Why is threre so much hate among religions?

Great Debates
1

I am not sure where to post this thread, but as the theme is mostly religious… here it goes:

Even in Abrahamic religions we see a lot of hate. They share stories, beliefs and traditions but still seem to have a lot of hate to each other. It seems that the intensity of hate (be it to other religions, woman, homosexuals… you name it) is directly related to conservatism. It is understandable that one religion might say it is wrong to do some things, but what I am witnessing lately, mostly on evangelical religions is pure distilled hate.
I live in Brazil, and some evangelical churches are growing rapidly. They are getting involved more and more into politics, making poo poo out of LGBT and woman rights. All because of hate to the ones who are different.
I know evangelical people who don’t act like that. In fact, they are supportive to other communities, and are pretty respectful to the ones who do not follow their beliefs. What makes me really sad is that some priests are making billions out of donations - that are now happily stored on the Cayman Islands. What they say about African religions is extremely disrespectful. In fact, some religions seem to exist only to impose rules and to hate the ones who are not part of them.
I know that this is not the rule, and that the haters are (most of the time) isolated in small groups such as the Westboro Baptist Church (ew.) But on the same time… we see the unsolvable conflict on Israel. We see the director of the human rights chamber in Brazil saying that HIV was a punishment for Africa. We see this same evangelical priest telling that HIV is the gay cancer.
Why can’t people live their own lives? I fight for woman and LGBT rights, but I do not want to forbid religions to exist. In my humble opinion you can believe in Odin and have your own Viking funeral (they are pretty awesome), as long as you don’t interfere with the rights of other people. We see exactly the opposite of that sometimes…
Is religion just an excuse for all the hate or is it the cause and core of the problem?

2

While I do not paint those organized religious ones with a broad brush, I do know the mentality you reference. It follows from the sense of superiority and destiny that is implied when one is following the “true” path, and others are obviously not. ( Read: wrong, less than, etc.)

3

Religion is specifically and deliberately opposed to reason, hence no expectation of reasonable results.

4

IMHO it is neither. Human nature is to divide into us and other. In past times those represented kinships and demonizing the other had some evolutionary payback, now we are stuck with fictive kinships, grandfalloons. Religion is just a handy divider, no more the cause than being butter side up vs butter side down or having or not having stars upon thars.

Religion is used by some in service of the divisiveness that is part of the dark side of or nature. By others it is used to serve the good of all humanity. The tool is not to be blamed for how it chosen to be used.

5

Pretty much this.

Humans use anything they can to promote tribalism. You can find Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Apple Fans, Windows Fans, Linux Fans, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hippies, "The Man"s, and everything else in our lives that can set off some form of “That’s the WRONG SIDE.” Even the most rational of us fall into the trap of giving global bad traits to some tribe and then feeling superior to all of the people that identify under that label.

Look around, it’s built into pretty much every culture everywhere. When you see political debates on the internet, you’ll see both sides of American politics going “Well, all repugnantcans…” versus “Well, all dumbocrats…” which causes an extreme polarization. If the WRONG GUY is bad, then you can’t accept any of his statements or even to come to an agreement. He is wrong, after all.

The go look at something like the “Apple versus PC wars” that happened last decade. Two legions of people utterly convinced their choice was right instead of realizing that their choice was right for themselves.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure of a way to defuse tribalism en mass. I’ve never been successful doing so unless someone was already on the fence about which tribe was best anyway.

6

The purpose of religion is to spread itself and survive. Inducing hatred in its hosts is a useful method of destroying competing beliefs, preventing them from picking up outside belief systems, and of unifying them with a hatred of the enemy. I disagree with the people saying that it’s just humans being humans; religion creates hatred where none would otherwise exist, and religion uses people much more than they use it.

7

None of this is snark:

Then how does that explain the contempt and hate of the atheist liberals and atheist conservatives for the other side?

People through out history have killed in the name of family, king, country, ethnicity, politics and gods. Why does only that last one deserve to be excoriated? Shouldn’t we rid ourselves of all these things, if humans aren’t the root cause?What about the rich saying that the poor deserve what they get because they are too lazy to get rich, also? While not death, per se, it’s certainly a lot of suffering.

