WORDS ARE WEAPONS SO YOU ARE VIOLENT IF YOU RESPECT VIOLENT RELIGIOUS TEXTS IN THE NAME OF GOD

The dangerous thing about religion is how its allies cannot see that some people will consider obeying or just obey evil texts posing as the word of God.  Religion feasts on that stupidity.

If anybody claims to be good and blesses the violent attitudes of others by ignoring them or calling them sacred but not applicable in her or his situation that person is a liar.  If you do that you are asking to be suspected of using scriptures and words as weapons.  You cannot expect anybody to really believe you are good.

Just because your fundamentalism does not lead you to murder your enemies anymore does not mean that it is a good thing. You and the Islamic bomber have the same attitude: religious faith comes first. (Your teaching that God is of extreme importance is really saying that faith in God comes first.) The attitude is the same but it is only the way you carry it out that differs. Your example of faith means you cannot complain if Catholics decide to believe that they have the right to destroy Protestants. The faith comes first attitude is paying homage to violent religionists. When they see your faith they have the right to feel encouraged in their bloodletting ventures by it.

A scripture is a book inspired by God or from a higher source than humankind that sets the standard or some of the standard of what a religion is to believe.  A religion is made up of followers resolving to live up to a belief system.

Examples of scriptures are the Book of Mormon, the Bible and the Koran.

Some points:

The problem is how violence is commanded by God in many scriptures.

The problem is also how these books are regarded as sacred and the word of God. That speaks volumes about the hypocrites that venerate the books and treat them as sources of divine guidance.
 
Even if violence is necessary, it is not right to make it holy by putting divine commands endorsing war and violence in a holy book.

We have the just war theory but it does not justify seeing violence as something that should be ascribed to God.

If a war is really just, you do not need a God to expressly command it.

A book of divinely commanded violence should not be venerated as holy even if there is more in it that endorses peace than violence. Violence is bad outright and is not made better by being outnumbered by nice commands. In fact it is made more disgusting.

The scripture may have men set up by God such as rulers and prophets commanding terrible things.  God is still responsible for this for why did he choose these men and not more peaceful ones?  He indirectly endorses their violence.

Or worse, it may have the commands coming directly from God.  The Bible goes to an extreme with this: the nasty stuff often starts off with, "This is what the Lord says."  The Koran also claims that each word was dictated by God and Muhammad was only a secretary and had no input in the Koran.

If a command is reasonable it will not need to be enforced by being presented as from God directly so even that forcing is violent in itself and especially when the forcing is about getting obedience to violent commands.

What is wrong with violent scriptures?  It does not matter if the violent commands are relevant today or not.  Real people bled and suffered and died.

-Honouring such as the word of God is inexcusable - violence is to be rejected and hated - no ifs and no buts and no active or passive or tacit approval.

-The Bible God never spells out why a war he commands is a just war. He just demands war. And it is man who has to wage it for him. We expect war to be a necessary evil but the Bible totally ignores that principle. In the Bible, why does God give us none of the information that really matters? How do you work out if a war is just? What about abortion? Its omissions are enough to justify saying that it is penned in innocent blood.

-Making a book a scripture honours that book above all others and even kinder ones - it is indirectly praising the evil.

-If you have to cherry-pick the good bits that is dishonest and enables corruption and corruption eventually leads to violence.

-Cherry-picking an authority that commands good and evil is not taking evil seriously. Taking evil seriously means you stop believing that the authority knows what it is doing. To say something is a reliable authority and then to ignore it when it calls for violence is still saying it is right to command the violence but that you do not want to comply. You are a rebel and a hypocrite.

-If you cherry-pick then you are encouraging people to believe what they want to believe. You have nothing to say if they believe terrible things. Do not encourage religion to cherry-pick its authority for that is dishonest and dishonesty is no way to inspire members who love violence to think of peace. It will cause disunity and how can a peaceful religion work for peace if it is full of conflict itself? If you can be a member of a religion and cherry-pick you can be as bad as you want to be in the name of the religion and call yourself a member.

-On the human level the violence is not edifying and gives bad example.

-There is a risk that the reader will feel he should execute such violence because God wants him to and is inspiring him to.

-It means that you with your biased human judgement are judging that God has written or authorised the book - a man judging divine evil to be good shows that that man is not a true man of peace.

-Honouring killers such as Moses and David and especially Joshua as the voice boxes of God is just disgusting and irrational - it is not what you do if you find the violent man reprehensible. You do not make good examples of bad men.

-A true religion of peace might permit war in extreme circumstances - it will however not command war. A God of peace is not the origin of a religion or scripture that does command war. And it is not good enough for a holy book to say that war is justified sometimes. We know that. That is no help for it is too general and what is a just war to a is an unjust war to b and a possibly just war to c. We need details about what we must look at before declaring war and they are not given to us. And even religions that fight without it being for self-defence but aggressively say the same thing.

-The just war doctrine is a religious doctrine. It might contain what a secularist can agree with but the overlap is pure chance. It is still a religious doctrine. For example, religion is saying it is holy and obedient to God to wage war justly and it is a mirror of the justice of God or a mirror of God. Nobody can say religion is necessarily non-violent.

-Bible Christianity and Islam allow capital punishment and for more than just murder. God commands that it must be allowed. Why can’t he just permit? Why does he have to command? Command implies approval. Permitting implies tolerance.  We don't know if Jesus was ever helping to stone anybody.

-Saying some of the Bible came from God and the rest from man is not an option. A God who promotes a book by writing some of it is promoting and advertising the writings of man too and that is bad in itself but terrible when man advocates hate and evil. The person who says God forbids bad example for man is so prone to being inspired by evil and then says that God wants us to have a Bible full of man's violent rubbish is a hypocrite and a liar.

-To say the core teaching of the Bible is love is odd for even if it's God commands that one person be murdered surely that death is a core matter? It is insulting as well as odd!

We conclude that the excuses for the scriptural violence are rooted in religious prejudice and bigotry and deceitfulness and not in justice. An extreme example of this bigotry is how people have been put to death for wanting a civilised Bible. Nobody was ever burned at the stake for saying God is bad but for saying he is too good to write nasty Bibles or to condone Jesus' hate speeches.

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