Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
All of which is a good reason for more people to understand the difference between faith and religion.
Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama
- Thread starter Dutch Uncle
- Start date
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
Spiritual faith is believing things without evidence, which is stupid and dangerous. Religion is basing a whole philosophy around spiritual faith.
In what way did he preach tyranny.....???
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
He preached the worship of a god that demands strict obedience to insane rules under penalty of eternal punishment. This produces a mindset that easily lends itself to Fascism. It teaches people that behaving like a madman dictator is ok.
And it's no coincidence that Europe was most oppressed when it was ruled by the Catholic Church. According to the Bible, we're supposed to obey our kings and emperors without question.
He laid out a choice, IMHO.
He never forced it upon anyone, "you decide what you want"..........
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
Sure, but he still preached tyranny. And leaders then used it to get soldiers to force it on others.
Will you be providing examples??
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Why do you think Faith is stupid and dangerous? Do you have faith there is life other than on earth? There is no evidence that there is life elsewhere. I have faith there is, do you?
I have faith that this coronavirus crisis will blow over. It’s serious but it’s not the end of the world. Do you have faith that most of us will survive this?
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
Well all of Europe didn't just accept Christianity. It was used as an excuse by leaders to get the military to take over regions that were still Pagan so they can be converted. I'm sure you've heard of the Crusades and the Inquisitions.
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
Yes, but that is faith based on logic and evidence. Spiritual faith is essentially blind faith. There is no evidence or logical reason to believe in a god. Now that doesn't mean a god definitely doesn't exist, but it does mean believing in one right now would be stupid. And it's dangerous because it conditions people to believe in things they want to be true, instead of what is actually true. This is how we end up with Fake News. There's no evidence that the server was in Ukraine? Well, I wish it was, so now I have blind faith that it was.
Yes, some ppl did that in his Name, he didn't do it, nor did he ever advocate it that I know of..
That was wrong... Christianity, like some other faiths does not have a doctrine of jihad..
& obviously the religious leaders didn't need one either.......
IMHO the inquisition of purely evil & w/out excuse..
But I know you & others like to take events & ppl in place, that is in their time, the perspectives, prejudices etc etc etc of that time...
I like history but looking back it seems pretty ugly for the most part.....
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
But he preached a philosophy of feelings over logic, blind obedience to leaders, and the worship of a tyrannical mass murdering god. A philosophy like this makes it really easy to get people to do something like a crusade.
It's like how Karl Marx never killed anyone, but he preached a philosophy in which the government gains enough power to force equality. That's an extremely dangerous idea and it's no surprise that it led to mass murder.
Sure, but it still has a philosophy that very easily lends itself to jihad. It trains people to be susceptible to dictators, war, and imperialism. Granted, that's all religion, but Christianity and Islam are especially bad since they both have the feature of a crazy god who considers people of other religions to be sinners worthy of eternal punishment. Leaders have always used dehumanization of the enemy to push people to war.
But things like this are still harming the world today. Look at the Fake News industry and the blind obedience that NPC cucks have to political parties. This is a result of a culture that values blind faith.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Buddhists have faith and they don't believe in a god.
You've slung around "stupid" and, more peculiarly, "dangerous" a few times now. Why do you care what faith others have? Do you advocate stamping out religion like Stalin and Mao? They killed millions and, guess what?, religion is still in Russia and China. You can't change human nature even if you are a staunch eugenicist. Is that what you are proposing?
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
You are blaming a spirit for the 2004 Tsunami? The Coronavirus? How can that be if you're an atheist?
Iolo/Penderyn
Verified User
The trouble is, as with Marx and may others, that what a person says and what his/her followers make of it are different things. I've always considered myself a sort-of-Buddhist, but I hate the thought of what those strutting murderers are doing in Burma and Ceylon, and I have a deep love and respect for Jesus of Nazareth, a very early socialist, but what the Pope and others have made of his ideas hardly bears thinking about. I reckon we do better without 'faith'.
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Whether or not you respect Christianity, there is exactly zero percent doubt that Christianity (along with the civic republicanism of ancient Greece) is the very foundation of western civilization in ways we generally do not even think about. In ethics, literature, art, politics, philosophy..
Whatever flaws Christianity has in practice, it was arguably the first religion that imbued every one with a sense of equality. The soul of a prostitute was equal to the soul of an emperor in the kingdom of heaven. The ethical traditions of the NT and the implication of spiritual equality was a profound transformation from the pagan religions of Rome. Whether we realize it or not, that theoretical sense of equality has had trickle down and intangible effects throughout Western history.
I maintain that virtually all of western culture, thought, art, philosophy, and ethics has been touched by Christianity, and we are all touched and informed by it, even if only by osmosis.
Yes, everyone knows many terrible things were done in the name of Christianity. Lots of terrible things have been done in the name of science too. But I for one am generally appreciative of western culture, western civilization, western thought. And if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that my intellectual, cultural, and ethical tradition was born in the crucible of Greek antiquity and early Christianity.
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Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
You bring up the real problem. "Religion" is "thing". It's inanimate like a car, a shovel or a gun. It just sits there until a human being uses it. Obviously lots of human beings have murdered even more human beings in the name of religion, nationalism or a political system like communism. That's not "God's" fault, that's the direct result of human beings doing what human beings do best: slaughtering each other. No other species on the planet is as efficient at murdering their own species as the Human race. As the link below proves, Humans aren't in the top 30 species for killing their own kind, most of the other species are either infanticide or related to sexual competition. Certainly not war or genocide.
Blaming religion for mass murder is as silly as blaming forks for making people fat.
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
So Buddhism is different in that there is a secularized Western version in addition to the original version that does involve gods and other supernatural elements. The former doesn't involve spiritual faith, the latter does.
I care because normalizing religion is normalizing feels over reals. It's teaching people that it's ok to believe whatever you want even if there is no evidence or logic. This is how we end up with Fake News and blind obedience to dictators and political parties.
I advocate stamping out religion through education and (more importantly) raising the living standards. I don't think anyone should be killed for being religious. Aside from that being ethically wrong, it only reinforces religion, anyway. However, religion is almost always a result of bad circumstances, which is why high living standards kills religion.
TexanManWithPlans
Verified User
I base this on the conclusion of modern scholarship.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Western secularized Buddhism with gods? Care to name one or two?
Education and modernization is already reducing the numbers of people who follow dogmatic religions in First World countries, but most people still have spiritual beliefs.