S
sedonaman
Guest
Define “a lot” and see my post #54 on page 4 of this thread] and prove your claim.
How to defend against the argument 'religion is the cause of wars'
- Status
C
Contarini
Guest
They aren’t in accord with what you or I consider to be a correct understanding of Christianity. But in a historically observable sense, they clearly are Christian. It is sheer special pleading to argue that any bad thing done by any Christian must be motivated by something other than the Christian’s Christianity. The evidence is solidly against you there.
Sorry, but I can and must. You are picking out one theme in Christianity. But there are others. “Compel them to come in,” for instance, or the way the Torah was enforced in the OT, which has not historically seemed as irrelevant to Christians as many modern Christians would claim. The task of balancing these different emphases within the tradition is a complex one, and people in the past often did so in ways that rightly horrify us today. When Ambrose protested against Theodosius rebuilding a synagogue that had been destroyed by a Christian mob, there is every reason to think that he was motivated by a sincere attachment to the Christian Faith. When medieval clergy told a Jew hiding in the cathedral that they could not protect him from the anti-Jewish mob outside unless he accepted baptism, and when a Christian court later found that this did not constitute “forced baptism,” they appear to have been acting out of zeal for the Christian Faith. You can claim otherwise, sure. And Muslims can claim that Osama bin Laden isn’t really acting out of zeal for Islam. But these claims don’t carry any weight, because they seem to have nothing behind them but the earnest desire that things should be that way.
In Stalin’s case, yes. But there were plenty of atrocities committed earlier by sincere zealots.
But you see, that’s the catch. It amounts to saying that only modern Westerners have figured out how to practice Christianity properly, which actually feeds into the “religion causes wars” narrative, because only after fierce religious warfare did Westerners adopt this “proper practice” as part of secularization.
Historically, Christians have generally thought that the acceptance of Christ’s rule did involve some limitation on the rights of non-Christians. Show me one single Christian country where full equality and freedom were granted to non-Christians and/or heretics without some kind of constraining political considerations being at work.
Edwin
S
sedonaman
Guest
Good essay. It points to a problem those will have when reviewing my reference hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM and sorting out religious from non-religious wars.
Cavanaugh’s observation might possibly be summarized by, “Religion is the major cause of war, and if you don’t believe it, I’ll beat you to a pulp.”
From the essay:
My son goes to the University of Michigan, and he told me that a UofM student wouldn’t dare wear his school shirt in Columbus, OH, for fear of being beaten up by rival Ohio State fans. I assume the same fate would befall an Ohio State student in Ann Arbor.
It would seem that the claim is made by those who just hate religion. I know someone personally who makes no bones about his dislike for religion and claims, “More people have been killed in the name of God than anything else.”
One thing the essay demonstrates, perhaps unintentionally, is the use of enlightened reason has its limits when it comes to understanding the world .
Bottom line conclusion: people are just no damned good.
M
mdrummer5
Guest
There’s an episode of South Park that sums up the reality behind this theory, I just watched it the other day and it reminded me of this thread. Since I’m sure most here won’t go anywhere near that show I’ll sum it up.
One of the characters ends up in the future to find that everyone is Atheist after someone from his time “educates” everyone on science and explains that things would be better without religion due to the fact that nobody would disagree anymore. The Atheists end up at war with one another. You find out at the end of the episode that they are simply fighting over what to be called… Allied Atheist Alliance, United Atheist Alliance or Unified Atheist League.
Sure it’s an exaggeration but it shows the flaw in the argument posed in this thread. If it weren’t religion mankind would find SOMETHING to fight about. So again, religion does not cause war… mankind does.
One of the characters ends up in the future to find that everyone is Atheist after someone from his time “educates” everyone on science and explains that things would be better without religion due to the fact that nobody would disagree anymore. The Atheists end up at war with one another. You find out at the end of the episode that they are simply fighting over what to be called… Allied Atheist Alliance, United Atheist Alliance or Unified Atheist League.
Sure it’s an exaggeration but it shows the flaw in the argument posed in this thread. If it weren’t religion mankind would find SOMETHING to fight about. So again, religion does not cause war… mankind does.
S
sedonaman
Guest
Sounds like a take-off of the story of the war between the “Big-Enders” and “Little-Enders” in Gulliver’s Travels.
M
mdrummer5
Guest
Very well could be… I’ve never seen it so I’m not sure.
S
sedonaman
Guest
I’m not sure it was in any of the movies, but in the book, Gulliver encountered two islands that were at war with each other over whether a soft-boiled egg should be opened on the big end or the little end.
R
Ranklyfrank
Guest
Starting with post # 83, it appears to me that “religion” could be abstracted as a subset of “faith,” that including the football example, e.g. where each side prays for strength from God to defeat the “enemy.” But what all that brings to mind for me is the idea that faith of whatever kind, political, familial, ontological, is all to a degree parochial and learned as a socialization to one’s immediate group. Now that group can and usually does grow from one’s self to family, and thence to church, city, team, state, nation, etc. So we might say that a direction away from personal ego can be established as a sign of personal maturity as one incorporates and transcends ever larger senses of identity at succeeding fulcrums in one’s life. Certainly the highest of these might be the Identification of one’s Self with or as a “child of God” in a sense of incorporating in the sense of self an unconditional but practical love for existence and its contents.
