Why some humans are so evil: double standards and irreligion

[Catholic_Lady]

Sorry, you made it sound like losing my humanity would be the final step of/intention of my faith, if I were to go that far.

I suppose you are right about the goal of my faith being to be "submissive to authority." Though that's an interesting way of putting it. Most of us would say that the goal is to strive to live by God's commandments... and I was taught that God commands us to love other people and do good for other people. Because all people have inherent dignity. Nearly all morality revolves around that basic fundamental principle.

Anyway, this whole interaction between you and I started because I told DownBeatDrum that religious ideals arent in and of themselves, inherently bad. It just depends on what the ideals are. Religious ideals can influence a person to do good or they can influence them to do bad, depending on what the religious ideals are... like any other ideals we live our life by. I'm still not sure how our discussion has followed that.

See the point I am trying to make is that religious ideals are not exactly the same as other ideals because with other ideals people are choosing the ideals of their own volition entirely, bad people are drawn to bad ideals and vice-versa, but with religious ideals, even good people can come under the influence of bad ideals quite easily because they have been conditioned to be "submissive to authority".

I would argue that a person still chooses to follow that religion "by their own volition". Contrary to what appears to be popular belief around here, us theists aren't mindless drones. If Christianity all of the sudden states that rape is good and that Jesus commands us to rape people in order to multiply, I would no longer be a Christian. But it doesn't. It states the opposite.

Good people can fall under a bad influence for any reason, bad religion only being one of them. And as i keep saying, it works the other way around too. A bad person can be influenced to do good because of good religion, or because of any other positive influene.

An annoying inconsistency I keep seeing here is the quickness to blame a person's religion for every bad act they commit. But when a religious person is influenced by their religion to do good , such as all the religious charities and church fundraisers for the needy, all of the sudden the argument becomes "Oh, well, their religion has nothing to do with them doing these good things." I've seen it multiple times. (Though I suppose I've also seen "They're only doing good things so they can win points for Heaven, that's it." Either way it's pretry unfair and extremely inconsistent)