RE: God is a Mass Murderer
May 8, 2020 at 4:28 am
(This post was last modified: May 8, 2020 at 4:29 am by Fake Messiah.)
(May 8, 2020 at 1:07 am)Belacqua Wrote: Christianity is full of various ideas, to the point where almost nothing we can say about it is true of every Christian.
For an outsider it is "full of ideas" but for a Christian there is only one Christianity. That's why Christians have been killing each since the begining over whose ideas are right. For instance in A.D. 385 at Trier, Germany, bishops put to death Priscillian and his followers for doubting the Trinity and the Resurrection.
Or take in 1200s Albigenses in France doubted the biblical account of Creation, considered Jesus an angel instead of a god, rejected transubstantiation, and demanded strict celibacy. So Pope Innocent III ordered all of them to be put to death and we're talking about 20 000 people killed.
And so on...
But yeah for an outsider to criticize Christianity is hard, because looking from the outside it seems that Christians themselves don't know what definition of Christianity is. Even Bertrand Russell ran into this problem in his essay "Why I am Not a Christian", where he writes
Bertrand Russell Wrote:What is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anyone calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. [...] The geography books counts us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in the olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.
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"