@CuddleDuncan, think you described it very well. The great religions do not engender hatred, unfortunately their principles are not practiced well. 'There is just enough religion in the world, to make people hate each other and not enough to make them love each other' to quote Jonathon Swift who was already mentioned. Also, most of the greatest atrocities have been been committed by atheistic regimes, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong etc
@JinxedT
"The great religions do not engender hatred..."
/Laughs in Hebrew
The three different accounts of Pontius Pilate's role in condemning Jesus to die immediately springs to mind. In the earliest account, he's kinda wishy-washy about the whole affair. But he lets it happen anyways. In the second, later account, he's like "I ain't got nothing to do with this", and tells the Jewish leaders "his blood is on your hands". In the third account, he's like "these bloodthirsty Jews are SCREAMING for Jesus blood! What a bunch of horrible rapscallions. Awful, truly awful. I must let the Jewish elders do as they like, though it pains me."
What explains these shifts? It totally can't be early Christians using Jew-hating as a means of bonding. Nah.
@HogboblinZwei, you crack me up.
@JinxedT....
"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." —Adolf Hitler
"We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer. Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS." —Heinrich Himmler
"God with us," indeed. Very atheist!
@HogboblinZwei - Nonsense! They may not do it deliberately, but they most certainly do engender hatred.
The great religions all believe that their doctrine is true and correct. Ergo, the doctrines of all other religions must be false and incorrect. There will always be some ignorant people who hate to have their beliefs challenged. Therefore, they hate members of other religions, whose very beliefs challenge their own.
There are probably dozens, if not hundreds of religions, all of them who believe that they are the "One True Religion." The odds against any one of them being correct are quit low. Many of their members refuse to consider the possibility that their belief system could possibly be wrong. They hate anybody who even suggest that they're wrong.
Far more likely, is that they are all wrong.
@GreatHornedOwl
Psh, nah. All great religions are about peace and love. And if I should deign to accept historical evidence to the contrary, well, then those specific religions aren't great...and the bad people simply got it all wrong.
No true Scotsman and moving the goal posts?
Man, I'm great.
@DaringSprinter - 👍
People hate regardless of religion. Atheist ideologies in 20th century - Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others - responsible for well over a hundred million deaths.
Complain all you want about hatred. Hatred and its opposite start with yourself and your own heart. I know the moderators don't like Bible quotes here, but since religion is being discussed here are some:
Leviticus 19:18 Matthew: 5:44 Matthew: 22:37-39 Luke 6:27-31 John 13:34-35 John 15:12 Romans 12:9-21 Romans 13:9 1 Corinthians 13 1 Corinthians 16:14 Galatians 6:14 Ephesians 4:29-5:5 James 2:8 1 John 4:16 1 John 4:7-21
@snugbuddy: You can reduce the likelihood of bothering people by putting >! in front of each of those references to the Christian holy book. Spoilers can be helpful in situations like this.
And why do so many people think the army using "Gott mit uns" as a motto was atheist? Baffling. To quote Hitler again:
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders."
Ooh! And if we're doing Bible quotes:
"So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him ... 'You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.'"
The contents of those quotes will bother people?
@snugbuddy: The long list of religious references may. You know people don't like long posts—much more so when they're preachy. "Read my holy book!"
I’m bored by the debate about religion (people don’t generally change their minds unless they already suspect they’re wrong so it seems pointless to debate) but I just noticed the OP got banned. That’s really odd. Did I miss something?
@Syins: Apparently she's a transphobic troll who's been banned before! The mods are on it around here. It's pretty awesome.
@DaringSprinter My post is short compared to many long multi paragraph posts on this forum. I don't preach but when people are equating religion with hatred it's only fair to be able to give examples countering that.
@snugbuddy: If anybody said religion = hatred, they'd be wrong. I don't remember anybody here making that claim, though. Religion can certainly make it easier to hate—even to kill members of your own family, depending on the beliefs—but it's certainly not 100% terrible, no good stuff in it anywhere.
@FunCartel: Ha. Yeah.
"Not 100% shit" is no reason to go mudlarking, in my opinion. Lot of jewelry in sewers, probably....
@snugbuddy If anybody here said that religion equals hatred, then I missed it. Religion most certainly is not equal to hatred. Equally certain, is that religion as the cause of a great deal of hatred.
Coughing is a side effect of some drugs. That doesn't mean that all people who take those drugs cough. Nor does it mean that everybody who coughs takes those drugs. What I said is that hatred is a side effect of religion. that does not mean that all religious people hate. Nor does it mean that all people who hat are religious.
The bottom line, is that if man had not invented religion, there would be a lot less hatred in the world.
@GreatHornedOwl like I posted atheists in the 20th century alone were responsible for more deaths than all the religious wars combined throughout the millennia. People are going to hate and go to war out of greed or the desire for power and resources whether it's by exploiting religion or an atheist ideology. If religion or God didn't exist people would find plenty other reasons for hatred and war.
@snugbuddy
I'm curious: what's an atheist ideology? Which atheist ideologies directly caused the deaths of many, many people? And, furthermore, did those responsible for the massive amounts of death say that it was because of their atheism?
Here I thought that atheism just entailed a lack of belief in God(s). I guess there's symbolic Satanism, but I don't recall any symbolic Satanists killing loads of people. And I don't believe any of their texts command them to kill others.
