HOW RELIGION CAN SET THE STAGE FOR VIOLENCE
Public religion is cosmetic. The cosmetic is used to hide something dark
Religion does not sit well with choice and freedom.
This is a form of violence in itself and leads to people being actually killed.
Some Ways Religion leads to violence
- By "love". People who are doing grave evil feel supported by you when
you know what they do and are nice to them. That is the reality nobody wants to
confess. People don’t need constant assurance that they are right. They need a
friend or two to encourage them at least once and that equips them to feel
others indirectly support them by seeming not to care. It is easier to do bad if
everybody around you is just nice to you regardless. And don't forget you
can feel God is just as kind!
- By de-sensitisation. Christians engage in a lot of hatred and violence on the internet and in video games and by what they watch on television. They use the idea of sins murdering Jesus to accuse even children of murdering Jesus. Adultery is equated with murder for killing a soul. Masturbation is the sin of suicide against your own soul. The idea is you "lose" your soul to God through serious sin. Why do they want de-sensitisation?
-By pretending that all that matters is a religion not
being essentially violent. But that does not mean it is essentially peaceful
either! It could go either way! We are not told that though!
-By pretending that any essentially violent religion is not essentially violent
or by pretending religion is somehow immune to being violent and condoning
violence and making violence out to be a sacred dogma. Claiming that the
violence is based on a misunderstanding is assuming that those who founded the
religion and gave it its doctrines were well-meaning. That is not necessarily
true. They may say that you should talk to the most reasonable exponents of the
religion before you dismiss it as essentially dangerous and evil. But what if
these people do not follow their religion correctly? They may say that there are
many ways of being a Christian or Muslim so you cannot say which professing
Christian or Muslim represents true Christianity or true Islam. This is exactly
the problem - what if the bad ones are in fact the perfect Christians or
Muslims? And if a religion is man-made it is nonsense to say it is essentially
non-violent for human beings are all capable of violence. Saying any religion is
inherently good leads one to deny the role the faith taught by the religion has
played in forming religious warmongers and terrorists.
-By teaching that you must not deliberately expose yourself to anything that
makes you doubt the teachings that the divine supposedly gave to the religion.
The more you try to conceal and avoid doubting thoughts the more frequent and
intense the unwanted craving to doubt is going to be. Suppressing it only makes
you mad at those who you see as threats to your faith and turns you into a
bothersome person who only sees what she wants to see.
- By insulating faith from being challenged by facts and evidence - for example,
Christians say that God answers your prayers but not in the way you necessarily
expect so when you get an antibiotic instead of the bike you asked for this
proves that prayer works! But this is merely a rationalisation and is about
shielding the alleged efficacy of prayer from critique. But if this is done the
tools for its justification are lost as well. Truth is put at risk meaning there
is an undercurrent of hatred, sometimes latent, for those who serve the truth
and those who believe end up exploited and treated like objects.
-By teaching that evil violent books are God's word. A book that is not violent
but is open to pro-violence interpretations is still to blame for any violence
done by believers. A really edifying book takes pains to avoid giving any
impression to readers that violence is okay or necessary.
-By making the more peaceful interpretation of those books a mere matter of
opinion or preference meaning that if you follow it your trust in it will be
weak and those co-religionists who crave war will see you as sufficiently though
reluctantly opening the door in principle to their nasty interpretations. Holy
books that are from God will minimise as much as possible the need for
interpretation. They are not plain enough. Thus any violence that is defended by
appealing to their statements is their fault for it should be clearer.
-By teaching that other religions or secularists are the enemy
-By teaching that if God commands violence we must obey for he knows best and he
uses evil to bring good out of it. Even to internalise this principle is bad. It
says something about you. Non-violent believers accept this violent principle
hypothetically but that makes the filth in their hearts no less real.
-By prayer. Prayer is making yourself feel you have done good when you have not.
People who like prayer get that buzz. That is why they like prayer. It has led
to the extraordinary spectacle of terrorists and abortionist Catholics coping
with the evil they do by saying prayers.
