(January 10, 2015 at 7:48 am)Exian Wrote: Wow. That's surprising. Granted, I don't know much about Buddhism. I just figured they were a peaceful, turn the other cheek bunch. Blasphemy laws will be the end of humanity. How can free speech exist in the same room as blasphemy? I don't follow a single god damned religion, but each one has a law that they kill me for breaking.
Oh boy, no religion is ever completely peaceful . People in the west falsely think of Tibet and The Dali Lama today as the entirety of the Buddhist history in Asia and the Orient. China's and Japan are full of Buddhists and they have had a long history of being enemies.
Burma's Buddhists treat Muslims pretty shitty at this point in history.
If you do an extensive history study of any religion in human history you will find violence.
The bottom line is that religion does not give us morals, our evolution does. There is not one currently held religion or any religion of the past that was around 200,000 years ago. Not even the word "atheist" gives humans morals because words are not our DNA. Our species has always been capable of, and will always be capable of both cruelty and compassion.
I think we do need more of a push to start talking about labels in terms of positions instead of talking as if those labels are physical flesh. No label describes our physical attributes as humans, they merely describe our likes or our geographical place of birth. But our labels are not us. Only DNA and the word "human" describe the physical us.
