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Old 07-29-2014, 12:38 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
Do you believe the men that used religion to carry out their atrocities would not have done those atrocities if there was no religion?
Of course not! But if they had not been able to appeal to religion to motivate the rank and file to violence, I submit that the impacts of this type of violence on our history would have been much smaller. That isn't to say we as humans could not invent other justifications, but to point out the religious belief is probably one of the most powerful levers for influencing human behavior, maybe second only to sex.

Of course as whoppers points out, religion does more than simply justify wars, it build entire cultures, rewrites history, it changes things dramatically. Whether you like it or not, believe it or not, it is powerful. The problem is, at least to my mind, the power of religion to influence society for good appears to be proportional to its power to justify harm.

-NoCapo
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Old 07-29-2014, 12:43 PM
 
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Originally Posted by NoCapo View Post
Of course not! But if they had not been able to appeal to religion to motivate the rank and file to violence, I submit that the impacts of this type of violence on our history would have been much smaller. That isn't to say we as humans could not invent other justifications, but to point out the religious belief is probably one of the most powerful levers for influencing human behavior, maybe second only to sex.
Really? I've always heard the biggest thing that enabled Hitler was the fact that he put people to work in a really bad economy. He appealed to their sense of national pride in rebuilding and rearming the army that was broken and beaten down. Selfishness and pride is certainly not a Christian value.
Quote:
Of course as whoppers points out, religion does more than simply justify wars, it build entire cultures, rewrites history, it changes things dramatically. Whether you like it or not, believe it or not, it is powerful. The problem is, at least to my mind, the power of religion to influence society for good appears to be proportional to its power to justify harm.

-NoCapo
Bad people will still be bad people. Worse yet--without religion in the world, there would likely be MORE bad people acting WORSE than they would without the restraint of a system of morality that religion gives.
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Old 07-29-2014, 12:57 PM
 
Location: S. Wales.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
What tenets of Christianity do you believe led Hitler to do what he did?
You really don't get it, do you? Hitler believed in God, he seems to have believed in Christianity, but his tenets were his own. Christianity was despicably weak. He was NOT a 'Real' christian, but a Christian -type theist he was. Not an atheist.

at most we might suppose that his anti -semitism can be traced back to Christianity, but Anti semitism was no more Christian linked than Racism is Christian - linked.
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Old 07-29-2014, 01:12 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
Really? I've always heard the biggest thing that enabled Hitler was the fact that he put people to work in a really bad economy. He appealed to their sense of national pride in rebuilding and rearming the army that was broken and beaten down. Selfishness and pride is certainly not a Christian value.
Sure, but read through his appeals to the German people. There is a tremendous amount of appealing to God, or religious justification. Did he believe it? maybe not. But it is often convincing rhetoric to help the average guy justify turning his neighbors in. Sure he may be gaining monetarily, but if he is doing it for God, it ok then, right? It is a reason why you ar enot a monster for killing men women and children, after all they are Christkillers, right? And the Russians are Godless Atheists, how can you be faulter for killing them?

Again, this is plainly seen by Stalin, after viciously persecuting the Russian Orthodox church, reinstating it when he needed to convince the Russian people that sending their husbands and sons to die in Hitler's meat grinder of a campaign was the right thing to do.

Both sides in the American Civil war were claiming that their side was justified by God. Both ISIS and the Shi'a militias will be screaming "Allahu Akbar" when they slaughter each other. Europe and the middle east have been torn by religiously justified wars for millenia.

Let me be clear, religion does not cause war and atrocities. Religion doesn't cause anything. It is not an actor with a will and a choice. Religion is simply a framework of beliefs that can guide, instruct, condemn, excuse, and justify human choices and actions. A simple example of this is that you would argue that Hilter's genocide was wrong and evil, but Joshua's was moral and just. Why the difference? Because your religion justifies on e and condemns the other.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
Bad people will still be bad people. Worse yet--without religion in the world, there would likely be MORE bad people acting WORSE than they would without the restraint of a system of morality that religion gives.
Here I tend to disagree with you. You are correct that "Bad people will still be bad people.", but it seems to me that the problem with religion is that it gets good people to do bad things. This is the entire reason that it is used politically, it is just about the only thing that has the possibility to get a gentle, peaceful man to slaughter his neighbor, or torture a 'witch' ,or kill his own children.

I don't see religion as being much of a check on the worst of man's impulses. Most of the people I knew in the church wrestled with sins like lust or maybe temptation to cheat on taxes or white collar crime. No one I knew was using their faith as a bulwark to keep them from murdering people, or destabilizing a government. My experience was that my moral compass is virtually unchanged from when I was a believer. My faith was not necessary to keepm e from cheating on my wife, or killing my neighbor. It did however give me justifications for trying to deny others their civil rights, for using material aid to extort the needy into enduring my proselytization, and for discounting and ignoring the point of view of others. I am not proud of the fact that I used my faith in those ways, to avoid cognitive dissonance, but at the time it was a very powerful justification. I did not feel bad about these things because I was convinced I was doing the will of God.

