Christians, because of the noble goal for their behavior should rarely be violent, and then only in self defense. However, this side of the grave they are humans, and guess what.
Goal? Christianity gives lip service to lofty principles, but is an ineffective program for instilling those values into its adherents and generating good people. This applies to Protestantism as well
:
- "The fact that [the Catholic church] can do good is a testament to the fact that there are good people who will do good, but the organization is corrupt. It is poisoned to its core and it serves no essential good purpose, no true purpose, it is lie after lie, promoting harm to real people....the Catholic Church is not a force for good."- Matt Dillahunty,
we'll have to disagree on whether one of their goals was to set themselves up as demigods.
Agreed. The brutal cults of personality to which these mendacious Christians refer when trying to condemn atheism by association are just religions with human gods behaving like the god of the Christian Bible barking commandments, insisting on being worshiped, forbidding dissent, threatening disobedience with death and destruction, and ordering genocides.
You neglect to even mention the vast good that these religions do, such as feeding the hungry, building hospitals, visiting the incarcerated, clothing the poor, educating the ignorant, etc.
We don't need religions for that. Governments do it better. Christian hospitals are businesses. I am a retired physician, and did my internship and residency at a Catholic hospital. We did not admit the uninsured or underinsured. They were stabilized if initially unstable, then transferred to the county hospital built by the government and supported by the taxpayer. The church only admitted profitable patients. It was the government administering to the indigent sick.
They cultivate our better virtues.
Not in my opinion. The most virtuous people I know are not religious. Believing by faith is not a virtue. It's a logical error.
if a person is not good, and wants to become good, the easiest place to find the tools for change is religion, especially the Abrahamic faiths which emphasize morality.
Disagree again. I don't consider the moral codes of the Abrahamic religions to be adequate for 21st century life..
Where do either the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Qur'an the proclaim that democracy is a more moral system of government than monarchy, or that people be viewed as citizens with guaranteed personal rights, including freedom from religion, than subjects at the mercy of the whims of a despot, that society should be structured to facilitate the most opportunity for the most people to pursue happiness as they envision it, that women should be seen an men's equal rather than their property, and more. These are the values that define modern life, which is why a book that commands men to submit to gods, subjects to kings, slaves to masters, and wives to husbands simply isn't relevant today.
you cannot judge the whole by the few.
What is being judged are not the adherents but the ideologies they adhere to. I look at the spectrum of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and secular humanists I encounter on religious message boards, something I've been doing for more than ten years and 90,000 posts (I'm relatively new on this site), and judge the effectiveness of each system by the relative numbers of each kind that I find morally and intellectually excellent, good, fair, or poor. Yes, the adherents have to be evaluated to determine how effective their belief systems are at people building - character, disposition, quality of thought, etc. - but it's the abstraction that is of interest and is the target of criticism, not the failed people per se. They are victims of a failed ideology.
Islam is a BAD religion because it's suppressive towards women, gays and non-Muslims.
Yes, but so is Christianity - if we change
non-Muslims to non-Christians such as Muslims and secular humanists.
The fact that anyone would actually equate Christianity and Islam as equal running partners is so misguided.
Disagree. Comparing the two is very instructive. The winner is - wait for it - secular humanism. Why? Because Christianity and Islam look pretty similar on paper. The differences are in the rendering, which reflects the history and the culture of the areas in which each is administered. The Christian West has been under the influence of the secular democracies that emerged from the rise of Enlightenment values and secular humanism and has been dramatically influenced by its rational ethics.
Hence, Christians no longer execute people for homosexuality, adultery, witchcraft, fornication, apostasy, impiety, blasphemy, and other crimes against Yahweh, whereas Muslims are still free to kill such people.
But the very fact that they share all of those values even if they don't act on them the same way is evidence of their ideological similarity. The fact that they are not free to indulge those values in the West is not a result of Christian values or its church, but of the secular humanist influence in the West, which is why Christians in the West aren't performing honor killings, pushing homosexuals off of towers, throwing acid into peoples' faces, cutting off hands, or burning people alive in cages, performing clitoridectomies, although that's a good description of the brutality of pre-Enlightenment, Middle Ages Christianity with its witch hunts and inquisitions..
Getting back to the similarities on paper, if you compare Christianity and Islam, they appear very similar, and both radically different from post-Enlightenment humanism..
Christians and Muslims each revere a Semitic desert god, Yahweh and Allah, that is an angry, petty, vengeful, jealous, judgmental, capricious, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadistic, prudish, strongman that requires worship and submission. You probably don't see Yahweh that way, but from from a humanist perspective, that is what is described. Humanists have no equivalent, nor any equivalent to any of the following:.
Believers of both attend temples (Mosques or churches) and obey paternalistic, misogynisitic clergy.
Both religions embrace magical thinking, mythology, dogma, the supernatural, and ritual.
Each feature demons angels, prayer, an afterlife, a judgment, and a system of reward and punishment after death.
Each has its now centuries old holy book of internal contradictions, failed prophecies, unkept promises, and errors of history and science. I'm not as sure about the Qur'an, but it likely also contain vengeance, hatred, tribalism, violence, and failed morals that endorse slavery, rape, infanticide, and incest.
They each think they have the right to determine who should be allowed to have sex with whom how, who should be able to marry whom, and what women must do regarding their bodies.
Both are patriarchal, authoritarian, misogynistic, sexually repressive, anhedonisitic, atheophobic, homophobic, antiscientiific, use psychological terrorism on their children, have violent histories featuring torture, genocide and terrorism, and demand obedience and submission.
Each consider faith a virtue and reason the enemy of faith.
Each has a history of opposing human rights and science.
Each advocates theocracy over democracy.
Humanism rejects all of this.
With all of these similarities - and that is a lot of parallels, most not found elsewhere - why should these two appear so differently in their rendering if not for the reason I just gave? The difference between America and Saudi Arabia is not due to the differences in the holy books of Christianity and Islam, but that America had the benefit of centuries of humanistic influence, and the Arabs didn't.
If you traded the ideologies out, and put Christianity in Saudi Arabia and Islam in America, the results would be the same: Christian Arabs doing the suicide bombings and flying airplanes into buildings, and Americans going door to door asking if you know Mohammed. America would still be a secular state with a Muslim majority forced to tolerate "infidels" thanks to humanist values, and Saudi would still be a brutal, intolerant theocracy, but a Christian one instead. The Muslim majority in America would embrace humanist values such as religious freedom and democracy.
If you or anybody else disagrees, please explain where that argument goes wrong in your opinion. If you think Christianity deserve credit for civilizing the West, please show me the scriptures that support church-state separation and guaranteed personal freedoms such as freedom of and from religion. Show me where the Bible forbids those barbaric practices characteristic of many Muslim states forbidden after the advent of the modern, liberal, secular state. You can't, because those ideas don't come from scripture.
The spread of Islam is like the spread of a cancer.
How do you think that the American Indians would describe the spread of Christianity in North America? How do you think the Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan feel about the spread of Christianity into their nations?
The spread of Christianity was brutal, from Roman armies to crusades to the conquistadores to the inquisitions. Christians have decimated multiple indiginous populations.
So, anything anyone believes is true for them. That's convenient.
How could it be any other way? Isn't that true for you?
It doesn't do much for me either, but then again, none of the Abrahamic religions do.
Do you also hate all Muslims? Probably not.