The truth is, humans use what justification they need to see to their own self interest. If that self interest is served by killing, then that will be so. It doesn’t matter if before or after said killing they bring their country, god, or shoe color into it. They are looking out for themselves and justify their actions in whatever way makes that self interest continue.

Look at the civil war. People on both sides of an issue using the same religion to justify their actions. The south said that God condoned their slavery. The North said that God condemned the South’s slavery. A largely secular issue due to the needs of the Northern industrial base and the Southern farming base diverging so much that both sides felt they couldn’t continue with the other side - but it was injected with religion.

Even if you look at the Crusades, which is considered a few hundred years of Christian-based war, do you think they would have happened without the nobles of Europe embarking upon the start of the age of chivalry? Men were supposed to ride into battle and earn their place in society and all. Europe was a huge war pot, full of everyone with a sharpened stick looking to strike it rich on the battlefield. So why, if Christendom had inspired so much hate and war, did they battle amongst themselves instead of just throwing forces at the “them” of the Turks?

In addition, the massacre of Christians in the holy land might’ve gone unnoticed by Europe had the Turks not turned on Constantinople, who’s emperor sent messages to the Roman pope asking for help and highlighting the treatment of Christians by the new Turk regime. Europe still would have been having battles nearly constantly, just as they did with the Crusades stopping and starting for 200 years.

The hate people feel, while it may be encouraged by religion (and nations, and political parties), is something that humanity does very well without religion. All we need is one example in our lives to instinctively hate an outsider. Gypsies steal babies. Marijuana makes black men go insane and rape white women. Homosexuals are causing all of the problems for the upstanding citizens in Russia.

The sad part is, we can continue this for as long as you want without getting into religion. :frowning: Humanity sucks. The only good part is that we are (excruciatingly slowly) getting better.

8

A lifetime of abuse, oppression, hatred and general unpleasantness from the believers. And, religion is contemptible; what would you think of someone silly enough to believe in Santa Claus as an adult? Someone who was willing to oppress or kill other people in the name of Santa Claus?

Who said that?

Religious tyranny and violence is usually against the self interest of the people doing it; it’s done for the interest of the religion, not the people it parasitizes.

And at least partly motivated by religion. Slavery among other things was a highly effective means of converting populations to Christianity.

This argument just demonstrates how evil religion is, how anti-human it is. The defenders of religion always demonize humanity so they can avoid laying any blame upon religion; they turn upon their own species to defend it.

9

Obviously there would still be wars and hatred if religion ceased to exist. But there would be less.

The average person on the street is tough to turn into a suicide bomber without a carrot to wave at him. Eternal life is the carrot.

Evangelical Christianity specifically spreads disdain of gays. It’s not insane to think there would be less of it, if Christianity stopped existing.

As for why they hate each other, every believer thinks they have the answer. If you have an answer that’s completely different, you’re as much as calling them a fool for believing what they do.

It makes perfect sense that many religious people would lash out at those they think are attacking them by coming up with different answers.

10

Speaking as a Jew: The monotheistic religions – Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam – all work under the assumption that there is only one God. From which, many practitioners leap to the assumption that there is only path to God, only one way to live. Thus, we’re right and the others are all wrong. “No one reaches the Father but through me,” kind of thing.

My personal take is that this is extremely arrogant, and a philosophy that assumes God is very limited. I personally think there are lots of paths to God, and that the world would be a happier place if religious leaders started to recognize that.

11

You can show the same thing with any topic with which humans are involved. In the US, liberals show open contempt and hatred for the conservatives and vice versa. The more each side shows contempt and hatred, the less each side comes together.

People’s actions. People rush to demonize “religion” and don’t rush to demonize “family.”

You ignore that people are social animals. A “Greater Cause” of any kind - king, country, religion, or poltical bias - can be used, not just religion. You also ignore that kings and nations can be tyrants with just as many people dying for them as people do for religion. At that point, the “Self interest” moves to the organization.

