But if we are being reasonable, relgion has caused unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries. The Kardashians hardly tweak the needle in pain inflicted. It's not like people are going to war over them. I think some perspective is needed about what religion actually is at times. It isn't just sunday church with Grandma.
There are many different 'tribes', for want of a better name, be they based around religion, nationality, personality cults, even sport, they can be used for good and bad. But it's the leaders, the people, that make that decision.
After all, they may not have gone to war for a Karshadian, but they have for a Trump.
Of course a lot of people don't practice that so much now, there are a lot of passive religious people. But it's built into the fabric of the idea of religion I feel, which is worth criticizing.
You singling out religion is saying more about you than it says about religion and religious people.
I don't even need to squint my eyes too much to see how your description still applies to all types of different ideologies - Trotskyists, "being Woke" and Racial Supremacists are all examples that come to mind.
Perhaps my using the word "blame" in the grandparent wasn't very clear. I mean blame it specifically for the issues it specifically creates, and not just let it go blame-free because humans would have had wars anyway. Issues such as evangelism in African countries creating religious tensions that wouldn't otherwise exist.
To your more reasonable paragraph, of course it can apply to other ideologies. I am just pointing out that religion is quite a bit more organised than most ideologies, hence it's centuries of success. To be super duper clear, I said more organised than most, this doesn't mean I think other ideologies can't be organised in the same ways.
Wars and conflict arise whenever there is a dispute for resources and a power imbalance. You are basically claiming that the different nations and tribes would not get into conflict if it were not for religion? This reeks of "Noble Savage" fallacy.
Also, how many tensions were solved because of evangelism and a shift in cultural/moral values? Can you quantify those?
The issue with religious justification is it’s effectively random, the only thing you can say is practices that are counterproductive to propitiate a religion die out over time. IE the shakers prohibiting reproduction for everyone not just priests is probably why their not around anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers#Celibacy_and_children
> Plenty of purely religious wars have happened
I'd love to hear examples of those, but let's agree beforehand that a "purely religious war" would be one where there had no conflict over resources or ethnic-national divisions?
That said, your criteria represent an overly narrow view of history because most possible wars didn’t happen. You need to both gather people into a fighting force and then actually start fighting to have a war so while religion might be a pretext was also quite frequently the cause.
And of course religious violence was often at a much smaller scale than an overt war. Add up smaller conflicts all the way down to stoning someone specific and collectively you have an enormous death total across human history.
It didn't even take that long to see how religion is mostly a pretext for a war over resources.
> religious violence was often at a much smaller scale (...) collectively you have an enormous death total across human history.
The problem is with violence, not with religion. Lots of people have committed acts of violence due to road rage, their sports teams, jealousy of a love interest and (the internet's favorite) political arguments. To try to blame Religion over the enormous death total is as silly as blaming "Car-Based Transportation", "Football" and "Biology".
The context was: “Calling for a crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II planned the departure of the crusade for 15 August 1096. Nevertheless, a number of unexpected bands of peasants and low-ranking knights organized and set off for Jerusalem on their own.”
Of course this is based on history books written about the time period I haven’t read the associated primary sources. Also, there where a lot of crusades with something of a sliding scale for religious involvement vs other motivations.
> To try to blame Religion over the enormous death total is as silly as blaming "Car-Based Transportation", "Football" and "Biology".
Again human sacrifice, you can exclude plenty of deaths as ethic / religious conflict, but you can’t hit zero. Millions have been sacrificed due to religion not just ethnic conflict. Death or conversion is another thing that shows up regularly.
I'm not arguing that. My argument is mainly that we shouldn't be attributing to religion all the evil things that happened where religion was only a pretext.
The inquisition for example gets marginally worse treatment than it deserves. While they did torture many innocent people to death they were sometimes used by others as a means of murder. The death total wasn’t 10’s of millions either. Hell they even regularly let innocent people go
On the other hand some significantly underestimate these evils by insisting on hard evidence of each individual death. Which of course fails when paperwork was lost or was never created, people died from the torture before they could be burned etc.
As I've had to painstakingly clarify for you, just because I have commented on one thing, does not mean I am subtly making comments about other things. I am being very explicit, very clear. Please read my comments, because I'm not one to bury my lede.
A better way to approach this discussion may have been to ask me questions instead of just assuming answers. You could have asked, "Do you not believe they would have gone to war for other reasons?" to which I would have replied "Of course they likely would have! But it was over religion in this instance."
