You don’t need to twist it. You just need to interpret it in a certain way, and pick the part of the scriptures that support your views, which is no different from what people forming non-heinous cults do. Neither is more ignorant or less valid. The Westboro baptist church, for instance, quotes many parts of the scriptures to show that god, in fact, often hates, and these quotes are perfectly correct. Most Christians just prefer to ignore them because they prefer to hear that god loves.
I see pretty much all religions, and “philosophies” in general, as the accepted substitute for thinking.
I prefer thinking. You tend to get better results.
He believed in something anyway, though not any religion that most of us have heard of. I guess we might call him a classical Deist, although it’s questionable how much he actually believed in some sort of Supreme Being and how much was a reaction against the excesses of the Cult of Reason as well as an acknowledgement that Religion cemented social bonds. As the Reign entered late 1793, I think there was a real fear of public backlash against deChristianization and Robespierre was desperate to replace it with something. The Cult of the Supreme Being was his attempt to give the people a religion, but not Christianity. There was also the political fights between Robespierre and the Hebertistes that almost certainly influenced his rhetoric at the time. Whether or not he actually believed it is a matter of debate. Regardless, most of the true excesses of the Reign were committed by devout atheists in the name of atheism, people like Billaud-Varenne, d’Herbois or Barere and that doesn’t even include the pre-Reign atrocities of Fouche.
Depends on why the deity wants the animal sacrifice. If it’s just cackling with glee over watching something die then that’s monstrous, but there’s evidence that the christian god likes animal sacrifices because it likes a good barbecue. If you’re a primitive tribe with a hilariously poor comprehension of what fire does, you could imagine that by burning the meat to a dry crisp you’re magically transporting the juicy steak’s essence to God’s platter. And as a guy who likes a good steak myself I can sort of understand the concept of bribing a god by offering him a tasty meal in exchange for a plentiful harvest.
Of course this focus on the tasty smell of sacrifices puts the whole Jesus thing in a rather…unfortunate light. Not that Jesus was burned; it seems clear that whoever decided that Jesus’s execution for disturbing the peace was a ‘sacrifice’ had completely forgotten why God was accepting sacrifices in the first place. (And/or were desperate to make their prospective messiah’s disqualification-by-death make some sort of sense in-mythos.)
Not immediately sure how to reply as a Christian myself. You could argue I view it more positively because I think it is true. But I don’t think of other religions on general as being negative in any way, and even particularly like some aspects of many.
I do have a problem with the trolling version of Satanism. I think trolling is wrong.
I notice a lot of dopers judge religions on history rather than beliefs. That idea had not occurred to me. But I don’t know enough about the history of most other religions, save for Scientology, which is definitely horrible because of it. But their actual beliefs are bad, too.
+1
I mean, I see why you’d think that was problematic, but what tells you more about a person: what they say, or what they do? Jesus was way cool and the world would be a better place if more people were like him. But considering the horrors perpetrated in his name, you kind of have to question the organizations dispensing his word. Over and over again, Religion has proven itself to be the ultimate bait and switch scam of humanity: Come and join/support us if you believe in X,Y, and Z; and then we’ll use that power to further agendas to persecute anyone who hasn’t joined the club. Personal spirituality and moral codes are fantastic. Religions exploit those things.
Bingo. I can claim to be a Christian and believe in a loving God, but if I’m generally an asshole, how meaningful are my beliefs?
I think with Christianity though, it’s not REALLY the history of Christianity that is problematic. It’s a 2000 year old institution that encompasses hundreds of cultures and spans every continent. It has a lot of history. Some quite good and some quite bad. Because though we don’t have the time, nor really the desire to delve too deeply into it, we tend to dwell on the more problematic parts of it. We also have a tendency to view the negatives of Christianity as a product of the system, but the positives as a product of the individual - and of course, such distinctions are meaningless. We are more than willing to blame Christendom for oppression of the Jews during the Inquisition (as well we should), but are less willing to give it credit for the Scientific Revolution or Human Rights. (We can watch below as people circle their identity wagons as they try to use apologetics to deny the influence of Christianity on whichever one of those things they find antithetical to their presupposed point of view.)
In Western culture, we have largely divided into two camps- Christian and secular. Our opinions on Christianity largely have little to do with history or beliefs or anything else other than which of those two camps we fall into. And that’s dangerous for both sides. A secularist that rejects Christianity out of hand is in danger of denying the foundations upon which modern secularity actually exists. Stephen Hopgood is one of the leading canaries of this danger. Christians that only see the positives of their belief system run the danger of not reforming their beliefs in the face of evidence and not dealing with their flaws.
What you are doing right here is called “poisoning the well.”
It’s only poisoning the well if the information presented is irrelevant. For instance, if I were to say “Convicted pedophile Bob will now tell us why he is a socialist.” When the information presented is relevant, it’s not poisoning the well. For instance, “Former Bush Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will now tell us why the Iraq War was good.”
In this case, my point is that the attitudes towards Christianity are a direct result of presuppositions and biases and I was already preparing people for the inevitable rebuttals about why their presupposition forces my statements to be wrong. Not all preemptive rhetorical attacks are poisoning the well, only those that are irrelevant. The real reason I posted it though was that I felt that it could easily change the subject to arguing about the Inquisition or the Scientific Revolution, rather than the real point that due to our presuppositions, we pick and choose what parts of those 2000 years worth of history we want to look at to confirm our biases.
It is definitely true that Christianity was involved with a lot of science in the west - though Islam was also, until early fundamentalists shut it down. It is hardly surprising since the Catholic clergy had the learning and the time to do science. However I am unaware of an official program of the church supporting natural philosophy back then. The Catholic Church does better today, it seems to me.
I have a book of scientific writings from Copernicus to 1800, and it is striking how mention of God and his glory diminish in the writings as time goes on.
Which church pushed human rights, exactly? Many clergypeople do, but often in defiance of their churches. Some churches do follow along as society moved to better rights, but few have pushed for it, and theocracies around the world are hardly exemplars of rights.
What do you mean “reject Christianity out of hand?” The most flaming secularist, like me, acknowledges Christianity’s existence and influence. Or are we supposed to say that it is at least a bit correct? I didn’t do that even when I believed in God.
I’m an atheist solely due to the lack of convincing evidence for any god and the fact that the world and universe makes a lot more sense without any gods. No problem of natural evil for me. No worries about unbaptized heathen babies for me either. The good and evil of organizations which are about believing in a deity are totally separate from the correctness of their belief. You can have a Star Wars fan club which breaks windows and a Star Wars fan club which runs a soup kitchen, but Star Wars is fiction in either case.
The Inquisition is relevant because it is a direct result of Christian beliefs. If one thinks a non-Christian is due for an eternity of torment, then forcibly converting that person is good for him. Right? Forcing him to send his children to Christian schools to be indoctrinated is good for them.
There are plenty of evils of the church, like indulgences, which come from individual greed and not Christianity, but let’s acknowledge the ones that are a result of doctrine.