Curious to see poll results - since most Dopers are from nations that are (on the surface) majority Christian or at least have a Christian heritage. (It can often lead to the opposite effect/perception)
“They’re all crap” would be how I sum up my point of view.
I don’t believe that any organized religion has it right. I was born and raised Catholic, so my only opinions are about Christianity. The pastors of my grade school and my high school both were molesters, that’s a fact. I remember some really nice nuns, and some old angry ones. What the church has done to cover up child abuse is reprehensible.
Other religions, I have no comment because I have no experience.
That’s a hard one for me. Most of the religious people I’ve talked to have been okay, but the radical religious (rah-rah) Christians are absolutely the pits. They know their religious beliefs are facts, and every one who doesn’t believe it is a child of the devil who is going to hell. Of course, you can live the worst life on the planet, and if you accept Jesus as your personal savior two seconds before you die, you’re in heaven. Go figure.
As I was raised in the US, I have an awareness of the history of Christianity from teachings in church and school. This leaves me with impressions of how Christianity has been behind centuries of what I consider bad behavior to others (conquest, war, subjugation, colonialism, genocide).
I am not aware of the same bad behavior in the name of any number of other world religions. However, admittedly, I have not studied history that has provided me with stories that would leave me with those impressions.
Of course, stories about Islam have been repeated in the West that intend to paint a picture of bad behavior. But the poll is limited in options of comparing Christianity to “Other”. So, when I lump Islam into “Other” along with Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, Judaism, etc., it is inaccurate to make a statement in the poll about “feelings” of “other religions” that covers all of these as one bucket.
I think religions bring a sense a of peace, structure, history and community to a lot of people and that is the good they do. Everything else is horrible and scary.
“I perceive Christianity in a more negative light than I perceive other religions”. Partly because it’s the one I have to put up with, and partly because even as religions go it’s especially unpleasant. It’s all about despair and hate and death, and the loathing of any form of happiness that doesn’t come from hurting or oppressing people.
Christianity is also the religion that has been most successful at exporting itself to new cultures and geographic areas and thus, in my estimation, has done the most harm.
Interesting. So far, 37% of the vote is “I view Christianity more negatively than I do other religions” and not a single vote so far has been for the positive option.
For those of you who voted ‘negative,’ do you think you would feel this way about most or any religion if it were the dominant one in the nation you grew up in (i.e,. if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, you’d feel negatively about Islam, or Hinduism if you grew up in India?)
I think some people are naturally disposed to set up their lives this way and would do so in the absence of religion. Similarly, there are a few people who need a rule book in order to behave themselves, and there are a handful of people who will do any atrocity as long as It Is Written down somewhere that the atrocity is ok–again, with or without religion as the support.
Philosophy is good because it makes you look at the actual world and learn something about it, and from there you can build a set of principles to help you interact with it. And because you’ve come to those conclusions through effort you are more likely to internalize and live by them.
Religion sucks because it’s a shortcut that just gives you answers without much exploration into why that is the answer. It gets really crazy when the answers you’re using were developed by stone-age people the ancient Greeks would have considered semi-literate and unsophisticated at best, and the ancient Greeks were some kooky folks in their own right.
Probably. The other religion I know best is Judaism and I have a pretty negative view of that one too (the religion, not the ethnic group)
I’m sure the more I was exposed to any religion, the more negatively I would feel about it. As a wise man once said “they’re all crap.”
I’m not sure, but I doubt it. In graduate school, I studied the spread of religion and growth of empires (whether and how they were connected). Christianity stands out for its aggression in using military power to spread, for its treatment of non-Christians, and for the general hypocrisy of its leaders vis-a-vis the tenets of the religion. I can point to other religions for some of these same faults, but Christianity leads the pack.
Yeah, kind of this. Contrary to the proverbial preference for the devil that you know, I think many of us have a special abhorrence for the nasty institutions we’re most familiar with.
Not that I haven’t had mutually respectful conversations with self-identifying Christians, including Polycarp on this board back in the day.
My intellectual take on the matter, as distinguished from gut-level reactions (as much as possible at any rate) is that any organized and codified religion is antithetical to everything spiritual in the same sense that euthanasia and taxidermy aren’t very compatible with life. To the extent that “spiritual” means anything that is actually genuinely worthwhile, it references a lot of processes that can’t be specified and written down in a book of truth nor spoken of authoritatively by someone that is defined as one who should be automatically believed, or represented by a clergy that is distinguished from the laity. Or that has an official orthodoxy in any shape way fashion or form. But having said that, the ills of Christianity could and can and do manifest in all the other orthodoxies and to that end they’re all bad news.
I myself am not an atheist. I use theistic language and do so non-cynically, non-sarcastically, to refer to aspects of experience I consider quite real. But all attempts to codify that have backfired spectacularly.
Christianity speaks more to me and my experiences but I don’t really see it as all that different from the other choices out there in general terms. All can be equally abused.
If this is your view of Christianity, it’s a pretty big straw man.
I’m a Christian and have read about other religions. I feel that people have acted extraordinarily positively and negatively based on their religion, in all religions. I don’t think Christianity is any different.