And as I've already put in another comment: it's not because religion was the justification for a conflict that we should attribute it to religion.
Many disputes and fights were had over beautiful women. Should we start claiming that women are a problem?
(They are also responsible for a large number of contemporary violations of human-rights and atrocities going on in the world)
If your point can be made by replacing "religion" with anything that can characterize a group or society, your point is not about religion. You are trying to make a particularization based on a generality.
That is not only a cheap rhetorical trick, it is also the kind of thing that leads to biases, prejudices and "othering", which ironically enough is one of the things that do lead to one of the most effective ways to lead people into polarization and conflicts based on segregation of individuals.
Your last paragraph is certainly true. In the end, how large are those groups compared to religious ones? Catholicism, a sect of Christianity, has 1.2 billion followers alone. Scale matters.
How many of those Christians are promoters of human-rights violations? How many self-professed Christians went on to support leaders that used religion to justify wars?
Now tell me how many people still support Communist/Socialist revolutions, even after seeing all this historical bloodbaths that they brought. How many people still praise Che Guevara even after they are made aware of how many people he killed in the name of "justice"? How many people still would support Mao? Pol Pot?
Any of the ones who put money in a collection plate to help fund the church. Those funds helped pay to cover up human rights abuses. Catholics still support the Vatican, where the leaders live and who were the ones sweeping things under the rug.
== Now tell me how many people still support Communist/Socialist revolutions, even after seeing all this historical bloodbaths that they brought.==
Talk about moving the goalposts. People still praise early Americans for their Revolution. How many did that kill? How many native Americans were slaughtered by the people we lionize?
You know communism and socialism are not the same thing even if you write them next to each other, right? Not to mention that all 1.2 billion Catholics follow the same religion, leadership, and structure. Politics don’t cross the same number of borders.
This game can be played all day. Which is likely what you want because it changes the subject off of religion.
> Those funds helped pay to cover up human rights abuses.
Possibly true. But the people donating money were not doing it with the intent of "let's help the child molesters go unpunished". On the other hand, I've heard/read from far too many socialists that they fully support Che's actions, or that "those bastards deserved to die."
We should be aware of our mind’s ability to play this trick. Have you analyzed if you might be falling into this trap? Who is it that I agree with, exactly? I don’t remember stating. It seems you have filled in your own details of who I am and what I believe with a nice straw man that you can attack.
Ironically, I’m struggling to think of a historical figure that was more socialist than Jesus.
== or that "those bastards deserved to die."==
And I’ve heard from plenty of “Christians” that the Crusades were justified, slavery wasn’t that bad, immigrants are rats, Manifest Destiny justifies Native American slaughter, and on and on.
Don't you see a difference at all?
The absurd things that I have heard Christians say (as a Christian myself) have been disproportionately directly from leaders in the Christian community (particularly, but not exclusively, the elites of the American Christian Right, some of whom are also significant figures in one of the remaining heirarchical churches in America.)
That includes the examples specifically cited by the poster upthread.
(There are, of course, other Christian leaders that disagree.)
When you say leadership are you referring to the leadership who abused small children (local level) or the leadership who covered it up (national/global level)?
The constant “whataboutism” towards socialism doesn’t answer any of those questions. Socialists aren’t a global society like Christians. They don’t have a universal set of instructions to run on (like the Bible). Giving money to a local “socialist” running for office doesn’t trickle up to a global socialist network like the church. You see the difference, no?
See comment in sibling thread.
> Socialists aren’t a global society like Christians.
Surely you are joking?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Forum
- http://www.internacionalsocialista.org/viewArticle.cfm?Artic...
May I also point out that the greatest schism in Communist groups is over Leninism/Trotskyism, and how their divergences come exactly from the fact that one of them believes that Communism can only be achieved when (what you call) Socialist practices are applied universally?
> set of instructions to run on (like the Bible).
I let the silly comment about "Jesus being a Socialist" slide, but if you see the Bible as a set of instructions I'd suggest you actually go learn more about Christian Theology and Philosophy before comparing all Christians to fundies.
Certainly the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule are instructions on how to live, right?
The Stalinist/Trotskyist split is a split within Leninist-derived Communism, and it hasn't been the “greatest schism” in that community since at.least the rise of Maoism; I’m not sure there are any Trotskyists left (in the US, leading ex-Trotskyists went on to form a significant part of the core of the neoconservative movement.) AFAICT, Leninist-derived Communism is all Stalinist “socialism in one state” now.
