Afraid of the Dark?Follow

Religion isn't a book. Moron.

How many Christians actually care about the bible, anyway?

That's as stupid as saying guns kill people. Don't be a f'ucking idiot.

How you make the leap from prescribed punishment to religion kills is beyond me, but you have me convinced. The next time I see religion coming, I'm crossing the street. He sounds like a bad mother f'ucker.

That's Shaft

I'm by no means arguing Moe's case here, but pretty much every philosophy can be interpreted in such a way by extremists. Many are being intepreted in such a way, it's just that the largest clear-cut philosophies in recent history are monotheistic religions.

Killing in the name of God, or Allah, or Buddha, or Kali is not remotely the same thing as religion killing people. My "semantics game", as you call it, is nothing of the sort. The English language allows for fairly precise description of concepts and objects. If you can't use the tool correctly you've no one to blame but yourself. Be less imprecise next time, and a little less lazy, and you may not be wrong.

Did I say that there was one that couldn't be? I may have erred there by simply mentioning misinterpretations rather than the scale of said distortions. The idea that there is anything concretely infallible is dangerous on its own, and combine that with the claimed ability to communicate with the perfect deity and you will inevitably have atrocities on the scale we've seen throughout history. It's unavoidable. On the other hand, while there have been perversions of atheistic philosophy, (well, as much philosophy as the statement "they don't know their *** from a hole in the ground" can bear) no one has ever committed atrocities on near the same scale as the former idea simply because they think that humans are fallible.

Moe - The semantics continue. Of course no one thinks that the concept of religion is walking around with a big stick beating old ladies as they board the city bus. Allow me to spell it out for you, since you seem incapable of reading between the lines: Religion has been the justification and call to arms for much of the world's turmoil and suffering.

Except what he was saying was damn close to the last line of my post and you just decided to be picky about his word choice.

May I remind you of the Red Army Faction? These people were terrorists, and had no religious ideology to back them.

Plus, I think inherently a lot of polytheistic religions offer a much greater potential for inciting wars. Gods are fighting each other? Then surely there's nothing wrong with that!
It just happens that we live in a time where there is only one major polytheistic religion which isn't all that innocent either.

Oh, anecdote incoming: I have a vicar friend who, when she was a teenager, was active as a missionary for a teenager-oriented church in East Berlin and they recruited a lot of kids away from the extreme left and right and put them into an environment that taught them respect and the value of nonviolent solutions.


I'm not trying to argue that Abrahamic religions haven't served as an excellent excuse for war in the past, I'm just saying that there's a flip side to the coin.

I don't think religion makes a person good or bad, it mostly just gives people reasons for acting in certain ways, and I don't doubt that a lot of people would otherwise not have enough reason for some actions, but generally it is used as a justification a lot.