The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: Pancho will like this!

Re: Pancho will like this!
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Monday, October 31 2011, 3:47:50 (UTC)
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Arrow wrote:
>If the followers of Gandhi used force in his name then can we claim that Gandhism is violent per se? Likewise, can we attribute the violence perpetrated by Christians to Christianity?

...If the followers of Ghandi indulged in violence we would naturally look to his teachings to see where there might be a connection....and if we found no link we'd assume that the teachings were not at fault.

...let's try the same with Christianity. What is the very essence of Christianity? It is not love and kindness, self-sacrifice or forgiveness because all of those and more exist in other religions and among people who have no religion and were around well before there was a Jesus....love is not unique to Christianity. The thing that is truly peculiar to Christianity, and only Christianity, is the notion that by accepting the sacrifice of Jesus we can be cleaned of our own sins..."he died for you" is literal....and yet that is the most immoral thing of all. If you owe a fine for some crime and haven't the money I can choose to pay it for you...but if you have committed a crime, like say murder or theft, I can't serve your time for you, I can't take your punishment onto myself...for one thing you wind up getting away with it and where's the morality in that? How often do we forgive our children for this or that but insist that they take responsibility and suffer the just consequences as a way of learning better, if nothing else?

Certainly no legal code or nation would allow such a thing...why then does a religion? is this really a good way to raise children? If you come to me and say you have a fantastic gift for me, say a gold watch, and it will be mine if I agree to the execution of the person who owns it, and I agree, then I am an accessory to murder...but even if I don;t know anything about it and you come to me after, like 2000 years later, and say, "look, the guy is dead anyway, so take his watch"....I'm still guilty of a crime as well as morally culpable....that is the way of morality and good citizenship...people should not be taught to accept presents which can only come to them through the murder of an innocent man or woman....such a gift is tainted to say the least, and yet this religion makes it the centerpiece of its message, it's one, truly, unique and singular teaching it shares with no other religion on earth...it MAKES people immoral, it demands it and calls it a "reward"...a path to paradise.

Then there's the small matter of extolling murder and corpses, and engaging in cannibalism and vampirism, even if it is only "symbolic" (which it isn't)....who would create a church where worshipers engage in symbolic child molestation? For indeed eating human flesh and drinking human blood is one of the oldest and most universally frowned upon practices on earth, as is child molestation...why, in the name of all that is good and decent, make those part of a RELIGION?...these can't be good for children to hear and worship.

Had Jesus been hanged, little children would be wearing a miniature, gold, gibbet complete with hangman's noose round their necks and in their churches would be a bloody statue of Jesus hanging by the neck...that's unhealthy to say the least. In churches all over the world a cadaver is placed above the altar where children kneel...often a bleeding heart is exposed, nails driven through hands and feet...there is a glorification of violence and murder which is quite shocking and vulgar to anyone not raised on this stuff from childhood...in fact the greatest gift this religion affords can only come BECAUSE of murder....no matter how good a Christian or human bean you might be, no matter how closely you follow the teachings of Jesus, no matter how good and kind you are, by nature or learning, if you do not accept that Jesus had to be killed for YOU, for your benefit etc., you will NOT get into heaven.

Does all of this necessarily allow people to indulge in violence? I don't know...but I do know that for some strange reason the religion itself is OBSESSED with murder and not just any murder, but the murder of the most innocent and blameless person imaginable....only then does the Christian promise get fulfilled....had Jesus died peacefully in bed, or been whisked up to heaven without first being murdered, no one could get into heaven...so at its core Christianity teaches that benefits, even the greatest benefit ever conceived, can come to us through our acceptance of a murder committed for OUR benefit...and we are encouraged to take the benefits and run, never asking if it is right to kill people in order to get the real goodies...and whether the goodies are eternal life, or petroleum and minerals, murder is an accepted, even a holy way, to get the goods...I can't think of a single religion or moral code that teaches such things.

Christianity began in violence, in murder, in the execution of an Innocent, it DEMANDED that murder or else.....................no paradise. Paradise and murder; Murder FOR Paradise, is ingrained in the religion....you can't have one without the other...I think this is unprecedented in human history....except maybe in other tribes who worship human sacrifice....so, yes, Christianity teaches violence and the benefits that come ONLY through murder.
>
>I would like to share a book I recently bought, it's called "The Devil's Delusion" by David Berlinski. It attempts to refute the arguments put forth by proponents of atheism, including the claim that religions have a destructive influence on humanity. It is mainly a response to Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion". The author is also a leading critic of evolutionary theory.

...that would be like arguing with someone who believes the world is flat...where do you start? These people begin their argument by saying that God exists, and then go from there. At that point, I bow out. There is no proof at all that any god they are thinking of exists...it is their delusion and they are welcome to it, but it's hardly something to "debate".

...I say there is no God and no God necessary...My saying so does not constitute a fantastic assertion but rather common sense for there is no evidence at all for the gods of revealed religions...but they, who claim to know of such a god, have the burden of proof...if I make a fantastic claim, it is up to ME to prove it...I can't simply say "I know pigs fly on Mars now YOU prove that they don't, and, if you can't, then you have to admit they MIGHT be up there flying around on Mars"...doesn't work that way.

I don;t have to disprove the existence of yahwe, or Jesus....those who claim they exist have to provide the proof and they can't and never have been able to...for when all is said and done they simply revert to, "you have to simply have faith that they exist"...well, that's a pretty pathetic whimper to end on. No scientist or rational thinker would ever dream of ending a discussion he wasn't able to bring evidence to by saying, "you just have to believe it".
>
>There is an online copy here:
>http://www.2shared.com/document/Dkzxj3dY/The_Devils_Delusion_-_Atheism_.htm
>
>And here is an interview with the author:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyxUwaq00Rc
>
>
>pancho wrote:
>>What he neglected to say is that aside from individual misfits who are always restless and on the look-out for something else, something better, Christianity wasn't spread by people hearing the "Good News"...it was spread by killing them and raising their orphans.
>
>= I am trying to find sources regarding this subject on the internet. I would appreciate it if you could refer me to one.


....I'll look. All you have to do is look to more recent examples of how the Church converted people....take Africa and China and Japan and the New World...unlike the claim that Patrick converted the Irish by simply telling them about a Jew carpenter, which occurred way before we had independent sources or much of written history outside Church scribes, the "conversion" of the people of the New World is well attested to have been done through violence and nothing more....same way Africans were "brought to Jesus"...we know how it was done, the Church doesn't dare produce a fairy tale about how that was done because it's too recent and we have records...we know Africans were stripped of their religions and languages so as to lose their culture and in place of their own religion were given Jesus, for whose worship they were allowed a day of rest, a day they would have taken for ANYBODY's sake, Jesus, Muhammad, Lincoln, Thor, you name it.

...In fact wherever armies didn't go to back the priests, there were no conversions, except for the few who could be bought with gifts and the newborns exposed to die who were taken in by the Church as a good way of raising new Christians.

...In India and China there are a few Christian congregations...about the number of people you'd expect if Christians in those countries were only allowed to marry within their own faith for several hundred years...but nothing like the mass conversions claimed for Ireland and other Roman provinces. It was the armies of Rome who converted people to Christianity, through force....the current pope just barely admitted it.



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