Well, it should be as clear to us as Yahweh’s instruction are to kill our own children if they get too uppity and talk back to us, that the End of History, which some of you are so eagerly awaiting, may actually be hastened somewhat by a small but dedicated group of confused primates who are convinced that they can hear the voice of God in their craniums.
The laws in the OT regarding disobedient children had nothing to do with hastening the Eschaton. Your post is extremely confused. To paraphrase your statement below, you seem to think that if you have religion on the
other side, any collection of illogical statements magically becomes rational and noble.
After all, with God on your side, all is permitted, n’est ce pas?
God is not on the side of people who believe that the ends justify the means.
So no. Not only do I not agree with the statement you made, but almost no religious people either now or in the past believe or have believed this. You are simply indulging in paranoid prejudice and reckless stereotyping.
It is certainly true that the more zealously people believe in any cause, the more likely they are to justify atrocities in its name. This is in no way confined to what people normally call “religious” causes. When anti-religious propagandists are confronted with this inconvenient fact, they typically redefine “religion” as anything in which people believe so blindly and zealously as to cause immoral behavior. Which has little to do with how religion is normally defined, and actually excludes much actual religion as well as including many secular ideologies.
In other words, if you want to prove that religion is the cause of fanaticism, you simply have to redefine “religion” to mean “fanaticism.” And by that method you can prove anything you lik.
One wonders if people of faith ever consider these unpleasant possibilities before they begin to espouse their certainties about invisible friends and foes.
We certainly do. I spend a lot more time arguing against triumphalistic or unscrupulous versions of Christianity than I do arguing with non-Christians, as you can see if you look at my posts on this website. (Did you bother even to read my earlier posts on this thread?)
One also wonders why His second appearance is required. Presumably the first one wasn’t convincing enough.
If by “convincing” you mean “convincing everyone to believe in Jesus instantly” then no, of course it wasn’t.
Yes, Edwin, the problem with our kind is not that we have bad ideas rattling around in our heads
Bad ideas are a problem. Your caricature of my position is accurate insofar as I don’t think that bad ideas are our only, or even our greatest problem. But bad ideas–particularly bad religious ideas (of which materialistic atheism is one, if we mean “ideas about ultimate reality”)–are certainly one major cause of the problems of humanity.
such as the preposterous idea that we can be absolved from our transgressions by someone else’s death by torture,
I shouldn’t have to tell you that that is a crude caricature of *any *Christian theology, particularly of historic, orthodox Christian theology. I am sure that you become indignant when creationists parody Darwinism and think they have refuted it. It is no more justifiable to parody Christian theology and think you have refuted it.
or that we beat the mentally ill with rods in order to expunge the demons that infest them.
The mistreatment of the mentally ill would certainly have been expressed in religious terms during periods of history when that was the main way of explaining all reality. But as I understand the matter, these harsh treatments continued into the 19th century under a purely secular rationale. I would like to see some scholarly documentation for your statement, if you really want to make an issue of it.
No, what is required to keep this human experiment rolling along is to encourage even more fantastically absurd ( and mutually incompatible) truth claims about our word.
Fantastical absurdity is not a recommendation for any view. However, what seems fantastically absurd to one person may not seem so to another. A purely materialistic explanation of the universe seems fantastically absurd to me. But I understand that it may not seem so to you, and that I and other believers have much to learn from you. (That is a plural “you.” So far, it does not appear that we have much to learn from you personally concerning constructing an argument, appealing to history in a reasonable and well-founded manner, or dealing fairly and courteously with those with whom we differ–mostly, we can learn from you the zeal and devotion to a cause which, as you note, we have often already displayed too prominently at times.)
Wholesome events like the orgy of violence that regularly erupts between Muslims and Hindus, for no other reason than what they believe about invisible agents,
That is a naive and indefensible statement. (It would also be naive and indefensible to claim that the Muslim-Hindu conflict is “not really” about religion, of course.)
Surely I need not regurgitate the endless list of wars, murders and torture that our bewildered ancestors inflicted on one another for explicitly religious reasons.
Lists of selective data with context or serious discussion aren’t very helpful. If you really want to discuss the nature of war, and the nature of religion, and the relationship between the two, I am happy to engage in such as discussion as I have time. But we would need to define our terms carefully first, and to look at all the reasons humans engage in war rather than simply listing those wars which were partially caused by those human cultural phenomena which we conventionally call “religious.”
Edwin
