Quote from: Baron von Bone on Jun 15, 2017, 05:59PMDoes an equivalency somehow cancel out the one at issue? Does an ugly historical equivalency applied to a modern one make the modern one go away?
No. What I'm trying to point out is that it matters not what religious fanaticism is at play, they are all equally guilty. But I fail to see your attempt to temper things with time. I get the feeling you believe a heinous crime of the past is less of a crime than a heinous crime of the present.
QuoteI'd like to agree, but I'm not sure I can. I can if you're specifying Islam in the West, but even then, as I understand it all of the nastiness and violence is in fact easily taken from the Quran, just like there's a tremendous amount of similar nastiness in the Bible, except that the New Testament puts a definite 180º spin on it. I don't think there's an equivalent excuse to jettison the nastiness in Islam. The fact humans just do it anyway because it's human nature to get along (the whole social species schtick) and then find excuses says a lot about human nature though.
There is an equivalent to he New Testament in Islam.
The Qur'an was supposed to be the word of god delivered to several prophets from Adam to Mohamed via the angel Gabriel. The Hadith are recounts of the life of Mohamed, and like the new testament is a collection of different accounts of the life of Jesus, the Hadith are accounts from different followers of Mohamed. The only difference is that the Hadith were never put into a single volume. Hence the different sects of Islam choose different Hadith texts. However, the same 180º spin is through much of the Hadith that you find in the new testament.
Qur'an = Old Testament/Tora
Mohamed = Jesus
Hadith (life of Mohamed) = New Testament (life of Jesus)
There is far more similarity between Islam and Christianity than there is difference.
QuoteMost unfortunately however, many religions promote detaching our Better Angels from humanity and crediting a deity, robbing most humans of the appreciation we should have for each other and our species as a whole, deflecting it instead to the homunculi we create to try and fuse our personal sentiments and sensibilities with Ultimate Authority to validate them/ourselves.
I'm not sure the proto-religions intended to do this. I think this has been manifest from people in power trying to retain such power. Just plain corruption of what seemed like a good idea at the time.
Quote In any case, I'm not sure the characterization that it's just a few dangerous zealots is accurate.
This statement seems to go against some of your recent sentiment, but I could be wrong. Taking the specific religion out of it I think there is a fine line to be drawn between the technical zealot and the dangerous zealot. I don't know what pushes one over that line and am not sure that we can't hand some blame to chance for what side you end up on when circumstances prevail. Did you read my little story about the village near Kumasi? That missionary's (and yes, this was in the past, but certainly still considered contemporary. And please forget he was a Christian) actions could have condemned dozens of people to a miserable and painful death just to get a fundamentalist religious point across. I can't help but wonder what pressures were in his mind that forced him to endanger life in order to push his religious beliefs rather than just pick up a shovel to save lives. I think circumstances can put any zealot into the position of being dangerous.
QuoteThe history certainly doesn't go away at least, and any doctrines/dogmas that are too close to those of the Crusades are obviously still here, but that doesn't mean all of Christianity and all Christians are somehow tainted by responsibility for all that, I have to disagree and I can find precedent to support that sentiment in religion itself. However, I don't need it. Religion must take responsibility for it's actions otherwise it denies it's own deity which would have supposedly demanded those actions.
Quoteand it certainly doesn't mean that the old school Crusader mentality is alive and well and prevalent (I don't think a lot of Christians are anxiously anticipating thrusting heavy duty cutlery through the enemies of the church). Again, I don't see your time limitation being pertinent or effective. How much time needs to pass before relevance fades? As you state dogma/doctrine don't change so neither should responsibility. From what I've read on TTF I think there are at least a few Christians here that would enjoy the thought of thrusting heavy duty cutlery through some folks that wish to worship the same god but in a different way. At the risk of opening a huge can of worms, how about the Christian Nazi's and their persecution of the Jews? Is that recent enough? Anyway, it has nothing to do with what specific religious order is gutting what other specific religious order. It would have been no better if the Jews had tried to wipe out Christian Europeans. It has to do with the fact that religion causes people to gut each other for the most insignificant reasons and it is just a really, really shltty thing. I just get dumbfounded when I see one religion try to vilify another when they both most certainly have a full closet of skeletons.
QuoteIt's a very positive revisionism, absolutely! It's why we should do what we can to support that revisionism, and why we should do the same here in the West--the revision of the popular use of faith, for example, which is doing a similar 180º flip. This is The Better Angels of Human Nature winning out over the Dark Side of Human Nature, which is heavily dependent upon riding on the coattails of the Better Angels. When humans grow out of the Dark Side and it fades, religion also fades leaving healthier communities just doing what humans do without so much distraction ... or destruction.
Perhaps you can explain where/how I revised things?
My point in all this Byron, is that Religion may have had a use ... at some point in the distant past ... but it has no use now. Even at its best it is bad. I know you understand what I mean. I read your posts on TTF and have a fair idea of where your mindset is. You know as well as I do that the authoritarian principles of religion and the stagnation brought on by dogma/doctrine are incompatible with humankind's betterment. Tiny differences in doctrine or the interpretation of it have people slitting each other's throats. Sunni's killing Shi'as in the middle east, Catholics blowing up Protestants in Ireland, Nazi's gassing Jews. The list goes on and on over time and does not look like it's going to get any shorter for the foreseeable future. From my perspective there is no place for religion any more. The original concept has been lost long ago and it's become the major source of conflict on this planet.
