(April 19, 2016 at 3:22 pm)Esquilax Wrote: At the heart of christianity, in its seats of power and its most fundamentalist pulpits, there is a colony of vultures. These vultures believe that everything belongs to them in the end, that all things are pawns to make rhetorical points for their preferred religion, and that all who dare disagree are little more than sustenance for their own grotesque beliefs. It is, to them, the rightful price to pay for the sheer cheek of diverging from their wishes.
If you let them, they will take everything from you to fuel their ends. They will take your voice, asserting that you only disbelieve because you wish to sin, not for the reasons you state. They will take your heart, telling others that you secretly do believe in their god, you just say otherwise. They will take your mind, loftily scoffing that you have no justification for your morals, your reasoning, your emotions, because the only justifications there could ever be belong to them (of course). And then, when you're at your weakest, when your life is done, when your grieving family has let you go and faced a new day without you, when you cannot speak or move or defend yourself, they will even take your death. That last little piece of you, the final dignity of your mortality, the ending of your story, will be stolen from you, ripped from your still warm hands, and tossed onto the pyre, because not even death can save you from their petty, awful need to get at you and twist the memory of you and turn you into a tool to work for them. Not even the grave can quell the utter affront of these vultures, that you would ever dare to presume to believe something they do not. They will take your death, and they will make it about them, because all you are and all you ever were and all anyone could ever amount to is a quantity, its value judged by how much it can help them.
They will rob you, if you let them, and they will strip every last piece of carrion from your bones. They will grind you down into an idea they will label "enemy," and they will turn that idea into a lie to beat your group with, and then when you're dead they will take that lie and they will smugly add their own coda to it, a little deathbed conversion, so they can hold up the lie they've extracted from your legacy and say "see? Nobody can get away with disagreeing with us forever."
There are vultures at the core of christianity, and you are merely grist for the mill, to them.
All religions have the potential to do everything you pointed out. But the "vulture" is not the empathy our species evolved with, even theists are capable of that. The "vulture" is what religion as an idea can do to human thought that can lead to very cruel things. Our species evolutionary empathy is what got more Christians to cherry pick and ignore the once taken literal parts of the bible. So don't underestimate our evolutionary empathy, even if it is held hostage and distorted by religion, it is in our genes.
Don't single out Christianity. The bible is a weapon as much as the Quran and OT. But throughout human history all religions as ideas can become volcanos even if they are seemingly dormant right now. The best weapon against religion leading to harm, isn't the idea that you can force it out of existence, but the best weapon against any group think is to insist nobody's label or book is scrutiny free. In the real world not even atheists can have a perfect utopia.
Our species will never be 100% delusion free, the best we can do is manage it better to a more civil degree. Treat every holy book as a weapon, a potential volcano, but in doing that, don't lose your own sense of humanity in the process of responding to religious transgressions.
