(July 19, 2013 at 12:23 pm)whateverist Wrote:(July 19, 2013 at 11:32 am)wandering soul Wrote: 2. people who use the Bible to send everyone to hell except themselves have their counterparts in every religion, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism (well there you get to keep trying for several lifetimes until you get it right). They are just finding the parts that suit their in-human tendencies. .. Fortunately they are in the minority.
3. there are far more people who use their sacred scriptures as a foundation to build kindness, tolerance, insight, and mutual respect.
2. & 3. I wish I were as confident as you about this.
thanks for response. mine are not the type of comments that usually get a response - not flashy enough?
you are right that I may be leaning toward the optimistic side today. But within the context of Christianity and the near-Christianity of the Unitarian Universalist (derived from a Christian culture but no Christian beliefs or doctrines - no doctrines at all as far as I can see - except the universalist part!) I count all of them, and all of the liberal, progressive portions of the major denominations such as Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic and some others. Among other religions there is also all the secular Jewish population, as well as the Reform branch and a lot of the Conservative branch (referring to the proper noun Conservative and not the characteristic "conservative").
As in all things it is the loudest and angriest that get the press, that disrupt the lives of those with whom they work and associate, that dominate these online forums of all sorts. But that's true of atheists as well. There are many different types of atheists as well and they have their strident evangelical factions also!
But in Christianity there is not only the aspect of personal human tendencies which come into play, but a particular new 20th cent. paradigm, ideological stance toward conversion that has affected American Christianity and made it both a haven for the tempermentally xenophobic and an new added substructure of exclusionist doctrines which feed a set of ideas that give a strong sense of cohesion, belonging, support, and emotional resources but have the side effect of taking them out of natural human sympathetic connections to humanity as a whole.
That part is a problem, but not a virulent one as I believe the evolution of ideas and religious ideas will, as with viruses and bacteria, tone it down to less virulent strains with time.
or at least that is what I hope for our future generations. Of course it will no doubt be replaced by other virulent angry exclusivist ideas!
having passed through many states of believing I was right I have come to the place of finding "rightness" rather irrelevant to the project of becoming human
