Interesting. What are your thoughts of the actions of the British Empire and the Spanish in particular across the colonies that they established in bringing the Lord to the world. I could go back through history… so many things in the name of the Lord or Islam (and other deities). All… peace loving religions, no? Yet horrors committed on an industrial scale. Can somebody say the The Sack of Constantinople and give me a Hallelujah! Oh wait, it happened 800 years ago so it doesn’t matter. But the Books are 2000 years old and more and they do…
People have been doing horrible things in the name of their God or gods for millennia and they will seemingly continue to do so until we destroy our little blue marble that doesn’t seem to matter to us as much as our ideology does. If a group come ups, identifies with a religion and starts doing stuff in the name of that religion then thats how they are defined because they have their own interpretation of it. So, nobody is an idiot.
With regard to empire stuff above, conquests etc. we need to recognize that geopolitics has often intertwined with religion throughout history.
People can be evil, greedy, and so on and so forth. They have been conquering each other throughout history. Sometimes religion has been misapplied to achieve bad ends.
But it’s not a good or true example of what Christianity looks like, any more than Stalin killing 9 million is a good example of what atheism might look like.
The problem with holy books, and the bible is no exception, is that you can generally make them mean whatever you want them to mean. There is no definitive interpretation.
It’s slightly different when it’s the founder of the religion, the prophet of the religion and the person whose teaching the religion is built around…. Compare to some wanker with a moustache who decides he wants to kill a load of Jews. Homosexuals and anybody else he decides he doesn’t like. The same can be said for a bunch of wankers in white hoods who want to hang and kill people just because they look different
I’ve already put a summary of some of the bad shit that Jesus is responsible for in this thread. It wasn’t all love thy neighbour.
Westborough Baptist Churcha good example. This frightful, bigoted bunch of backwards inbreds claim to be led by the bible, and the problem is that their nasty take on it is not an unreasonable interpretation.
Religion is on the wane in the west. Increasingly society is putting religious adherence and participation in the past. It’s a simple fact to say that the vast majority of people, say in England, are irreligious these days.
So two things:
The majority of crime, atrocity, etc. is committed by the irreligious. Simple statistics.
If having no religion is the enlightened path to peace and harmony and so on, why, in the light of religion being on the wane for several generations, are things in such a mess?
If Westboro were a reasonable representation of the Christian faith, most churches and believers would be like that.
They are an extreme outlier, thankfully, though obviously in discussions like this they keep coming up when people want to argue against religious belief.
Of which there are plenty, no doubt about that. In short, there is no end of fuckwittery. That does not condone the states where religion was/is intertwined with religion of the acts of extreme violence causing death, destruction and untold suffering in the name of their all powerful and unfortunately over the years the effects of Christianity and Islam across the world has been far more damaging than any other. There is simply no getting around it no matter how much you defend it or say that it has been misapplied and peaceful. The bald facts and history speaks for itself; the Church and Islam are drenched in and have been enriched by blood.
Not sure where you get your statistics, but certainly most terrorism seems to be committed by religious people of one sort or another.
As has been mentioned before, there have been multiple crimes and atrocities throughout history committed by religious people often in the name of their religion.
There is no evidence that I can see that religious people are any more moral than those who do not follow an organised religion.