So there is a kind of dialectic we might look at here. Thesis: I love my UofM team! Antithesis: Beat Ohio State! Synthesis: I love football. So “football” transcends yet incorporates teams. So if that could be taken as a model of “faith” of various sorts, both the causes and solutions of conflicts can be seen in identifying with a parochial paradigm, abstracting a more universal commonality and re-identifying with that.
So jumping way ahead, what is the most fundamental commonality amongst men, and how can our parochial paradigm relative to that be transcended and incorporated in that more or most Universal one?
So there is a kind of dialectic we might look at here. Thesis: I love my UofM team! Antithesis: Beat Ohio State! Synthesis: I love football. So “football” transcends yet incorporates teams. So if that could be taken as a model of “faith” of various sorts, both the causes and solutions of conflicts can be seen in identifying with a parochial paradigm, abstracting a more universal commonality and re-identifying with that.
So jumping way ahead, what is the most fundamental commonality amongst men, and how can our parochial paradigm relative to that be transcended and incorporated in that more or most Universal one?
S
sedonaman
Guest
Christianity attempts to see this fundamental commonality through the belief that all men are created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore are recognized that at one level, we are all the same. [Unless I misunderstand the question.]
R
Ranklyfrank
Guest
No, that’s good. So now, if Christianity is one of the teams, how is it included and transcended? What is yet a more Universal factor?
S
sedonaman
Guest
Everyone has God-given free will to accept or reject Him. [Again, unless I misunderstand the question.]
K
KathleenGee
Guest
I bring up this topic about the Franciscans because of the remarks made to it in this thread.
In times past, the colonial era missionaries baptized people before they were well catechized. In modern times, there is great effort among professional missionaries in the Church to always reflect on the tension of helping people in their native cultures but not imposing on them ways that cannot be adopted or supported by them. There is also great work in preparing native people for baptism. And now our greatest vocations are coming from Africa and countries south of the America border.
Before I go on, I made a brief reference about pueblo buildings…These were common buildings found throughout parts of Arizona and New Mexico. There are common references to the mistreatment of native Indian people by the Franciscans imposed on them.
Considering the structures of these buildings, I would think that it required slave-like labor to build them.
And they were built as such to protect the native Indians, not from the Franciscan friars or the Spanish explorers but against native, nomadic Indian tribes who were their enemies.
I spoke to a Dominican priest years ago about the concerns people had about making Fra Francisco Sierra a saint considering he treated Indians. The priest answered you have to look at the context of one’s time. He did not excuse the behavior either.
I worked in SE Africa with Franciscan friars who built churches, mission houses, schools, and infirmaries all for the welfare of the native people, the missionaries themselves living austere lives…but totally for the native people.
And I assume that any past missionary friar who lay down his life for Christ had the same motivating factor.
Spain’s history is quite unusual compared to other European countries. I read a book recently on the history of the Murranos…These were Jews who outwardly appeared to convert to Catholicism to avoid being expelled. When they described the conditions they lived under the Spanish Catholics, the Catholics in those times sounded very similar in how the Muslims treated them.
The Catholics defended the misuse of the Eucharist. Mistreating the Eucharist or receiving without faith by those who knowing receive it…are committing a sacrilege.
There are those like this woman who was Jewish in her inner identity who became a convert to Catholicism in her early years, and admitted she instantly experienced joy and love upon reception of the Eucharist. Here is a person who is acknowledging the good effects of the Eucharist. Not like those who receive with deliberate unbelief and contempt. The Eucharist is God’s presence to us just as the chamber of the sanctuary of Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple was sacred to them.
Spain was enslaved under dhimmitude. Slavery was a way of life in times past; some times to pay back a debt, one was under another’s employ as a possession until the debt was repaid. The American Indians enslaved other Indians. So when I read how the Spaniards were treating the Jews, so much of the behavior was paranoid like and it reflected the same behavior I had read of the Muslims who treated people as second class citizens in Catholic Spain. My teacher in high school was an atheist; but he admitted there are those countries who take were abused and then take on the role of the abuser. I see Spain like that.
I was studying some different takes on the history of the Franciscans…one I came to is scholastic. Its secular and education viewpoint is totally devoid of the motivation and intent of Franciscan missionaries of those time…www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5032
I went to another popular site, //en.wikipedia.org/spanish-missions_in-California
Here is one that has depth of understanding of what motivated the Franciscan friars of those times that covered Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the priests who truly made an effect on the Indian people…commenting on the care and protection the Franciscans had for Indian women (who later died in a measles epidemic),
www.texasalmanac.com/topics/history/franciscan-missionaries-texas-1690-0
And then here is an overview of the Catholic take on the history of the missionaries in the SW USA, www.olgofm.org/index.php?option=com_content&view-article&id=50&I=emid=58&showall=1.