I think that the negative feelings are largely that we are familiar with Christianity and that it is still a cultural force. It’s also a ‘safe’ religion to bash since we consider ourselves culturally Christian, so anti-Christian language is tolerated and in many circles celebrated in ways that anti-other religious language would not be. We can talk about violent expansion of Christianity, but largely it hasn’t been particularly bad. Christianity via Rome became the dominant religion of Europe and as Europe expanded, it took religion with it. Sometimes that involved violence, but more frequently, it involved groups adopting Christianity to access European power. This isn’t to pretend that Christianity hasn’t had its bloody episodes, but it’s a 2000 year old religion that is followed by 1/3 of the world and the only part of the world that we actually learn about in history (We all know about the Crusades, but no one is particularly familiar with the Ikko-ikki rebellion.) so it’s not surprising that it has a bloody history. Pretty much every belief system does (including lack of belief-the Reign of Terror wasn’t called that because it was all about happiness and joy)
I think that we have to remember that religion is what created society. It solidified social bonds and allowed non-familial groupings to come together under a shared ethos. Looking at Gobekli Tepe, it is theorized that organized religion pre-dates agriculture and may in fact be the reason that we have agriculture and society as a whole. The history of humanity is the history of religion. It’s not surprising then that religion figures prominently in all of the atrocious crap that we do to each other, but nor should it be excluded from all of the awesome stuff we have done either. Christianity is no different other than it happens to be bigger and more traditionally held by the world’s dominant powers over the last half millennia.
I voted negative, but mainly because of the evangelical wing. There are plenty of good Christians out there.
All religions are based on irrationality. Some include some valid ethical teachings, but are ultimately grounded in fairy tales.
I voted negatively.
I’m an atheist, but my view of Christianity (and Islam) are worse than other religions due to the following rule: “thou shall have no other gods before me”. That creates a lot of religious intolerance, missionaries such as John Allen Chau, and historically resulted in numerous invasions, forced conversions, and massacres.
The schisms also resulted in lots of massacres, although I’m not entirely sure how that compares to certain other religions.
When I compare Christianity to, say, Japanese religions, there’s a huge difference in religious tolerance. In Japan, there are two main religions, Shinto and Buddhism. When Buddhism established itself in Japan, there was a civil war, so clearly the possibility of religious violence and intolerance were there, but afterward things calmed down. There’s nothing preventing an individual Japanese person from being Buddhist and Shinto simultaneously. There’s nothing preventing a Shinto shrine from being inside a Buddhist temple; clearly nobody is getting murdered over that. Conflicts revolved around influence (for instance, if a Shinto follower converted to Buddhism, and was still Shinto, they probably didn’t double their income, so they have to cut their funding to the Shinto shrine so they can fund the Buddhist temple).
I’ve never head of the following sort of thing happening in religions other than Christianity:
The various massacres of Jerusalem in the Crusades by Christians, against people who essentially practiced an earlier form of their religion. Did they forget that Jesus and the original apostles were Jewish?
Crusades to kill off the Cathars (a Christian group in southern France, we get the term “kill them all, let god sort them out” from that event).
The Massacre of the Huguenots (French protestants) by French authorities. There were several wars between Protestants and Catholics, typically in northern Europe, as well as the United Kingdom.
The expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain. Muslims were also expelled, but at least they had somewhere to go. When the Muslims ruled much of Spain, they treated Christians and Jews as second class citizens. The Christians and Jews had to pay extra taxes, but got to keep their churches and synagogues. When the Christians took over, they tore down mosques and later created the Inquisition, not to kill witches, but to punish any Jews or Muslims who pretended to convert to Christianity, which they had done to avoid persecution (we get words such as “converso”, which applied to “former” Jews and Muslims, and “crypto Jew” from events like this).
Count Emicho’s massacre of Jews on the way to the First Crusade. He didn’t even make it out of Europe to get to the Middle East. (On the positive side, the local bishops actually sheltered the Jews in churches. Unfortunately Emicho’s men broke in and massacred them anyway.) This link is how I first heard about this: Europe: The First Crusade - The People's Crusade - Extra History - #1 - YouTube
Anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, which killed around a million Jews, prior to the Communist takeover in World War I. (The Communists, not being religious, put a stop to this. They even “allowed” Jews to join the party, but they could not rise beyond a certain rank. It wasn’t a glass ceiling, since it wasn’t secret, at least not at first. This was anti-Semitism, but with no religious basis.)
Of course, this doesn’t apply to the vast majority of Christians living today. I used to go to church when I was younger, though, and heard many types of discrimination (mainly against women, by the time I started hearing about discrimination against gays and Muslims I had already left the church).
I have less knowledge about Islam, but just take a look at how some majority Muslim countries treat their female citizens, such as Saudi Arabia. They can drive now, but they must be accompanied by their husband or a male relative, which of course makes it difficult to escape the country. In Afghanistan, the Taliban prevented girls from being educated, and after they were defeated terrorists would sometimes throw acid on the faces of girls who dared to go to school. The Taliban rule had another nasty side effect: women could only get medical treatment from women, but there could be no female doctors without education. Many women died during childbirth, and presumably from other medical issues.
While Judaism is also a monotheistic religion, it generally keeps to itself. After the conquest of Canaan, the Jews generally made no attempt to conquer other people, convert other people, or impose their views on anyone else. When conquered, which happened frequently to the small area, they generally kept out of the way of the conquerors except when provoked… when they fought hard and, at the hands of the Romans, died hard. Even the settlements in modern Palestine seem more like “preventative colonization” (Macchiavelli talked about this, though not in the modern Israeli context) or spreading punishment too far rather than religious conflict (although of course many very religious Jews move into these settlements, giving some political support to these strategies).