My Christian cousin broke her deceased father's Buddha statue

[Allegra]

Right. Just because someone’s religion gives you the creeps gives you license to call for its destruction.

It really disgusts me that my own ancestors were enslaved for 300 years, lost their identity, and had their cultural icons destroyed by people who thought just like you.

You’re going a little bit far there. Who is calling for the destruction of a religion? Surely, the object isn’t the religion or the people who practice it. If the object belongs to a person, they have the right to destroy it. That wasn’t the case in the OP’s situation but consider a situation where a person is a Christian and decides to become Muslim. Would they not have a right to destroy or throw out the items from their former religion that they now found distasteful? Would that be an expression of hate or disrespect? I don’t think so, unless it was done in a very public, threatening way. I certainly don’t think the destruction of those items would be destroying Christianity or Christian people. In the instance you are referencing, people are destroying other people’s cultural items that they stole. In the case of the Protestant minister, there is no reason to believe that he obtained the statue through theivery or force.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

You’re going a little bit far there. Who is calling for the destruction of a religion?

Destroying the objects of another religion based on grounds like ‘it gives you the creeps’ is enough of a bad seed that needs rooting out of Catholicism. The same goes for converts. (The first thing you would want to do to commemorate your new faith is to bash items of your former one? Yeah, that’s mature.)

In the instance you are referencing, people are destroying other people’s cultural items that they stole. In the case of the Protestant minister, there is no reason to believe that he obtained the statue through theivery or force.

Actually, I would think that the OPs case is exactly the same case as what the Spaniards did and why now our anthropologists and archaeologists continue to struggle with piecing together what they didn’t torch purely on religious grounds.

 

[Allegra]

Destroying the objects of another religion based on grounds like ‘it gives you the creeps’ is enough of a bad seed that needs rooting out of Catholicism. The same goes for converts. (The first thing you would want to do to commemorate your new faith is to bash items of your former one? Yeah, that’s mature.)

Actually, I would think that the OPs case is exactly the same case as what the Spaniards did and why now our anthropologists and archaeologists continue to struggle with piecing together what they didn’t torch purely on religious grounds.

If I was changing religions, I think I would certainly get rid of things that had to do with my former religion. I would certainly have no problem getting rid of things that gave me the creeps. What do you expect someone to do, keep a creepy object in a place of prominence in their home for the rest of their life, just because it is important to someone else? In the OP’s case, the statue wasn’t even used by her grandfather for religious purposes, so it was just a nicknack to him anyway and not of spiritual importance. If you are being intellectually honest, you have to admit that there is a huge difference in the case of someone destroying items that belong to them for whatever reason, and someone destroying the items of someone else.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

If I was changing religions, I think I would certainly get rid of things that had to do with my former religion. I would certainly have no problem getting rid of things that gave me the creeps. What do you expect someone to do, keep a creepy object in a place of prominence in their home for the rest of their life, just because it is important to someone else?

Right. You find other religions ‘creepy’ so you dismantle and disrespect whatever reminds you of them.

Honestly, that is both immature and uncharitable at the same time. I’m all for using symbols and items from other religions for non-religious purposes but it crosses the line when you deliberately destroy them on fanatical grounds. Our religion is now stained with the crime of destroying cultures because of that.

In the OP’s case, the statue wasn’t even used by her grandfather for religious purposes, so it was just a nicknack to him anyway and not of spiritual importance. If you are being intellectually honest, you have to admit that there is a huge difference in the case of someone destroying items that belong to them for whatever reason, and someone destroying the items of someone else.

The item did not belong to the destroyer. Period. Nobody’s questioning that here. It’s only worsened however when the destruction was for the sake of religious purposes. The error of which I have logically explained above.

 

[Allegra]

The item did not belong to the destroyer. Period. Nobody’s questioning that here. It’s only worsened however when the destruction was for the sake of religious purposes. The error of which I have logically explained above.

In the OP’s scenario, the item didn’t belong to the person and that why it was certainly wrong for her to destroy it. In the scenario another poster offered, where a statue was destroyed by a Protestant minister, there’s no reason to believe that item was stolen. That was the scenario I was originally addressing.