(July 10, 2019 at 2:54 am)Belaqua Wrote: These are two examples out of many I could name.
For you to say that these people are "very little" and have "scant hope" of being more is flat out bigoted of you. How can you type such bigotry?
Nice two examples, but the problem is that for each person that is inspired by religion to do something good there are much more lives damaged by it.
So it would be foolish to celebrate and fixate on the beauty of religion while ignoring the ugliness that is also there.
Every time some good religious person does something good there is a preacher out there somewhere who is delivering a poisonous sermon that encourages believers to hate others and to embrace a medieval ignorance of the world. The belief inspired mistreatment of countless millions of girls and women alone proves that.
Or for example, how can a science-literate Christian refuse to call it anything but ugly when other Christians insist on teaching children that the world is ten thousand years old and life does not evolve? How can a sophisticated and worldly Jewish person not cringe at the segregationist behavior of some Jews?
Those who insist on denying that religion is often repulsive are dishonest. Religion was not progressive when an Aztec priest plunged a stone dagger into the chest of a living, breathing human being and then ripped out his still-beating heart. It wasn't beautiful when religion inspired the Crusades and the Holocaust, terrorism, antiscience activists, and prejudice among people who might otherwise be cooperating to build a better future for everyone.
Religion has caused unimaginable suffering for so many people throughout history. For example, can any one of us sense how terrible it really must have been for the women who were burned alive after believers condemned them for being witches? Don't skim over this little historical item just because you have heard about it many times before. Try to imagine how astonishingly evil it is to tie a woman to a wooden pole, pile up branches around her feet, and then burn her alive. Imagine the terror and intense pain they suffered. And this kind of thing didn't just happen to a few people. Thousands of people in Europe and around the world have been killed for allegedly practicing witchcraft. Today, despite the fact that witchcraft is still as unproven as any other supernatural claim, the killing continues. Every few months or so, a news report is published that describes the murder of an accused witch somewhere in the world.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
