@rooeytoo It wasn’t so very long ago that Christendom was intent on killing all who they invaded and could not convert. The word Christendom did not fall out of use till the religion finally outgrew that habit just a hundred years ago or so. And the Old Testament or Talmud is chock full of instances of the Jews fulfilling their bloodthirsty God’s command to kill, in some instances even the women, children, babies and livestock of a land the pillaged—or as they wrote it, liberated of the evil of worshiping false Gods. And as @sinscriven points out, some Jews in Israel today strongly support the systematic ethnic cleansing of Arab Muslims from their homeland. Let us not forget that El; Elohim; Yahweh; God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; and Allah are all the same deity. Taken together, a little over half of the Earth’s 7 billion people worship the God of the prehistoric Abrahamic desert nomads under one of those pseudonyms.
And Christianity isn’t in the clear today. We have the Catholic Church still tirelessly working to stop use of condoms in preventing the spread of AIDS in third world countries and spreading lies that condom use spreads AIDS. We have Catholics advocating for having as many children as possible in lands where millions die for want of food and clean potable water—why? Having ever more faithful born swells the coffers of the Vatican, forget that it’s among the most obscenely wealthy institutions on Earth already. We have far-right fundamentalist Christians feverishly trying to provoke nuclear Armageddon with ground zero the Temple Mount because they believe their Sky Daddy will snatch them up to heaven if they can just manage to get all of humanity exterminated.
Here’s a brief clip of Christopher Hitchens talking about part of the problem with the Abrahamic religions. And here’s a fascinating essay titled ’‘Killing the Buddha’’ with Sam Harris writing in the Shambala Sun. I must thank @josie for having pointed me previously to that article.
And if you don’t have time to read it in its entirety, I’ll leave you with two paragraphs that stand out for their salience to current religions wars and terrorism.
“Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades.”
“Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.”
Religion cannot long survive in an increasingly nuclear armed world unless it finds a way to completely shed its concept of intolerance, its dogged assistance that my invisible deity is the only right invisible deity.