The biggest split in Communism (at least, the Marx-derived subset) seems between developed-capitalism first Marxists and Leninist-derived vanguardists, though the former subset is also less tied to old orthodoxy and so has mixed a lot with non-Marxist socialism and is less easy to draw a firm bubble around than the Leninist vanguardists.
I did have my share of discussions with Trotskyists, especially in Europe, so I wouldn't say only stalinists are left nowadays.
Religion has been used as a justification to cause unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries. Even if no religion existed, wars and conflict would still exist.
With the Kardashians and Gwyneth Paltrow as bad as it gets is news drama and vagina-scented candles rather than wars, creationism and women without reproductive rights
The problem is not what you believe in but how you do. Religion is by definition dogmatic and in a sociatal context very well suited to create/base a self image on. Its a nice layer 8 intrusion vector. To be fair, there can be dogmatic kardashian fans but its much more unlikely. Just consider the short news lifespan of this celeb world.
At one point there were over three million followers in the United States...those officially inducted or "baptized" through a program that closely resembles and is modelled after the "three degrees" of freemasonry. These people amount to a sleeper cell that will do exactly as they are told, immediately and without question.
It didn't start like this. The founder established the organization as a way to use Christianity to spread the tenents of freemasonry to the masses instead of just white males of means. His first successor was a drunken fundamentalist.
Gotta love America.
> Religion is by definition dogmatic
I'm not religious and I'm strongly in the science camp. But I don't pretend that my choice of worldview is not based on axioms that I myself cannot test.
This sceptical approach down to the core is fatal for religions, thus discouraged, thus dogmatic.
Science is hard to reproduce, true, but it is non the less encouraged.
> Aply the verification approach to religion and you will see many inconsistencies and contradictions.
Inconsistencies and contradictions are found as much in science as they are found in religion.
I dont think its "as much" but anyway, science works to resolve these tensions, regardles of personal believes. You had to reach for the edges of scientific progress to come up with these examples, whereas i was speaking of the foundation of religion.
Which I would sign, too.
(but probably not the specific truth, they found, I do not really know more of them, except that they were the base of Rudolf Steiners philosophy, I am not a huge fan of)
Religion lack that root, there is nothing but human culture in it, which is then mistaken for objective truth about environment.
I think if we weigh up the overall good vs bad of these two propositions, you might find that it's not as clear cut as you think.
If anyone is trying to distract us with cultural issues, it's probably our own ruling class.
I'm not denying the fact that Church DID in fact kill people thorough it's history, it's just many popular estimates are wildly inaccurate, and sometimes deliberately, to make Church look worse.
I'm not following, here. Do you not believe in the Kardashians?
There is something very wrong with the world. When you actually read the gospels, it is clear that Jesus was very much against violence and his main message was love, you can see it on every page, each allegory. Whatever happened in the institutional Christianity like Crusades was a sick invention of a human mind. I wonder what was going on in the heads of people who read the Gospels but decided to take their swords and kill others anyway. To me these are not Christians, only "people who call themselves Christians."
This distinction is crucial because the ST contains all sorts of atrocities. Modern Christians try to justify them by allegoric interpretations but the logic of this approach is very weak and basically indefensible. Whereas when you don't feel limited by the ST, things become much easier (and a bit more logical).
The "everyone is a sinner" part of it is not, though.
I would say it's better for people to believe in Jesus than the flat earth or that vaccines don't work or that the election was stolen from Trump. But these seem to be oddly linked; being an evangelical christian in the white American tradition seems to make people more susceptible to dangerous nonsense that has nothing to do with Christian doctrine.
But they attract one, don't they? And that's how MOST religions work.
The big Abrahamic religions are rare as religions go, because they insist that what you do should follow from what you believe.
Most religions are perfectly fine with it being the other way around. As long as you follow the customs that give a sense of community and meaning, you're given a lot of leeway in how you justify them - and that's how fandoms work too, including presumably the Kardashians fandom (which I'm happy to not be very familiar with).
Wiping out clean religion (or the sense that there is a father figure watching and judging you) seems to have had bad consequences wherever it has been tried. And it has come back with vengeance. Go to StPetersburg in Russia in a church on Sunday - all the churches are almost full to the brink.
By predominantly what you could call Trump/Brexit voters and babushkas over 60 years old?
That's taking it too far, for the sake of edginess. Trolls cynically employ outrage tactics for purposes unrelated to the audience's interest in the topic. That religions attract cynical power abusers, like any other large organization, is another matter, regardless of your stance on religion.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/03/dont-trust-that-face...