What flaws/evils are unique to Christianity?

Great Debates
1

In the various Christianity- and Christian-bashing stuff I have read (on this board and elsewhere), I have yet to find an argument or accusation that cannot be levelled against another religious group.

In order to better understand why Christianity, per se, is so evil, I would like to know what flaws or evils are unique to Christians/Christianity.

(To start with, I should say that the Inquisition and the Crusades are out. Similar events transpired in and by Muslims: to begin with the minha against non-Muta’zilites and the subsequent anti-Muta’zilite minha is a parallel with the Inquisition; Muslim wars of conquest, expanding the Muslim realms, are akin to the Crusades, even down to acts of brutal cruelty. Besides, the Mongol hordes were far more disastrous than any Crusade.)

WRS

2

Well, the ritual cannibalism is pretty much an exclusively Chrisitan concept.

3

I don’t think any other religion, not even Islam, teaches that you have to believe in it or suffer forever in Hell. (Not all variants of Christianity teach that, but it is a distinctively Christian idea, and a very historically important one.)

4

hhmm… I thought cannibalism was quite popular in the past with a few New Guina and Brazilian natives !

I think the Vatican and its centralized and energetic campaign against birth methods is quite unique… and evil. Not giving Sex Ed or condoms to kids ???

5

Killing in the name of God.

6

Disbelievers are doomed to hell-fire in Islam also.

7

Many religions including Islam.

8

Cite?

9

Pick one.

10

That seems persuasive . . . I’d like to see what Tamerlane has to say about it.

11

Prosletyzing.

12

In general I’d agree with x-ray vision. Islam definitely condemns unbelievers to hell. The only question being just who would be so classified. At it’s broadest all Muslims, plus all ‘People of the Book’/monotheists ( variously defined - usually Christians, Jews, Sabeans and Zoroastrians, but also on occasion throughout history others ) are saved:

002.062
Those who believe (in the Qur’an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.

However many believe that passage was abrogated by this one:

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If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah), never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost (All spiritual good).

Then again not all Muslims believe in the abrogation of verses and not all believers in abrogation think the above abrogation is correct ( including a couple of writers way back in the 8th century ). The number of verses abrogated in the Qur’an ranges from zero to ~500 depending who you talk to ;).

Even beyond that, some Muslims believe all rival sects of Islam are gonna burn as well, based on this hadith, supposedly narrated by Muhammed ( note this one is also variously interpreted ):

“Indeed the people of the Book before you split into seventy-two sects. And this nation will split into seventy-three sects, seventy-two are in the Fire and one in Paradise”. And in another narration, “All are in the Fire except one.” It was asked: Who is that one? He replied, “That which I and my Companions are upon”

So in Islam ( as with Christianity ) you can take a view from the very broad to extremely narrow or various points in between. But it certainly seems somebody is gonna take it in the shorts in the afterlife.

  • Tamerlane
13

You seriously think that christianity is unique in this? Almsot all the worlds religions have or do proletytize.

I don’t think that christianity is unique in its evils so much as that it stands out as the dominant western religion so that to a western observer, it is the most obvious example of those evils. Judaism, the other well known western religion, has been to oppressed and marginilized in the last few centuries to enact many of the same ills, at least on the same scale as their christian neighbors, so they aren’t as good an example in most conversations.

Do you have a cite for someone saying or implying that christianity is uniquely evil?

14

Flaws of aggregates are not measured in individual amounts, but in combinations and volumes. It isn’t the specific flaw, but how endemic that flaw is in combination with other flaws.

I’d say that unique to Christianity, would be that the Roman Catholic Church is really the Roman secular authority being run under the auspices of the Christian faith. That’s unique to Christianity. However, secular authorities utilizing spiritual dogma to cement their power structure isn’t unique to Christianity.

Otherwise, their denial of sexuality isn’t unique, their killing of people in their name is not unique, their belief that they are the one true faith is not unique.

Erek

15

Hmmm, I believe that today, Christian enjoy a lotta peace and prosperity. This is due to their wiping out of rival religious groups. Now, wiping out a rival group is not unique, but perhaps the scale in which it has been done is. Also, while the christans are told to observe the following advice, Islam considers Jesus to be a holy man, just not the savior.

Aha! I think I found a verse which is not taught by Muslims or Jews.
Luke 14
26 If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple.

The next few are bad, true, but they are in the torah as well as the christians’ old testament.