The "atheists did bad things too" argument is blatant whataboutism. It's weak. It's boring.
Also: gonna need a source for your claim regarding death tolls.
I already posted it: "People hate regardless of religion. Atheist ideologies in 20th century - Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others - responsible for well over a hundred million deaths."
You can research if you want the breakdown of each tyrant and country.
@GreatHornedOwl You win this thread, hands down!
The Nazi party really leaned heavily on Catholicism for being based on an atheist ideology. Weird.
And Stalin? All that he did was because of atheism. He wasn't interested in political power or anything. Same with the others.
Ha. Haha.
Do you have like...anything substantial to support your claims? Or do you just have whataboutism?
Considering the Nazis went after Catholics as well as Jews it's difficult to tie it with Catholicism or any religion regardless of any cherry picked quotes. And I said atheist ideologies which is what Communism is, based on Marx who hated religion. The Communists also persecuted religions.
And it's not whataboutism to bring up the massive amount of non religious hatred, tyranny and war when people are posting that without religion there would be much less hatred.
One more thing instead of asking me to provide all this information do your own research. This is a message board not an academic paper or book in which sources need to be sited, and the only reason I keep posting is because people keep quoting and de-bait-ing me.
Can we equate the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with 9/11? Both were destructions of urban centers perpetuated by people or a deity who shall not be named who reasoned the behavior of a group of people didn’t square with their religious beliefs, so said centers were destroyed. Nothing like genocide as indoctrination.
I'm glad this thread is still open!!
I wonder if we all may have learned our world history at different times (either decades/places taught and/or our varying ages when exposed to content). And through whose filtered lense did we aquired our information/"facts"??
And what do all those differences (if they exist) contribute to how we each go about processing and understanding the past, now that we're on our own with it??
@quixotic_life
wonder if we all may have learned our world history at different times (either decades/places taught and/or our varying ages when exposed to content). And through whose filtered lense did we aquired our information/"facts"??
Fun and interesting thing to think about, and reckon that it's true that we're going to learn about the same topics differently based on all those varied factors and more. The context the information is provided in, the experiences we have that we compare them to based on when we learn them, the views of the people who teach them to us, what relevant information was included or discarded, etc.
Think history is a bit of a tricky one with some aspects of it especially historical figures because while we can say certain things are objective EG the date and location of a battle, why the battle was fought may not be as clear cut.
We may know that a speech was said by someone at a particular location, but there might be differing opinions on what the speech is really about or what influenced it. And that kind of thing applies to all sorts of stuff with history. I learnt recently that we found out that the pope at the time of the Irish Potato Famine did some secret stuff (I don't remember what it actually was lol) involving politics around the famine and that we only learned about it in the last couple of decades based on a letter that got found. Nearly two centuries of people learning about it, missing some potentially key context.
Learned about the famine at secondary school, and had 0 idea about that. I also had 0 idea that it wasn't actually a famine, as a famine is when there's a scarcity of food. But there was plenty of food in Ireland at the time, the problem was that they had to export most of it to be able to keep their land as that's how farmers paid for it.
Assume most people who learned about it were taught the same way. Maybe because it was simpler? maybe because it was biased? maybe because it was based on older information? maybe the teacher had been taught differently? who can say. But presumably there were also other people who were taught it differently, given different context, different ideas, and who came to different conclusions about it.
If you are open minded you are always relearning history as the monolithic voices who wrote the histories of the past—patriarchal constructs that were primarily white, Protestant or Catholic—make room for the marginalized voices. The truths they tell rarely square with the established status quo. History is about power because the powerful write the history, and we are in an interesting time where academia has become more inclusive and varied partially because it becomes more difficult to censor voices in the Information Age. The narrative is no longer owned by a single group despite the dismay of said group.
And we still have a long ways to go.
Yes history is a lot of interpretation. But that doesn't mean all interpretations are equally valid. Facts, scholarship, and context still matter or at least should matter. Just because certain groups were marginalized it doesn't exempt historians in those groups from serious scholarship if they want to have any credibility with scholars who are meticulous in their research and theory development. Also the dominant narrative by one group should not be replaced by the dominant narrative of another group. To view history (or anything) through one narrow lens and to fit the facts to suit a narrow narrative is not serious history. It's more pushing an agenda.
@snugbuddy > it's only fair to be able to give examples countering that
But you didn't do that. You listed a bunch of Bible verses that people would have to go look up. It seems unlikely that they will do so.
I say this as a Jesus follower. God does not need us to defend him or the church or the Bible. Instead, he needs his children to simply love people. If we did more of that, our faith would be as attractive as Jesus was.
@GreatHornedOwl, idk...I think humans are pretty good at dividing ourselves and setting our various groups against one another. If it wasn't religion, it would be, and often has been, something else. Racism, fighting over resources, nationalism, etc.
@Cuddle_RN said "I say this as a Jesus follower. God does not need us to defend him or the church or the Bible. Instead, he needs his children to simply love people. If we did more of that, our faith would be as attractive as Jesus was."
Every verse I listed deals with that to try to counter the focus on religious hatred in this thread. If people want to look them up that's their choice. I don't think it's either/or. The goal you mention can be accomplished both by example and scripture.