The Religion of Blood

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/satpal-singh/the-religion-of-blood_b_6408352.html

Satpal Singh
Former Chairperson, World Sikh Council - America Region

Posted: 01/07/2015 5:56 pm EST Updated: 01/07/2015 5:59 pm EST


AFP

The year 2014, like many of its predecessors, has left us with a warning. A major premise that has often dictated human behavior over centuries is wrong. Deadly wrong.

We live in a world where schoolgirls are kidnapped and sold into slavery, and school children are massacred in large numbers. We live in an era where young children, who can't even comprehend what is being done to them and why, are subjected to horrific torture, and infants who have barely learned to walk are so mutilated that one cannot sleep after seeing pictures of them. We are numbed by heart-rending pleas: "If you know where we are please bomb us... There is no life after this... I've been raped 30 times and it's not even lunchtime... I can't go to the toilet... Please bomb us." And we live in an era where we helplessly watch "...gun-wielding militants firing on cars of screaming children, tens of thousands of people trapped on a mountain, mothers keeping dehydrated babies alive with their own saliva."

While a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center reported a six-year high in religious violence across the world, what we have experienced in the recent years is not unique to this period. For centuries, our timeline has been pockmarked by one series of inexpressible horrors after another, including full-scale genocides and ethnic cleansings. Every few years, we run out of adjectives describing our red-hot outrage, but then quickly reset our sensibility thermometers to normalcy once the dead have been buried, the injured have disappeared from our radar, and we have purged our conscious of forever-festering psychological wounds of millions.

Our life returns to normal. Once again.

more at link

[trotsky]

1. He had me until this:

"We must recognize that such mind-numbing barbarity has nothing to do with God. No god would ever look kindly to such barbarity, much less encourage it or condone it."

More whitewashing of the role of religion. There are stories in the bible, that MILLIONS of people believe are literally true, where Yahweh didn't just encourage or condone brutal violence, but commanded it. Denying this reality, and denying that many believers have no problem whatsoever reconciling their notion of god with unspeakable violence, is keeping us from truly dealing with this problem.

[COLGATE4]

2. +1

[rug]

3. If that view is true, why on earth would God command it?

If the answer is, there is no God to command it, then indeed God has nothing to do with it. Look to your fellow humans and political players.

[okasha]

4. You're being rational about it, rug.

That's not wanted.

[rug]

5. My cognitive dissonance must be acting up.

[Humanist_Activist]

6. You do realize that is looking at it from a secular viewpoint?

The Bible is a collection of books and writings that are part history, part myth, and also part political and religious treatise. To believers in that book, for example Justin, who believes the story of Exodus is true, then God is a real being who ordered the slaughter of the first born of Egypt, a monstrous act.

Your point would make sense if NO ONE believed the bible was more than I laid out above, but that is simply not true.

[rug]

8. You do realize blaming a nonexistent entity for what goes on in the world is rather silly?

And it's true even if people believe every dot and tittle in the Bible.

The inescapable answer to "Whence evil?" is clear. It's us.

If you successfully deconvert every believer on earth, the answer is the same.

If all religion withers, turns to ash, and wafts away, the answer is the same.

The only question remaining is what noun to use to replace the subject in "Religion poisons everything."

[Fumesucker]

9. If there is indeed an omnipotent and omniscient creator then every act of humans belongs to it

We were created with both good and bad evidently, if that assumption is true and since we had no hand in our own creation then neither the good nor the bad are on us but but rather on that hypothetical omniscient and omnipotent creator.

The existence of an omniscient and omnipotent creator makes a mockery of the very idea of "free will".

[rug]

10. Yes, but that's another subject.

[Fumesucker]

11. Opinions differ

I think it's entirely germane to the discussion.

[Humanist_Activist]

13. It doesn't matter if the entity exists, his followers follow the examples written in the Bible

and Quran, the God of those books is not a good being, and that's putting it lightly.

The problem isn't that evil people exist, as you said, they always existed, the problem is that, given the power of faith and belief over people's lives, you can have otherwise good people do horrendous things in the name of religion. I would say this is almost unique to religion, it helps when the religions in question devalue human lives and exalt the afterlife.

[rug]

14. I disagree.

The mass indoctrination and support for militarism and armed interventions around the world causes otherwise decent people to countenance the most horrendous and brutal war crimes. All in the name of patriotism.

[Humanist_Activist]

15. And thats an argument against patriotism, nationalism's little brother. n/t

[AtheistCrusader]

12. Obviously there's no god to command it, but if there was

It'd be one seriously sadistic asshole, and in self defense, we should invest resources in figuring out some way to destroy it.

Fortunately, that's not a problem. From an engineering perspective, killing a supernatural, omniscient and omnipotent being presents a number of unique challenges.

[Humanist_Activist]

7. The problem is the levels of religiousity, I don't like using fundamentalism to describe it...

it doesn't quite cut it. Radicalism also has issues, being it can be confusing political and other ideological issues in with religious ones.

The problem is that there seems to be a strong negative correlation between levels of religiousity and how much value people place on human life. You see this here with more church going Christians people being more supportive of torture and the death penalty, and you see it among Muslims elsewhere, who are more supportive of the death penalty, torture, etc. Even Jews in Israel follow this pattern, the more Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic they are, the more likely they will buy in to the whole settlement culture and support, along with supporting harsher treatment of Palestinians and non-conforming Jews.

And don't think we should leave out the Buddhist and Hindu religious extremists as well, both in Sri Lanka and India, who target religious minorities with goals of cleansing their nations of them, or reducing their influence.

I do note one interesting point of data though, in most of these cases, the religious people in question are able to see themselves as the majority and/or having a type of societal or government support or acknowledgement. This appears to embolden them.

Obviously, this is about the religions, not the denominations within them, no Christian denomination is a majority in the U.S. but Christianity itself is.