-By motivating terrorists through encouraging its members to think they are part
of God's plan and God's plan does include tolerating violence for he is said to
let evil happen for his and our own ultimate good. Terrorists do not use a
proper military strategy to defeat whoever they are against but they do it
recklessly in order to make a religious or political point and to make society
feel endangered and threatened. Without religion there would just be the
political point to worry about and though the state will act against terrorists
who claim to act in its name religion refuses to disown its terrorists.
- By using the No True Scotsman fallacy to get away with evil and to keep the
ideology strong and put people into denial that it is harmful. It easily becomes
or encourages the No True Nationalist attitude. What does the notion that
religion is essentially good mean? It may mean the core is good but is a core
really good when it slots itself in a heap of excrement? Or it may mean that
religion is always good and that whoever does bad in the name of religion is not
being a religious person even if they pray as they kill babies. And it denies
the truth that working out what is good can be messy dangerous business meaning
there is a risk with our moral and religious systems.
-If you worship God you necessarily worship a being who gives many people
violent genes, and who gives everybody genes that make them enjoy the
misfortunes of another, and who is ultimately responsible for the existence of
political institutions. Religion and faith in God involve YOU taking
responsibility for worshipping such a God and approving of the evil he creates.
And if there is no God the responsibility is yours by proxy. Do not add insult
to injury by saying that no truly religious person would condone or do violence.
They have to and there are countless examples. Some say that faith in God or
gods is not to be blamed for religious violence and that God or the gods cause
the violence and inspire it in the belligerent. I don't know how they expect to
be taken seriously.
-If you believe in a perfectly good God, you must say that evil is good that is
used wrongly. So evil becomes the absence of good. Violence becomes the absence
of peace. Peace usually is not real peace but just war not happening. Too often,
peace means that people are experiencing good conditions but is it real peace?
It is only provisional peace until the good things they have are threatened and
then war breaks out. And each religious country blesses its favourites with
peace. Many groups are left out of the equation. Another difficulty is that if a
religion or group is considered pacifist, it may not wage war but it makes up
for it by battering children and wives and spewing hatred. Such groups are no
better than the non-pacifists or the population in general. And religion creates
new "needs" to get aggressive and protective about - eg, a religious nation will
persecute missionaries who enter it to bring in another religion. Lucretius
noted that once you start needing and craving beyond the bare necessities you
start taking baby steps to becoming a warmonger.
-Many faiths such as Christianity believe that Jesus will war one day against
the evildoers. They may claim to be non-violent but that is a lie. They love
deferred violence.
-The notion that you can wage war in God’s name and be assured that God will
protect you or will not retaliate (at least not much!) if you think the war is
lawful when it is not can encourage you to maim and kill. And more importantly,
it SHOULD.
-In many cases, violence WOULDN'T have taken place without religion. It proves
that religion is not immune to causing strife and would cause it. But even if
the violence would have taken place without the religion, what does that say
about the religion? That it would cause it even if it does not.
-In many cases, violence COULDN'T have taken place without religion.
-Religion is to blame for violence when the amount of the violence or the number
of the violent is above what is normal statistically and when any other possible
cause has been shown unlikely or eliminated or just to possess a minor role.
Religious people too often try to get you to just assume religion is always good
when they should be getting you to collect and check the evidence for and
against. Finding evidence that religion can sometimes be bad is enough to prove
that religion and good are not the same thing. Keeping you away from
evidence-based thinking is a typical tactic and manipulative religionists are
notorious for it.
-If Satan uses human enemies to do evil, and Christianity says this is his
favoured method, then it is always self-defence to attack them first.
-Human nature is not intrinsically good so if non-religious people engage in
violent extremism or religious people engage in it, it is a demonstration of how
there is nothing intrinsically good about anything human - even religion. To say
religion is good is to be lie and you will only tell that lie if you want to
cover up the violence.