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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (229429)	8/15/2013 10:04:42 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 543147

Never do men do evil so cheerfully and so thoroughly as when they do it in the service of religion. Religion allows people to quickly sort out "the other". Most of the Jesoids I have met in this country are very compassionate, for members of their churches- not so much for other folks, unless they are engaged in the process of evangelism- in those cases they are more like a used car salesman with a new mark. Religion makes people tough in suffering- as anything that concentrates the mind out of the body will, but it also makes people resistant to actual, real, extrinsic truths, because focusing on the unreal can have some pretty negative consequences, and it comes to rational thought. The ideas of Christianity, with it's "dominion over the Earth" may very well be the reason human life as we know it ends on this planet. Christians are not particularly good stewards of this planet. And why should they be? They're waiting on the rapture. Why should this marvelous little planet matter? It's just here to use up, and wad up like used toilet paper when they're done with it. The skeptics have a lot more to do with humanities humaneness than the religious do. I'd rather have my fate in the hands of skeptics than a religious, any old day.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (229429)	8/15/2013 10:37:18 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543147

Certainly we consider ourselves more "humane" than in the past. Our consciousness and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" have evolved; and have become more nuanced and pronounced at the same time that our capacity to kill each other has increased, and I think this has a basis in the humane concepts present in contemporary religious thought. The practice of violence against other human beings has always been closely associated with religion, including Christianity in its many variations. Moreover, it might have been possible to assert that paragraph above before the holocaust and/or before there was widespread knowledge of other forms of mass slaughter in the twentieth century. It's very hard to do so now.