smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein... with the edge of the sword.
...gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street, and burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit... and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.
WRONG! That's actually what every bible-reading Christian should do, according to the book of Deuteronomy. All religions are much of a muchness, its just that some religions' followers are better at sticking to the word of the religious law than others.
Religion is stupid. Give up.
3 comments:
A well made point Dan but it is fair to say that some of the most evil acts of recent times have been perpetrated by athiests Mao, Stalin and Hitler. The true evil is not ideology (which includes religion, only differing from non-theistic ideologies in that it builds a world view on faith as opposed to reason) but fanaticism.
Fanaticism lifts the individual or society above fellowship with the rest of humanity, creating a monstrous ego/ Superman/ self-appointed right hand of God which must obliterate everything that does not fit its inflated perspective. Hence we have ethnic cleansing, Nazism, the Cultural Revolution, the Gulag, 9/11 etc. In the name of humanity, or God, the fanatic becomes the most inhuman, and unholy.
It is no coincidence that fanatics are usually drawn from the young, the dispossesed, inadequates etc. Happy, well balanced people don't tend to plant bombs. Indeed, they tend to be the victims - their very contentment an affront to the creature with the cause.
I'm halfway through reading Sam Harris's book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason - an excellent, though flawed, book. He identifies the problem as faith, i.e. fervent adherence to an idea in the absence of evidence (or often in direct contradiction to evidence). For Harris this covers most of religion but also the likes of Stalin and Hitler, as they killed on the basis of ideologies-gone-mad. Harris boldly claims that faith is at the root of all human conflict. I'm not sure whether or not he's pulling a fast one by stretching the definition of faith to cover everything which causes conflict, but still I have a lot of sympathy with his viewpoint.
By the way, I got it slightly wrong on my post. It is, of course, Jews who should be getting out their swords and killing non-believers, seeing as (apparently) Christ's mission was to try and temper some of that Old Testament rage. But regardless, there are plenty of people out there (a scary number of them involved with the current US administration) who are willing to take any piece of scripture, Old or New, and use it as a basis for public policy.
Fair enough, though (on a slight tangent) I've never understood how anyone who believes in the Old Testament can actually call himself a Christian - I mean, what's that got to do with Christ?
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