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What's the f-ing big deal about LDS?

Oceansides said:
Religion, is not inherently good or evil. The tenants of Christianity are love, acceptance, forgiveness, generosity, taking care of each other. Even the old testament made provisions for equality under the law for the foreigner and the poor.

Yes, its highjacked by people, to do other things. Just like someone might pick up an axe, that is made to cut down trees, and lop off heads.

Would communism fall in as a religion? In the past hundred years, extremism and politics have killed more people than anything else. And fun fact- perhaps in WW2 the Catholic church was complacent, but it is by no means infallible. It is a human organization, just like every other organization.

Made by God perhaps, but run by Man.

And for the Catholic church being complacent in WW2, you had Christians and not, smuggling Jews away from the Nazis. The Danish resistance ultimately meant that 99% of the Jews living in Denmark survived the war (mostly by smuggling them to Sweden).

The Catholic church spends more than anyone else on providing health care, particularly for AIDS/HIV in Africa. Thats some pretty big fucks given.
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The point that religion is tribalism still stands. I can argue that is the worst form of tribalism there is. You can find all the examples of people doing good in the name of religion, I can give you tenfold reasons why humanity would be better giving up indoctrinating people in irrational dogmas that divide us much more than unite us.
 
So, do you believe in the public school system?

The one that teaches children to pledge allegiance?

That indoctrinates them to be proud Americans?

The system that does not teach right and wrong, but getting ahead?

Wherever you have 2 or more people, you have tribes.

EDIT-

The Ethnic gangs are also tribes. They take care of their own, and they fight each other. The death toll is pretty staggering. Salinas CA, id estimate that most of the murders (95+%), are gang related. What do the gangs give back to the world?
 
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Corb said:
Taking religion metaphorically is not really an option if you get indoctrinated since childhood to accept the revealed truth of the religious dogma as reality.
I disagree fundamentally with you that without indoctrinated dogma average people would still justify suicide bombings and genocide as easily.
Exactly like Steven Weinberg said in the quote above and exactly like the Voltaire quote I posted earlier in this thread already.
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I like talking to you, courteous and making good points. Seems rare sometimes. :)

Don't think I said anything about suicide bombings, but it's fine just the same because that's roughly how I feel. Note that I'm not talking literally, as in the exact number of people would die the exact way, that's silly. But, bad people would still do bad things using other methods, not concerned with how successful one method may hypothetically be over another. To me, the quote you posted supports my position because it focuses on the human aspect and not the medium.

Just for fun, can we both clarify our positions? Mine is simple; there is no inherent evil in religion and the negatives we see are the result of people's shitty application of it. Yours is that religion is bad in itself? As in, by design?
 
Patriotism is in fact a form of indoctrinated tribalism. And I am not very fond of it either. But it does not have near the potential for dehumanizing other groups of people as religious dogma has. Not even close.
 
Corb said:
Patriotism is in fact a form of indoctrinated tribalism. And I am not very fond of it either. But it does not have near the potential for dehumanizing other groups of people as religious dogma has. Not even close.
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Japanese occupation of China, WW2.

All in the name of the Emperor.
 
byke said:
I like talking to you, courteous and making good points. Seems rare sometimes. :)
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Thank you, I appreciate that as well!

Just for fun, can we both clarify our positions? Mine is simple; there is no inherent evil in religion and the negatives we see are the result of people's shitty application of it. Yours is that religion is bad in itself? As in, by design?
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Absolutely. First as I said because it separates people in different distinct groups. And it convinces them, they alone have the revealed truth.
Also because it forces people to accept irrational ideas as reality on blind faith.
I hate re bringing that Voltaire quote again, but it makes such a valid point.
Plus if you take each religion and dissect it there are plenty examples of how that dogma can be used to incite hate, disrespect and even violence against other groups of people. Based on race, sexuality, gender or religion.
Look at the issue of equality for gay people. I have never heard a rational argument against it. All of it is basically bible thumping and fear mongering by religious folks.
 
Oceansides said:
Was Hitler regarded as a God? Stalin? Pol Pot?
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They all had cults of personality based around themselves. I grew up as a child under a communist dictatorship. One that took its blueprint straight from North Korea.
Its religion in every way. In the NK case it even has a supernatural mythological side.
Look at the way they indoctrinate their ideologies on the common man and compare it to the cult of personality built around Jesus.
By the book.

edit:
[youtube]mxLBywKrTf4[/youtube]
 
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Oceansides said:
Was Hitler regarded as a God? Stalin? Pol Pot?
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no, but he in invoked god to further his cause. its littered throughout his speeches and in mein kamph numerous times.

heres some speeches
it matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.
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My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
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We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.
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We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
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Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.
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shall I go on? hows one more for fun?

National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity
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Corb said:
Absolutely. First as I said because it separates people in different distinct groups. And it convinces them, they alone have the revealed truth.
Also because it forces people to accept irrational ideas as reality on blind faith.
I hate re bringing that Voltaire quote again, but it makes such a valid point.
Plus if you take each religion and dissect it there are plenty examples of how that dogma can be used to incite hate, disrespect and even violence against other groups of people. Based on race, sexuality, gender or religion.
Look at the issue of equality for gay people. I have never heard a rational argument against it. All of it is basically bible thumping and fear mongering by religious folks.
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Okay, thanks for that. Speaking mostly to the modern brain, this is where I think interpretation comes into play. This is where I expect people of reasonable intellect to say, "hey, this part sounds screwed up and creates unnecessary conflict with those people over there, which is counter to so many other teachings...let's not focus on this". In practice, this almost never happens, but in searching for the root cause, I still say it's the omission of critical thinking in the practical application that comes first.
 
In Nazi German a third of the population prayed once a week and invoked Hitler on a daily basis. The other 2/3 were along for the ride, which is how fanaticism works. You get sucked in and then it's all over. Hitler NEVER got a majority vote, except when he outlawed other parties.
 
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