(March 17, 2019 at 11:58 am)Brian37 Wrote: Before anyone jumps on me, this isn't an attack on one single religion. Islam did not invent violence against others. Our species has always had competing groups worldwide who have gotten violent with each other.
There is no magical power to a belief. There also can be others whom hold the same core characters and holy writings to be true, but come to different conclusions to either justify empathy or compassion, or others use those same characters and writings to justify violence and call it self defense which is really fear of outsiders. That has been the case worldwide and not just monotheism, but worldwide.
There have been and always will be well intended peaceful non violent individuals worldwide in every religion. But that is not the religion itself doing it. That is our species inherent evolutionary ability to show compassion and empathy. If any one religion, or sub sect of, were a cure to stop violence, war and crime, one should expect to see a universal model the entire species could follow. But the truth is there is no nation in the world, friend or foe, that does not have hospitals or prisons.
I will always constantly remind everyone reading posts like this, I do think most humans are good, or at least want to do good and be non violent. I merely object to where my fellow humans think that ability is coming from. I say it is not in the writings of antiquity, but in the individual themselves, in our species evolution.
There are good people like Malala, but unfortunately there are evil people like Bin Laden. There are good people like Martin Luther King Jr and others unfortunately who murder people like him in the name of defending white Christianity. Some would argue the Dali Lama as being a non violent person, but you also have Buddhists in Myanmar murdering Muslims.
And even with atheists. It is absolutely true that Stalin was an atheist. But he also convinced a nation of Russian Orthodox Christians to put him in power. I have absolutely nothing in common with that monster.
Point is, and will always be, our actions as individuals, not old writings, not old mythology, not even the labels we assign ourselves have any real magic power to make the individual only do good, or always do bad. I know empathy when I see it. I know cruelty when I see it, and those things are not the result of anything divine being handed down to humanity.
There were religions of peace. But there aren’t any more. Such is the nature of any world where religion is allowed to flourish.
