(March 19, 2019 at 9:24 am)tackattack Wrote: I agree with your statements Brian and I am related to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Pedophile Priests, serial killers, etc.
back to the point.
Your thread title and OP seem to imply that religions can't be peaceful, or it's particularly Religions fault for dismantling peace, which is the only reason I piped up into your thread. If your only point is that people doing good or bad things isn't dependent on or caused by a supernatural creator daddy, I would actually agree.
Please stop reading into my posts what you want to hear.
I didn't say religious individuals could not be peaceful. I am disputing where humans think our behaviors are coming from.
Martin Luther King Jr, Malala, and Ann Frank are all EXAMPLES of the empathy and good our species is capable of. They certainly would claim that religion is the cause of their good. Not the point.
Saying humans are capable of doing good is not the same as having evidence for a super natural divine source of that ability to do good.
Religion has no magic power to make an individual only do good. That is what I mean by "there are no religions of peace".
There are peaceful individuals that point to their religion as the cause yes. But religion is not a universal cure to bring worldwide peace. If it were, we should expect to see one universal religion, and only one religion.
What we do see in human history worldwide is that every part of the world since the first human writings, is that not one part of the world has been 100% violence free forever. Every part of the world has had it's conflicts. And I have said before, every nation, both friend and foe alike, have hospitals and prisons.
That says to me that religion isn't the cause of peace.
Humans point to their respective religions as the cause of peace. I am not arguing that.
I am simply saying that is not really where our ability to get along is coming from. There is no super natural reason we fight or get along.
You cannot look at this and should not look at this as singling out any one religion on my part. I am not. I am saying that humans behaviors are not in holy books, mythology or fictional beings.
If a Christian does good, it is because that individual is good. If a Muslim is good, it is because that individual is good. If a Jew does good, it is because that individual is good. If a Buddhist does good, it is because that individual is good. If a Hindu does good, it is because that individual is good. That says to me once again, that there is no magic to the labels we ascribe ourselves, because there are prisons also in every nation in the world.
Just like there were no written religions 200,000 years ago, one could expect, in 20,000 years, if humans don't blow ourselves up, we can expect humans in the future to do what we have always done both good and bad. And we can expect today's current popular beliefs to morph into something unrecognizable and or simply die out and in the future be replaced by another religion where today's would be considered dead mythology in the future.
That is what I mean by "There are no religions of peace". There are only peaceful individuals, regardless of what they attribute it to. I only argue that humans are doing it, and nothing we do, good or bad, war or peace is the cause of the divine.