Yes, slavery WAS highly effective at converting populations, but that’s not WHY people were enslaved. People were enslaved for one thing: Money. They came back later to justify it when people started going “Why, exactly, are we fucking over intelligent persons?”

People have justifications. For everything. And just because you end one justification doesn’t mean you end the excuse people make.

And those that hate religion hate it at the expense of recognizing what actually needs to change. The answer to hate is not more hate. The answer to anything wrong is not more wrong. The answer is to accept, love, and cherish - even if it costs your own life. To do otherwise perpetuates the cycle of hate. And when you teach children to hate, they hate something all of their lives. It doesn’t matter what that hate is toward.

12

Right, but on its own that doesn’t explain the hate. I’m right and y’all are profoundly, ridiculously, Kevin Spacey WROOONG about plenty of things. Such as whether the oeuvre of Stephanie Meyer is better thought of as the groundwork for a number of successful cinematic productions, or as an overpriced firelighter for example.

Yet I wouldn’t really go on a crusade or blow myself up over most, or any really, of these observed fundamental wrongnesses. I just act smug, and that seems to be enough.

13

I think it does though. Because religious viewpoints aren’t a matter of differing opinions and preferences. Somebody’s going to heaven. Someone’s going to hell. You can debate your friend about his musical tastes over a couple of beers and still leave the bar as friends because it’s just music, not anything actually important. But you can’t debate religion like that. Morality is tied up in that discussion. And for many people, morality is ultimately about who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell. The entire discussion guarantees that someone will leave with hurt feelings. Hurt often plants the seed for hate.

Also, vilifying of the other side is necessary to keep children from straying from the flock. It’s not enough to tell them that your side is “right”. You have to make them afraid of being “wrong”. Hate is an easy way to achieve this.

14

Sure, but why should you give a fat duck whether or not the other guy goes to hell or not ? You’ve got the Truth, the stupidhead won’t listen, fine, his crummy afterlife. Oh, how you’ll laugh thinking about him up in the bright place, when you get a break from the harp lessons !

But again, vilifying’s one thing ; coming to blows is another. I’ll vilify neo-nazis all day if I’ve got nothing else scheduled, but that doesn’t mean I might come over to their house and set it on fire. And that’s not even just because neo-nazis typically are violent people built like brick shithouses while I am a mere 100 pounds of cowardice.

15

They shouldn’t come together, not when the conservative side is so openly evil, incompetent and destructive. Not to mention factually wrong on all sorts of issues, and devoted to looking upon compromise on their side as evil, and on the other side as a weakness to exploit. You picked a really, really bad example for an issue that people should “come together on”.

This isn’t about people, this is about religion; religion isn’t a person.

It was one of the reasons for enslaving them.

Religion needs to be rendered irrelevant, sidelined and eventually destroyed. That’s what needs to change. That is after all a consistent part of human progress, moral and otherwise; until religion is removed from the equation, progress is usually far harder or outright impossible.

That’s just suicidal. Loving your enemies is just stupid, there’s nothing noble or moral about it. There are plenty of things in the world that deserve to be hated; there’s nothing inherently wrong with hatred. Hatred has done plenty of good throughout history; people hate injustice, they hate oppression, they hate disease, and they fight those things out of hatred and do good in the process. Hatred has done far more good for humanity than religion ever has - admittedly, a low standard to beat.

16

Actually, it’s not. If their counterparts hadn’t spent 30 years demonizing them and instead worked with them, do you think the party might not be beholden to it’s crazier side today? Hatred begets Hatred, trihs.

Religion is nothing without the people. The same as any other institution. Canada isn’t Canada without it’s people. If they were scrubbed of the earth tomorrow by the Aurora Borealis, it wouldn’t be what it is, today. It would simply be land.

It was one of the justifications used after slavery had already started. Remember to look before the future US began importing slaves. It was alive and well to other parts of the world and the justifications came after people started inquiring about why we needed forced labor back in Britain.

