Outcast107 said:
Ahlycks said:
angry people hiding behind a guise of religion to justify there actions.
THANK YOU! I grow tired of hearing people saying Religion is the root of all evil. Where its mostly the people who are corrupt or just using religion for their own thing. To me, religion is like a tool. It can be use for both good and evil. Just like everything else in the world.
No, while I understand why you would like it to be true (because you feel vicariously responsible as someone who worships a religion - no rational person is pointing at you for this though) - that's not the case.
If you ever speak to these people, or an islamic fundamentalist, or any other religious radical they believe DEVOUTLY that their religion tells them to do what they do. They quote scripture, they repeat it daily, they pray that it comes to fruition. These are not people intentionally abusing religion to achieve their goals, they earnestly believe they are right in the eyes of their god.
When rational people like Richard Dawkins (irrational people can say what they want, no one listens to them) suggest that Religion is dangerous and to be avoided - they are pointing at the inherent danger in being convinced of anything Absolutely / Infaliably: as inherent in divine messages.
Anything you are unwilling to accept as possibly being false, if actually false, causes your whole perception of reality to shift to account for the false "truth" you are unwilling to question. For example, when the Catholic church refused to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe, they held western thinking back for centuries before finally recanting - centuries we could have been advancing had we accepted this simple, now self-evident, theory.
Religion is dangerous, extraordinarily so - and you can't deny the faith of radicals of any religion because their interpretations lead to 'evil' - they are deeply religious, perhaps too religious since they often become over-involved in a literal interpretation of specific phrases. They act out that which religion fails to allow: self-correction, human error.
As soon as you accept that some of it may be faliable, all of it falls into question. Maybe Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour's Wife meant something completely different than is commonly believed - based on what is implied by 'covet' - that could mean adultry, or idolatry, it could mean don't begrudge your wife for not having the characteristics of other women - accept her for who she is - it only means one of those, but which? If the Ten Commandments - being as concretely written as they are - are questionable - try reading the Bible (or any Holy text, I've read nearly all of them) for a specific, concrete meaning of 'rule' to be gained: they aren't there, it's all subject to personal interpretation, and nearly anything can be justified with a sufficiently large enough divine text (enough ambigious terms).