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Originally Posted by RevKathyV
"HALLELUJAH!!!
Somebody finally got it!
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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism. "
EH, there are a lot of people who kill for their beliefs...on the other hand there are a lot of people who's spiritual teachings which some would call idiotic which promote peace and loving kindness and will not kill to promote their beliefs. These people realize there is a fundamental human ethics and their beliefs support that in stead of viewing their church as the the all in all they view the beliefs which stared their church as important which are based on the fundamental human ethics....anything contray to the fundamental ethics which all religious groups originally started with are man made additions built on negative feelings and emotions and that is what is destructive...not the core teachings that started it all
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Of course, you are correct, but I think you may have mistaken my meaning. I am not a foe of religious belief. I am, however, a foe of dogma.
Do you know this quotation?
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg (1933 - ),
quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999
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Frankly, I think Weinberg is not quite correct on this. It is not religion that can cause good people to do bad things, but it is dogma. Now, there are many kinds of dogma, not all of them religious. Anything which must be held to be true in spite of appearances to the contrary is dogma. Most human organizations have dogma of some kind, but so-called utopian societies (communist, national socialist, fascist), and many religions.
Now, here's where the danger comes -- when the dogma that must be believed is placed at higher value than the humans that they should be meant to serve, it then becomes possible to do great evil.
How could the Nazis tear children away from their parents, knowing that they would soon be killed? Because they accepted the Reich's dogma that Jews were less-than-human, and would cause irreparable harm to the state. That is dogma and it is manifestly untrue. But as long as it is the dogma that must be adhered to, the Nazi soldiers could not only do it, but they could smile and joke about it while they were doing it.
How can Muslim's bury someone up to the neck and stone them to death, using small stones at the beginning to make the torment last longer? Because they place the "dictates of God" higher than the value of human life.
My point is, finally, no belief that allows for no independent verification, can be accepted as dogma and used as decision-making tools that will have negative effect upon the lives of individual humans. Those individual humans are always of more value than unverifiable dogma.
- The religious belief that apostates should be stoned to death? No, never.
- The religious belief that homosexuals should not be allowed to live their lives in the open, with the same rights and responsibilities as others? No, never.
- The belief that savages must be brought into one's "true religion" no matter what the cost to the lives and heritage of those savages? No, never. (Tomorrow, the Prime Minister of Canada will stand in the House of Commons and apologize to the aboriginal Canadians who were snatched away from their families and communities and brought up in residential schools to take away their "indian-ness." He is right to do so, but it doesn't change the horrible wrong that was done to them).
I could type that list forever, and still not be finished. But at the end of the day, nobody, not one single, solitary person who has ever lived upon this planet has the unvarnished truth about the will of God, or what the future holds, or what is the ultimate right and wrong. And therefore no religious or other belief, based upon any person's unverifialbe viewpoint or opinion or even purported revelation, can serve as an acceptable excuse for the ill-treatment of other human beings.
And I will stand by that until the moment of my death.