And once it’s destroyed, where will your eyes turn? A society based on aggression will turn on itself after it’s perceived enemies are gone. You can look at any empire established through bloodshed throughout history and see that it always ends the same.

The reason that we’ve had increasing peace isn’t because we developed weapons that can annihilate the world in a breath - it’s because we have started understanding that working together is more beneficial than ripping an outsider’s heart out in a fit of tribalism.

It’s not suicidal. Gandhi proved that. And history has proven that people live with injustice, oppression, disease, and they remain with it, even if they are “unhappy” or “actively hate the regime.” Why haven’t the North Koreans thrown off their generations of oppression? Why didn’t those southern American slaves slaughter their slave masters and had to be freed by sympathetic white men? Why didn’t those under Stalin’s horrendous atrocities rise up as a people and drown him like a dog? Why didn’t the serfs of medieval Europe destroy the nobility when they were crushed as fodder for farming and soldiering?

Because those that are oppressed don’t have a self interest in mind. If a farmer is to join a revolution, he needs appreciable gain. So do those in an industrial city. THAT is how those that would usurp the current regime flourish. They talk of the change and the betterment that can be had. In other words, they give self interest to their followers and their movement as a whole.

And that is how we act. That is what actually needs to change. Humans need to wake up and see humanity as a single tribe and as something to elevate, instead of their personal standing.

17

I realize that evangelicals are spreading rapidly in your country. Are you seeing things turn more intolerant than they were when there was universal Catholicism?

18

Trying to work with them is exactly what the Democrats have done far too often, and is part of the problem. The Republicans have learned that they don’t need to compromise; they just need to make demands and nine times out of ten the Democrats will give in.

And a virus is nothing without a cell; that doesn’t make the virus any less dangerous.

And what makes you assume that it takes bloodshed to destroy religion? Religion is in the process of dying over much of Europe, with no need for massacres. Better education is more dangerous to religion than any number of bullets; religion feeds on martyrdom, but reason and knowledge poisons it.

He was killed. So yes, suicidal.

Because they didn’t have the necessary power.

19

First, you see you are doing him a favor by forcibly converting him. An immoral person would let him burn, a moral one will make him be saved. He’ll thank you in the next life.
Second, if you think God favors the right religion, it is downright embarrassing for those in the wrong religion to have money and happiness. Easy to do something about that, especially if you are the majority.

20

That’s really only been true since GWB came to power. Before then, it was the Democrats that voted primarily in the 90% of party line segment. After GWB won the presidency, the Republicans shot off the chart in terms of number of party line voters and the Democrats crossed the party line more often in those early days of GW’s presidency. Now, half of both parties are party line voters.

They have left the traditional two-party model of trying to draft legislation that most politicians can at least get in line with and both have gone towards extremism with the fairly easy to predict result of very little getting accomplished at the federal level. Pretending that this is the fault of “Deals with the conservatives” is a very short range look at the situation.

So, should we attempt to eradicate the viruses from our environment? Viruses are, once again, only part of the problem. There’s also fungus, bacteria (some of which is beneficial) and other microorganisms that may or may not harm us. Should we go about eliminating each of these from earth to make sure we never get sick?

Of course not. The task is monumental and goes against our nature. We must change our nature and make ourselves resistant to bodily intruders. Much as we should change our nature about hate.

Destruction is violent. If I say a person’s death is agonizing and then later say “Oh, he didn’t suffer at all,” does that make sense? No. Words have meanings.

He was killed fifty years after his achievements for a different reason. But was his full life not worth what he accomplished for India?

And what power is needed for the Syrian rebels to fight the Assad regime? The rebels started with very little in the way of weapons and still did a lot of damage before they signed on with help from Iran and other groups that supplied them real weapons.

The reason they don’t revolt isn’t power. Look at the history of Chinese involvement in Korea and Vietnam. We had superior everything and couldn’t take those two countries because of sheer manpower. That’s what every oppressed people have over their oppressors. The oppressed often outnumber them thousands of times. They have the requisite power.

But they don’t have the interest to do so. They don’t know how they will make their own lives better by doing so.