Posted by earthworm currently religion is not mandated at gun point in most of the world. |
Posted by tekriter it is far from okay to NOT be a christian in the US. |
Posted by jeepdave Bullshit tecky and you know it. |
Even the united states changed things like the pledge of allegiance to include under god. While not at the point of a gun, it is far from okay to NOT be a christian in the US. |
Posted by jeepdave Bullshit tecky and you know it. |
Posted by earthworm Can you name one Moslem country that the state apparatus uses Islam to put people to death that also has popular support for it's government? |
Posted by tekriter You live in a country where the scopes monkey trial is re-argued every day. http://www.wsbt.co...hing-bill-20120126,0,893282.story |
Posted by tekriter Your circles of logic are too convoluted to even parse into intelligible arguments. |
But this is obvious. Afghanistan. There is great video of a woman getting shot in the head at the Kabul soccer stadium for looking at another man. Sharia spoke, shot to the dead by a mullah, and the crown cheered. I saw things like this happen all over the place. Government for these people is often local, and they have no concept of "popular support" since they have no idea what democracy is, nor does it appear on their christmas list. Interesting that you should mention popular support and religious government. Why don't you follow that to it's logical conclusion. |
Posted by earthworm Your ideology is showing. Why don't you follow that to it's logical conclusion? The use of force for control is how these folks stay in power. Religion is a easy way to enforce that, and always has been. ... All I'm saying is that your disdain is misplaced a little bit. You're attacking the means by which the atrocities are committed and not the cause of them. You're yelling at the rocks and not the person throwing them. |
Posted by splumer But the cause of these atrocities is religion. In Afghanistan, they justify these acts with religion, and they can point to the places in their holy books that says it's OK. Religion is another control method. And it's quite effective. |
Posted by earthworm You got it right in the second sentence, though it's not the cause. |
Posted by tekriter And the cause of the inquisition was a lack of public transit. |
Posted by tekriter Equating religion with just another tool of repression like secret police or torture is ignorance of epic proportion. |
Even if you were right, would that not just be another reason to fight against religion's powers? |
The difference is, that unlike political tools, religion requires one to not ask why, to voluntarily submit to unreasonable ideas, to make leaps of faith. The only similarity is fear, that both religion and politics exploit. If our primary motivations move from fear and superstition to honest inquiry and reason we would all be better off in politics and our beliefs about the nature of the universe. |
You live in an empire in decline where religion and politics blur together and exploit your basest fears. Because it is okay not to ask why when it comes to questions about the universe, you are easily led. It is now impossible to have a rational public discussion about anything in america, from abortion to health care to taxes on the rich to whom to invade an why. |
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Posted by KublaKhan
We're living in Univ. Edinburgh's Family Housing complex, a weird horseshoe-shaped building (check it out on Google Maps), along with a dozen or so Evangelical Christian theology students and their families, all of whom are from Kansas, Texas, New Hampshire blah blah blah and all look like very handsome televangelists. They avoid me like the plague because I wear one of these on a shirt, and they tell their children not to play with my son, and tell their wives not to associate with my wife, the reason being (or so I suspect) is that I turned down an offer to participate in a Wednesday Evening Soup Dinner and Bible Study when we first arrived back in September. |
Posted by KublaKhan
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