> Once one recognizes that religions are human creations, and that the
> major ones were created over centuries by very large numbers of
> individuals, it is no longer hard to understand why they are hodge-podges.
Xtianity won't let this happen. It is a tenent of the faith that the good book is gods word. Give that up and you may as well give the whole thing up. Even xtians who admit their texts are a hodge podge still fall back to divine inspiration for their authors. That "fact" is a requirement to be a believer. No xtian puts his Bible on par with the Quaran or Vedas as texts written by men on their own and it is impossible to both believe and not believe at the same time.
>I would be cautious about contrasting Islam and Christianity in this way.
>I don't have the sense that the majority of Muslims today around the world
>go around extracting vengeance and carrying out the most violent
>injunctions in their sacred texts, any more than the average Christian or
>Jew makes a practice of stoning adultresses, etc. In general, I don't
>think that we non-Muslims really have a very good grasp of how to
>understand the world of Islam; we need to do a lot more work on that. Even
>leftists tend to fall all too easily into the assumption that Islam is
>somehow inherently a more violent religion that Western ones.
I am very cautious when I do this. Read the Quran and read the xtian Bible. Both have plenty of violence and advocate retribution but the xtian bible has the "love thy neighbor" stuff that is simply absent from the Quran. The tolerance for stoning adulteresses is phenomenally higher for muslims than xtians. You can argue the cultural differences all you want but at their core is the religious edicts. Islam is inherently more violent than xtianity for the reason given above. Xtians have peaceful tenets in their nonsensical tracts that are absent from muslim tracts. It is time to admit that all religions are not equally tolerant or intolerant of violence. Buddhism certainly has followers who have killed but violence is much less a part of that religion than xtianity. Hindus have killed plenty of people also and I would place the level of violence inherent in their texts as about equal to xtianity. They simply are not all equally tolerant and pretending they are is to misunderstand the religions themselves. The Tripitaka advocates less violence than the xtian Bible (none actually) and that is the major reason its adherents are less violent but Buddhism really is different from most major religions so that comparison isn't as meaningful as it might otherwise be.
>>I don't know that trying to convert others has much to do with projecting
>>the evangelicals problems onto others. Religious adherents fear other
>>religions will lead their offspring and friends and perhaps even
>>themselves down the "wrong" path so the other religions must be minimized
>>or destroyed.
>
>I wouldn't say that about "religious adherents" in general, even
>Christians in general. And most other religions are a lot less zealous
>about conversion than Christianity.
It depends on the religious tenets again. Some religions demand a greater degree of soul saving than others. You have to acknowledge that difference when looking at their behaviors. I think this has more to do with wealth too. Xtians in Central America don't evangelize as much as North American ones. The more money the group has to spend on such things the more they do it.
>>Ultimately it is all superstitious nonsense and belongs shelved at the
>>library in the mythology section with stories of Hercules but that isn't
>>going to happen any time soon.
>
>"Superstitious nonsense" is one way of interpreting religions, but another
>approach is to consider them as mixtures of psychological theories,
>recommendations for how to live or what moralities to follow, and attempts
>to describe the nature of the world and relate this nature to the other
>components. As such, one can find some value in the psychological
>theories, toss out most of the attempts to describe the nature of the
>world as having been superseded by science, and evaluate the suggested
>moralities according to whatever moral ideas one subscribes to oneself.
>
>That is, religions are highly complex constructions, and need to be
>analyzed into their components before one evaluates them.
>
>Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
This is incorrect in that none of the things you list require religion to exist. The fact that you can find psychological theories in religions does not mean the religion is about them or necessary for them. All of those things exist for non-religious individuals and are not about attainment of an afterlife. There is no doubt that religious beliefs are complex and in order to understand them you need to analyze them but you cannot stop there. Most xtians claim to believe one thing but when questioned thoroughly you will find they actually believe something else. Studying the religion itself will not explain the behaviors of its followers by itself. The exercise of trying to pull a handful of "good" things out of mixed bag of religious tenets is a pointless exercise. We have no need of religion to have these good things and trying to find them in religion still ties them to that rest of the baggage whatever attempts anyone makes to prevent that. Zeus is no longer relevant in peoples lives and it is time Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and Brahma joined him.
John Thornton