids to hangings and lynchings for the fun of it. They were “just ordinary people trying to get by”.
I think we’ve been gradually getting better, actually. Most societies don’t make a party out of torturing people in public, any longer. Many societies have figured out that providing every generation of young men a war to fight in isn’t actually good for those young men. But considering our numbers and our armament, I’m worried that we’re not getting better fast enough.
(And I do not believe in God in at least the common sense of the word in this society (I’m agnostic about some of the other versions); nor do I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine. Or, most likely, accurately quoted. Nor do I think that whether one fights the murderers, joins the murderers, or incites the murders has much of anything to do with whether one is religious or not.)
Some of it was that. And some of it was that there was a lot of antisemitism to start with among that 90%, and so while they might not have wanted to kill a five-year-old looking right at them (though it should be noted that various people through history have turned out to be quite willing to do that), quite a few were in favor of having the Jews all rounded up and hauled away.
And yeah, some of them were just scared shitless. And some of them nevertheless did their very best to help; and saved some lives. Our species has enough good in it that I hope we manage to survive ourselves.
There is currently a sitting Congress person that wants to preserve the ‘’‘’‘freedom’‘’‘’ to say that the Jews killed Jesus.
Now I grant that her Tweet length version might not be a subtle as what she actually thinks but ‘The Jews killed Christ’ came to her like a duck to water.
First, that’s a very different set of behaviors than the first ones you listed, and if you are including these under “among other things” then I question this as a line of argument. But I see other posters have taken you up on that, So let’s talk about being saved, and the need for a savior. If you don’t believe in original sin, then not everyone needs a savior, right? Non-evil people, even people who are cowardly and selfish about helping others, would not need a savior. So if you posit a savior who was sent to us by a deity to die for our sins, it sounds like that savior is suffering to help a minority of people to be saved, because the majority of people don’t need it. Of course, trying to use reasoned arguments on these issues will always lead to cul-de-sacs like this one, because the issues don’t arise from a reasonable premise. Here I’m just showing you where such thinking leads, which I suspect is not where you want to go.
The fact that Jews generally don’t view Jesus as the son of God or that he rose from the dead seems like a strike against Christianity. Jews were the ones worshiping and studying God from the start. Jesus comes along saying “I’m the Son of God” and the Jews are basically “Nah. Don’t think so.” If anyone could have identified Jesus as God or the Son of God, it seems like it should have been the Jews. They knew God the best. If they say Jesus isn’t God, I’ll take their word for it.
I think you missed my last questions.
Do you have any good reasons to believe in god? If you found out tomorrow that there’s undeniably, definitely, no god, would you except it?
I was just describing one aspect of humanity. The guilt for the Holocaust lies with the Nazis and their active collaborators. There were locals in Poland and in Ukraine and the Baltics (as well as some in Western Europe) who actively helped the Nazis. But there were millions of people who were indifferent…not killers…not collaborators…just people unwilling to do anything. There were, luckily for some Jews, a lot of people who risked their lives to help them.
I like this part bestest,
Christian: Jesus died for your sins!
Non-Christian: Cool! So I get to go to Heaven too!
Christian: No, you only go to Heaven if you repent and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
Non-Christian: In other words, Jesus did not die for my sins.
Christian: I see you’re demon possessed and have the Spirit of Anti-Christ! Burn in Hell sinner!
I think our socieities - for the most part - have gotten better. We’re more accepting of other races & diversity in general than the old days. There’s more of a live and let live ethic. I think our governments & our economies have gotten better for much of the developed world, such that some of our more “bad” nature doesn’t come to the surface. But there’s still human nature. And we need to always be on guard.