-NoCapo
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Old 07-29-2014, 01:16 PM
 
Location: S. Wales.
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Originally Posted by nateswift View Post
In precisely the same way that religion is to blame for the abuses perpetrated in the various subsets that come under the thesis that there is a god.
Bur atheism merely does not accept that claim. There is no thesis, dogma, commandments or rules. atheism per se is to blame for nothing done by Dictators.

The rules, Credo, Dogma and thesis is down to the political dogma of marxism, and that it rejected god- belief is no more to blame for its excesses than God -belief is to blame for the excesses of the Nazis.
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Old 07-29-2014, 01:19 PM
 
Location: S. Wales.
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Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
Do you believe the men that used religion to carry out their atrocities would not have done those atrocities if there was no religion?
Possibly. Give me particular examples and I'll tell you what I think.
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Old 07-29-2014, 01:22 PM
 
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Originally Posted by AREQUIPA View Post
Possibly. Give me particular examples and I'll tell you what I think.
Hitler. The argument is that he used religion to accomplish the holocaust. Do you believe he would have tried to take over the world without religion?
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Old 07-29-2014, 01:38 PM
 
Location: Type 0.73 Kardashev
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio View Post
Hitler. The argument is that he used religion to accomplish the holocaust. Do you believe he would have tried to take over the world without religion?
Hitler didn't try to take over the world; he tried to conquer much of continental Europe and dominate the rest.

Absent religion, Hitler almost certainly tries to absorb German-speaking territories into the Reich, and invade the East in search of lebensraum. The actions in the West (France, the UK, Scandinavia) were essentially a means to the end of moving East, so that still happens.

The Holocaust? That didn't have a point, such as gaining land or looting the treasuries of capture capitals. It was solely an exercise in the mass-slaughter of a people who had been marginalized, evicted from one place after another in Europe, attacked, and killed en masse for the primary reason that they were all perceived as having been responsible for killing Jesus. Hitler was not beyond extreme carnage as a means to his ends of conquest, but the Holocaust didn't serve those ends. It was a costly affair that diverted resources from military campaigns.

Hitler was a bad person. That doesn't change the fact that, absent the long-standing Christian tradition of oppressing and killing Jews, there is no Holocaust.
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Old 07-29-2014, 02:33 PM
 
19,942 posts, read 17,122,936 times
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Originally Posted by Unsettomati View Post
Hitler didn't try to take over the world; he tried to conquer much of continental Europe and dominate the rest.
Do you think the US and the rest of the Americas would have been spared after he ran roughshod over Europe?
Quote:
Absent religion, Hitler almost certainly tries to absorb German-speaking territories into the Reich, and invade the East in search of lebensraum. The actions in the West (France, the UK, Scandinavia) were essentially a means to the end of moving East, so that still happens.

The Holocaust? That didn't have a point, such as gaining land or looting the treasuries of capture capitals. It was solely an exercise in the mass-slaughter of a people who had been marginalized, evicted from one place after another in Europe, attacked, and killed en masse for the primary reason that they were all perceived as having been responsible for killing Jesus. Hitler was not beyond extreme carnage as a means to his ends of conquest, but the Holocaust didn't serve those ends. It was a costly affair that diverted resources from military campaigns.

Hitler was a bad person. That doesn't change the fact that, absent the long-standing Christian tradition of oppressing and killing Jews, there is no Holocaust.
What tenet of Christianity tells us that we should kill and oppress Jews? I'm not aware of any Biblical mandate to do that.
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Old 07-29-2014, 02:43 PM
 
Location: City-Data Forum
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Originally Posted by zeliner View Post
There are three basic Abrahamic religions that most of us obliged to acknowledge. They are all derived from Abraham in the bible. They are as follows:

1) Judaism

2) Islam

3) Christianity

Currently the Jews are killing the Palestinians in Gaza. Of course, if they didn't, then HAMAS Muslims would most certainly be killing them. ISIS, the Sunni Muslims, are now killing Shia Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Christians in the Congo are killing Muslims and Muslims are killing them too.

All of these religions are rooted in evil and based upon falsehoods. They're the cause of so much suffering, pain, death, and all sorts of social calamities.

I think we would all be much better off without most religions at all. Let's just go for science, technology, and transhumanism, instead...
Sabean (as said by Woodrow) and Bahai'i incorporate Abrahamic ideas (and themselves into the "tree" of religion, where Abrahamism is a big branch)
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