Wipe them out, all of them.
Numbers 31
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them… 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

Don’t eat road kill yourself, sell it to someone else.
Deuteronomy 14
21 Do not eat anything you find already dead. You may give it to an alien living in any of your towns, and he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner. But you are a people holy to the LORD your God.

16

Really? How did you arrive at that conclusion?

Islam – not wiped out
Buddhism – not wiped out
Hinduism – not wiped out
Greco-Roman pantheon worship – basically gone, but not due to Christianity
Pantheism – not wiped out
Wicca – not wiped out
Universalism – not wiped out
Animistic worship – not wiped out

In fact, I’m hard-pressed to find any significant religious groups that were indeed wiped out by Christianity. So I’m curious – what historical basis do you have for your claim?

17

Ah. It occurs to me that you may be thinking of the ancient Moloch worshipers, the Hittites and other such groups. If so, this is a rather odd argument to make. These groups were wiped out by the nation of Israel centuries before Jesus arrived on Earth. As a result, they present no more of a challenge to Christianity than they do to Buddism, Islam or any of the other major religions.

To say that Christianity is now prosperous because the ancient Baal-worshipers were wiped out is a strange argument, to say the least… especially since an abundance of rival religious groups still abound.

18

Forgive my ignorance here, but didn’t Islam arise in somewhere around 600 AD, and weren’t it’s adherants previously Christian? I ask because it seems that the presence of similar flaws in Christianity and Islam merely shows the philisophical and historical link between the two. Islam simply continues the flaws of Christianity.

Jews are certainly not prosletyzers, nor are Hindus or Buddhists, in my experience. Neopagans, including Wiccans, are often very excited about our gig, but the general consensus is that there are many paths to enlightenment, and if our thing isn’t your thing, no problem as long as we can live with respect all 'round. Then again, not all Christian sects prosletyze either - Shakers, Amish, Mennonites, etc.

19

Yeah, no significant religious groups. But where would they have been if not for christiani— Back up a second, how do you believe that “Greco-Roman pantheon worship – basically gone, but not due to Christianity” How are they not gone due to Christianity? Also, many of the groups you have mentioned are types of religions, not religion themselves, such as Pantheism, Universalism and Animistic worship.It is possible to outlaw a religion, in christian roman without wiped out the type of worship. As for specifics: once Christianity became the religion of rome, they sure had one heck of time destroying pagan temples. Outlawing of pagan religious services followed.

Many chistians would say that any other sect besides theirs isn’t Christianity. Under that definition, they killed off the Albigensians, the Essenes, etc. and they may have not killed off the jews, but they sure did their best to. That is just a few, but I think that it is enough. Cite: any reliable history book about the rise of Christianity. While some might put a positive spin on things, it is impossible to deny the fact that one heck of a lot of violence went down.

The following was taken from someone else’s webpage, but it sums up my views:

It is a feature unique to Christianity that “heretics” and anyone who did not assent to the official line were persecuted, murdered, imprisoned and otherwise silenced. Despite suffering the same oppression against themselves, the literalist Christians gained the upper hand as they gained the armies and swords of the roman empire, as Constantine converted to literalist Christianity. Gnostics, Jewish Christians and many of the other forms of Christianity were wiped out. Literalist Christianity became the only existing form of Christianity, not by force of truth or by spiritual virtue, but they reigned victorious through the materialistic and Earthly adoption of politics, Roman power, murder and oppression.
Literalist Christianity in this form lasted one thousand and three hundred years until the end of the Dark Ages, where it was replaced by another form literalist Christianity; liberal Christianity. Finally under this new relaxed form of Christianity, Western science was free to overtake Arab and Eastern science. Liberal Christianity could be termed tolerant Christianity.

20

Intellectually, exactly the same flaws appear between Islam and Judaism, et. all, since they believe in the New Testament, Old Testament, etc., along with the whole “New Covenant” that keeps them from following inconvenient Torah commandments, just like the christians, plus or minus a more gnostic view of christ, (he didn’t really die on the cross, he wasn’t really the son of god), but that is just a cover story. Really, while they claimed the same intellectual teretory, they are really formed from non-christian paganism.
An extremley biased [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0879759844/qid=1112022061/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/002-5918928-8929611]cite. It’s been awhile since I read it, but I believe it gets into it. Note, it’s a book. All the website I have found get into the details too, but sound really paranoid.