Interesting that it’s only the last century that’s being used to determine the ills of religion being in a position to take lives and cause misery. Christianity and Islam, the divisions between them and amongst themselves and the drive to subjugate and convert or destroy across the world has cost the lives and livelihoods of untold masses. They’ve pretty much had it down pat for centuries and the true cost in human lives will probably never really be known.
All part of a plan we can’t understand, of course.
the KKK are also Christians. faith in the church has little to do with morality.
I don’t know if it’s made international news but over here in Canada there was a partnership going back to the 1800’s between the Catholic church and the goverment in regards to the First Nations (aboriginal) communities and their attempts to destroy them. forcibly removing children (with help from the RCMP!!!) from their homes and housing them in “residential schools” where the aboriginal children were beaten and tortured. this went on until the 1970s. Now they are using ground-penetrading radar to scour the grounds of these schools across the country and are finding thousands of unmarked graves.
Ok, a trite response by me, to relate this to the old footy, but I’d be careful about over egging the pudding here. What one student might report about what he got from the class that day isn’t exactly flat out incontestable evil.
If someone thinks that being disabled is some sort of punishment from God, they are misinformed and don’t understand Jesus’ teaching on this. For example, one time Jesus and his disciples came across a man who had been blind from birth. They asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind.” (John 9:2)
Jesus answered that neither the man or his parents had sinned. He was like this so that the works of God might be displayed in him.
I’ve seen evidence of the last sentence numerous times. Anecdotally I was waiting for a flight just the other day. There was a family sitting there waiting too. A mum and three kids. One of the kids, the youngest, clearly had some sort of learning difficulty, and seemed a little agitated, making a few gurgles and noises, looking around, standing up to go and see the first thing that caught his eye, and so on.
As I watched the family it was a beautiful thing to me to watch the two other siblings look after their younger brother, talking to him, guiding him, reassuring him, getting him his drink, and so on and so forth. I was struck by the love that was in the family.
Now OK, I was just passing through a busy airport, and I’m sure their life is hard, and I’m sure there are a lot of challenges and difficulties for them to overcome. But I’m not quite ready to say that seeing a child in such a condition was proof that God is evil or whatever. I saw something more than that, and it was quite beautiful.
The problem with sound bites is it can all be reduced to something shit! It’s a nuanced discussion.
I’m trying to tease out something more than the disability. And yes, I thought it was beautiful to see how the family interacted, and how the siblings cared for their younger brother.
So where’s god in this then? The architect of the disability or the organiser of the rest of the family showing love? You see the problem? You can’t attest one to him without the other.
Or just a family showing perfectly natural love, nurture and protection as you’d see in animals round the world every day.
The thinking is a little too straight line and boxed in here, in response to the family at the airport situation I described above,
I see a paradox. A difficult situation, a tough blow in life. No doubt about it. So is God evil because of that? No! Is God not powerful enough, because he didn’t stop the son being born that way? No!
My worldview on this situation allows for the possibility that God might have been doing something redemptive, and it was an example to me of something good about the human condition, even in the midst of extraordinary difficulty.
Not entirely. It is based upon a literal reading of the Hebrew text influenced in no small measure by the work of J.C.L Gibson, Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
may I recommend as additional viewing, a film by a Canadian artist named Gord Downie. He’s more famous for his music, but this is the legacy which I will always remember him for.
Have you not noticed though that on this forum, things don’t get blocked, discussions don’t get out of hand and the red type rarely turns up? Maybe we’re all just growing out, sorry, up, wrong thread
That is part of it - but there was a far more deep seated and personal reason why he expressed such hatred for Jews. Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting podcast about it - I will see if I can dig it out.and post a link .
I think a lot of different groups over the years have claimed to be doing their work under the banner of the church and god and Christianity - The KKK and Hitler have been mentioned above.
But only an idiot would link those groups with the teachings of Jesus.
The same can be said about radical islamists.
I’ve been to Islamic countries in the past and they seem to be a peaceful bunch at their core. It’s a bit ridiculous that when people think of Islam and of Muslims they think of the radical bunch more so than the peaceful bunch.
Wherever Hitler’s personal motivations against Jews came from might be interesting, but is somewhat irrelevant. The Holocaust was only possible because there was centuries of anti-semitism to build upon. And both the major churches in Germany certainly didn’t cover themselves in glory during those days, to put it mildly (individuals like e.g. Dietrich Bonhoeffer excluded).
