by nvrgnbk 133 Replies latest jw friends
Yes, threats and use of fear seem to be an effective way of keeping everyone in order and obedient. When you combine this by offering an added reward for such obedience (such as a heavenly paradise), this makes it yet more effective still.
The same can be said for other religions aswell that use this fear/threat message, it's not just solely used by 'Christian' groups.
LFCv
Tell that to the guy that was disemboweled to extract a confession from him.A practice inherited from pre-Christian Roman jurisprudence.
Doesn't matter where the practice originated. It was used by the Church.
Tell that to the Jews expelled from their homes for rejecting the Messiah.The action of an monarchy wanting complete uniformity and compliance to its rule which in those times was not merely temporal. That is what happened in Spain in the 1400's.
I was thinking of 15th century Spain when I wrote that. The Christian authority used Christian doctrine to support the expulsion of the Jews.
Tell that to the African sold into slavery because he belonged to the cursed race.Slavery was a business practice, not a religious one. Asia, Africa, and preColumbian America all had slave economies. Africans were not captured and sold because of religion, but because it was "good business". Slavery was nearly universal regardless of religion. There were plenty of white slaves before the African slave trade and it had naught to do with the color of their skin. The "cursed race" doctrine was used later to provide a justification for keeping black slaves.
BTS
Good explanation, Burn. That's why I mentioned African slaves specifically. The Bible was used to justify seeing them as somehow deserving of their fate.
ROTFL is right, less loving compared to what major historical state religion?Christianity has been historically one of the least loving religions out there.ROTFL!
Zoroastrianism was notably more tolerant.
Why is this a ROTFL comment?
Because it shows an utter ignorance of history. Yes, professed Christians committed atrocities in the name of Christ. I am in no way dismissing that fact of history. However so many contributions to the world have been made by Christians that I can only name a few with corresponding confirmation:
All evidence points to there having been, in the earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was profoundly cyclical. The assumptions that early man made about the world were, in all their essentials, little different from the assumptions that later and more sophisticated societies, like Greece and India, would make in a more elaborate manner. As Henri-Charles Puech says of Greek thought in his seminal Man and Time: "No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once . . . ; every event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at every turn in the circle."
The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that humans beings have ever had. But their worldview has become so much a part of us that at this point it might as well have been written into our cells as a genetic code.
Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, (New York, NY: Nan A. Talese , 1998), p. 5.
[The state of marriage among Romans after the Punic victories:] To this loose and voluntary compact religious and civil rites were no longer essential, and between persons of a similar rank the apparent community of life was allowed as sufficient evidence of their nuptials. The dignity of marriage was restored by the Christians, who derived all spiritual grace from the prayers of the faithful and the benediction of the priest or bishop.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Vol. II (New York, NY: The Modern Library, n.d.), p.701.
For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature – everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without the Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly re-founded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.
Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1995), pp. 3-4.
It can indeed be said without exaggeration that the Western world lived until the advent of the steam engine on technological innovations made during the medieval centuries.
Stanley L. Jaki , Christ and Science (Royal Oak, MI: Real View Books, 2000), p.22; quoted in Nickel, p. 76.
You can also add abolition, sufferage, hospitals, orphanages, many many other things. It is completely unfair to encumber Christianity with its dark side and remove the good it has done.
Perhaps your mindset against Christianity is coloring your thoughts a bit too much?
Nope. The entire bible is about God getting payback to Satan for being a rebellious child and we are just the unlucky f&ckers caught in the middle. God is love, but he'll kill yer azz if you dont' play by his rules. You have free will but dont' you dare use it, or you'll get an eternal time out! Yeah.....without fear/threat tactics, who'd want to worship his egomanical butt?
Nope. The entire bible is about God getting payback to Satan for being a rebellious child and we are just the unlucky f&ckers caught in the middle. God is love, but he'll kill yer azz if you dont' play by his rules. You have free will but dont' you dare use it, or you'll get an eternal time out! Yeah.....without fear/threat tactics, who'd want to worship his egomanical butt?
At least you don't feel angry about it, sweetstuff.
Zoroastrianism was notably more tolerant.
How so?
BTS
Yes, the history of Christian universalism is a long one; in fact, for the first few centuries, universalism was the dominant view.
gently feral
Doesn't matter where the practice originated. It was used by the Church.
It was used by the political institution. If there was no Church would there not have been torture? Explicitly atheistic governments have used atheist ideology as a rationale to justify torture. Is this a mark against atheism itself?
I was thinking of 15th century Spain when I wrote that. The Christian authority used Christian doctrine to support the expulsion of the Jews.
And if they had been something other than Christian, they would have used a different explanation to accomplish their ends. I hate to bring up Hitler as an example, but his movement conjured up Darwinistic explanations to justify its massacres of the Jews. Am I to take this as an indictment of evolutionary ideas?
Good explanation, Burn . That's why I mentioned African slaves specifically. The Bible was used to justify seeing them as somehow deserving of their fate.
And with the universality of slavery in civilizations throughout history it is noteworthy that the only abolitionist movement in history sprang up in a Christian society.
BTS
With the references made in this thread to good and bad christians, are there good or bad atheists? And if so, what makes them that?
