Sun Tzu,
<<it is not the belief in God that is the cause of the problem. It is "feeling of "rightness" to the decision making process that often impedes critical thinking, interferes with pragmatic evaluations of the realities of policies and is more likely to infringe on the individual liberties of others">>
A lot of what has been said about Christians and Christian beliefs reflects the current media prejudice in favor of any "third world" religion, race, creed, activity (the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a classic, but Genesis (the book, not the old group), nyahhh!; Sikkhism, yeah, dude, that's cool, but Southern Methodism, nyahhh!) and against the institutions that many shallow thinkers might collectively term "The Establishment", but what you wrote simply says, which is a pretty self-evident truth, that if Somebody has a Feeling of Rightness to an Extreme Extent, it can screw up their thinking.
Right?
And it can screw up their results. And it can screw up the lives of a lot of other people.
Would you agree?
Certain examples come to mind (not in any order or order of magnitude):
Qin Shihuangdi, the guy with the Great Wall (first political mass murderer)
Napoleon
The guys at Fort Sumter
Hitler
Stalin
Mao
Pol Pot
The Best and the Brightest group with JFK
LBJ
On the other hand, we have to admire people who have enough confidence in their ideas to perservere:
George Washington, Abe Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, FDR, Churchill, RR, Ray Kroc, . . .
Once we extract the religious prejudice from the argument and begin to list ACTUAL EXAMPLES we find that there's nothing really religious about the proposition or hypothesis at all. AND, it's pretty hard to find any examples of official Christian action (I'm not talking about scandals among the clergy, whether priests for Jimmy Swaggert, ah, the flesh is weak) in the modern era which illustrate actual repression or aggressive behavior. AND, when you counterbalance it with the hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and services, historically, given away in the modern era by Christian institutions and Christian inspired institutions to fund food, relief, adoption and health programs on every level, then I think those who wish to sully modern Christianity with this black eye, at least those with a pulse and some brain activity, ought to put the car in reverse and drive quietly away.
[Again, by way of disclosure, I am not a member of any Christian faith.]
(Just by way of one example, consider the Holt International Adoption Agency. Started by a devout Christian farmer and his wife in 1957, I think, it has arranged the adoption of over 100,000 orphans. Harry and Bertha Holt simply said they were inspired by their Christian beliefs to help the unfortunate orphans they had seen on a television broadcast. You can read more about them, and even contribute if you wish, here:
holtintl.org
I would be interested to see if anybody else, starting from zero dollars (the Holts were farmers in Creswell, Oregon, population at that time, maybe 500) inspired by any creed, managed to save 100,000 plus lives in a similar time period.)
Kb |