I think all these articles reflect the overall good will of the Spanish Franciscan friars of time past. They explain various reasons why these missions failed and others who were successful and why.
In times past, the colonial era missionaries baptized people before they were well catechized. In modern times, there is great effort among professional missionaries in the Church to always reflect on the tension of helping people in their native cultures but not imposing on them ways that cannot be adopted or supported by them. There is also great work in preparing native people for baptism. And now our greatest vocations are coming from Africa and countries south of the America border.
Before I go on, I made a brief reference about pueblo buildings…These were common buildings found throughout parts of Arizona and New Mexico. There are common references to the mistreatment of native Indian people by the Franciscans imposed on them.
Considering the structures of these buildings, I would think that it required slave-like labor to build them.
And they were built as such to protect the native Indians, not from the Franciscan friars or the Spanish explorers but against native, nomadic Indian tribes who were their enemies.
I spoke to a Dominican priest years ago about the concerns people had about making Fra Francisco Sierra a saint considering he treated Indians. The priest answered you have to look at the context of one’s time. He did not excuse the behavior either.
I worked in SE Africa with Franciscan friars who built churches, mission houses, schools, and infirmaries all for the welfare of the native people, the missionaries themselves living austere lives…but totally for the native people.
And I assume that any past missionary friar who lay down his life for Christ had the same motivating factor.
Spain’s history is quite unusual compared to other European countries. I read a book recently on the history of the Murranos…These were Jews who outwardly appeared to convert to Catholicism to avoid being expelled. When they described the conditions they lived under the Spanish Catholics, the Catholics in those times sounded very similar in how the Muslims treated them.
The Catholics defended the misuse of the Eucharist. Mistreating the Eucharist or receiving without faith by those who knowing receive it…are committing a sacrilege.
There are those like this woman who was Jewish in her inner identity who became a convert to Catholicism in her early years, and admitted she instantly experienced joy and love upon reception of the Eucharist. Here is a person who is acknowledging the good effects of the Eucharist. Not like those who receive with deliberate unbelief and contempt. The Eucharist is God’s presence to us just as the chamber of the sanctuary of Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple was sacred to them.
Spain was enslaved under dhimmitude. Slavery was a way of life in times past; some times to pay back a debt, one was under another’s employ as a possession until the debt was repaid. The American Indians enslaved other Indians. So when I read how the Spaniards were treating the Jews, so much of the behavior was paranoid like and it reflected the same behavior I had read of the Muslims who treated people as second class citizens in Catholic Spain. My teacher in high school was an atheist; but he admitted there are those countries who take were abused and then take on the role of the abuser. I see Spain like that.
I was studying some different takes on the history of the Franciscans…one I came to is scholastic. Its secular and education viewpoint is totally devoid of the motivation and intent of Franciscan missionaries of those time…www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5032
I went to another popular site, //en.wikipedia.org/spanish-missions_in-California
Here is one that has depth of understanding of what motivated the Franciscan friars of those times that covered Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the priests who truly made an effect on the Indian people…commenting on the care and protection the Franciscans had for Indian women (who later died in a measles epidemic),
www.texasalmanac.com/topics/history/franciscan-missionaries-texas-1690-0
And then here is an overview of the Catholic take on the history of the missionaries in the SW USA, www.olgofm.org/index.php?option=com_content&view-article&id=50&I=emid=58&showall=1.
I think all these articles reflect the overall good will of the Spanish Franciscan friars of time past. They explain various reasons why these missions failed and others who were successful and why.
R
Ranklyfrank
Guest
Actually, sideways in the right direction, but despite what might be your first reaction, more fundamental than that.
O
OrdinaryMelkite
Guest
I tend to agree with Socrates, who declared that War/Conflict is ultimately caused by the Desires Of The Body.
That, and one could also say Forgetfulness Of God.
Plain Old Sin does not help, either.
That, and one could also say Forgetfulness Of God.
Plain Old Sin does not help, either.
G
GaryTaylor
Guest
What will become of the world, if there weren’t people willing to detach from material pursuits and assume a life of prayer?
The fundamental problem is faith in the creature and not the creator. What is the purpose of man’s existence?
R
Ranklyfrank
Guest
I understand what you are saying, GT. What I’m trying to get at though, is given all the people in the world, whether they agree with you or not about the above, what is the inevitable and common factor which is even at the root of the ability to detach and pray?
And in your mind, what does “detach” mean? I’m asking because the holiest most Saintly man I ever knew was also very wealthy, business savvy, Had one of the most lovely private art collections I’ve ever seen, and yet was utterly detached from his “belongings.” He was also the most respectful and careful man regarding them. So I’m curious what you mean when you say “detached.”
S
sedonaman
Guest
R
Ranklyfrank
Guest
Perhaps, but rather intellectualized, bifurcated, and complex. I was thinking something more Universally simple.
S
sedonaman
Guest
R
Ranklyfrank
Guest
Remember, we are looking for something undeniable by anyone. including atheists, agnostics, idol worshipers, ancestor worshipers, Nature worshipers, any one. What you quoted me is from the Catechism, eh?
- Status