Religion has not done a lot of good in the world lately. Turns out the “my way or the highway” approach creates nothing but death and violence.
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Traditionally, churches and other religious institutions, have been good at building community and programs that benefit the less fortunate among us. You know, the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” thing.
More and more, though, it has devolved into not much more than political extremism and often hateful rhetoric and even calls to physical violence.
In all seriousness, community is the biggest benefit of religion, and the reason I’m ok with it existing in modern society. The idealized church (and these do still exist in smaller churches) is a safe place for people to come, not be judged, and find acceptance and support.
A friend of mine goes to a church like this, and honestly sometimes I’m jealous. I’m as atheist as they come in my personal beliefs, but hearing all the actually cool stuff they do to support their members is really cool. I don’t agree with their religion, but they’re practicing it right as far as I’m concerned.
Religion should absolutely be either personal or small community, though. As soon as you have states using it as justification for violence, that religion has stopped being useful or acceptable.
Agreed, it’s mostly community as far as personal benefits. We had a friend group through it that fell apart recently and my wife wants to go back to church only for the community.
Outreach is mostly a guise in my opinion, a show that’s put on to make the congregation think their money is being used wisely. I have a lot of disdain for organized religion though, having grown up in it and painfully “deconstructing” a couple years ago. I can’t step foot in a church ever again (minus a wedding).
Religion can give a framework of morality when people lack one. There’s, of course, secular justifications for morality, but in times of hardship and despair, some could find it incredibly difficult to see a humanist perspective as justified, e.g. it’s other people who create hardships for people, so why should I be good to others when they won’t be good to me?
Religion can fill in that gap. The assumption of a benevolent omnipotence can inspire people to help others when it seems pointless and ineffective to do so. There’s a quote attributed to Rabbi Tarfon in the Pirkei Avot, “It is not up to you to finish the task, but you are not free to avoid it.” that has personally helped me a great deal to remember to work hard to do good and help others, even in a small way, when it seems I can have no effect on a great injustice.
Religion can also give structure and guidance to life when things fall apart. Jewish tradition, ritual, and holidays in particular can be quite grounding in hard times. To give another example, during the pandemic, many people lost their daily, weekly, monthly, routines. I, personally, found it very grounding and calming to observe the rituals of my ancestors, if for nothing else to mark the passage of time, but also as a reminder to take time in your life to slow down and refocus yourself.
Another poster mentioned the benefit of community religion can provide, so I won’t.
The danger comes in when ritual, tradition and faith turn into ardent dogmatic following, zealotry. When people use these tools for finding morality and peace in our lives and with others as justification for horror and malice, they lose sight of these benefits and worsen the world around us at great harm to our fellow humans and ourselves. Something capable of doing great good is twisted and weaponized for political purposes and the darkest of human desires.
Religion works best when we separate doctrine from strict action and reflect on the intent of tradition and law and use them to inspire us to make the world a better place for all people.
What’s going on now feels very much an example of this horrendous zealotry. I cannot see how these actions help us be better stewards of the planet, how they help heal the world or accomplish anything we should aspire to. It’s heartwrenching to see demagogues pervert faith into casus beli for political and military victory.
Religion isn’t unique in the way it gets twisted for vile actions, there are many, many secular ideologies that this happens with, as well, in blatant and subtle ways. But I understand how it can feel especially bitter when something rhetorically benevolent gets used so horrendously.
Pope hats are kinda cool.
It gives some people a lot of comfort.
Religion, and British imperialism
The Roman empire’s spawn. Western imperialism and christianity/islam.
As a Brit I’m always shocked people focus on us so much. Like yeah we fucked up a lot of places and did awful things, but basically every country in Europe has committed atrocities that are as bad if not worse, like the French in Vietnam or Belgium in Africa, or mother fucking Spain basically wiping put the entire south American continent.
Most of the current day border conflicts are related to the past century’s British policy, both due to the extent of the British Empire and its little interest in preventing trouble in their way out. You see similar issues with French ex-colonies, but since they weren’t as many they don’t appear as much in the news. Border conflicts in old Spanish colonies mostly took place during the 19th century, and they’ve been independent for long enough for their current issues not to have as much to do with Spain anymore. In contrast, there are British people alive today who were kicking around when the victors of WWII decided to split Palestine in half without asking Palestinians for their opinion, and afterwards chose to ignore the ethnic cleansings of Palestinians.
In any case, you shouldn’t take of this personally, unless you actually hold any position of relative power.
Palestinians were in fact asked for their opinion before the UN voted to split it in half…
There’s a shituation very comparable to Palestine happening today in Western Sahara. A former colony of Spain.
Palestinians were in fact asked for their opinion before the UN voted to split it in half…
Do you have a source for this?
There’s a shituation very comparable to Palestine happening today in Western Sahara. A former colony of Spain.
Fair enough. Spain had an UN mandate that ordered them to oversee the process of decolonization, and instead they just gave it up to Morocco against the wishes of the Saharawi people themselves. The contemporary attitude of both the US and Spain is disgusting in this issue.
Edit sorry client won’t post links
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine
While Jewish organizations collaborated with UNSCOP during the deliberations, the Palestinian Arab leadership boycotted it
So the majority of Palestinians just flat out refused to discuss splitting their country apart, just like it would happen everywhere. The way in which you presented facts is disturbingly misleading.
Three things: Scale, recency and contrition or perceived lack thereof.
The British Empire is the largest empire there has ever been. At its greatest extent, in 1920, it covered about 1/4 of the entire world, long after having lost many holdings like the US. The second largest, the Mongol Empire, reached almost the same size, but hundreds of years earlier.
In the same time period as the British, the Russian empire covered <20% in 1895, but its proportion of colonial lands to their own was much smaller than for the British Empire and the proportion of the current world population living in those areas is also much smaller. The French colonial empire covered less than 1/10th of the world at its peak in 1920, and was by far the other largest recent holding of colonies geographically and culturally outside of the immediate sphere of the holding country.
Spain is rarely brought up, I think, in large part because the Spanish empire reached its peak in the early 1800’s and so is “history”. Belgium doesn’t get discussed at much because 98% of their colonial holdings was Leopold II’s personal ownership of the Congo Free State. And then we get to the last bit: Contritition.
Nobody goes around saying the massive scale of gross abuse that happened under Leopold II’s rule of the Congo Free State was a good thing. Few people I’ve met ever defend France’s atrocities in Vietnam. Even the defence of their ownership of Algeria, which was special enough to trigger an attempted coup against Charles de Gaulle when he wanted to let it have independence because many saw it as part of France itself, is relatively muted.
But there’s still mainstream support for the British Empire in the UK. There are still people who insist the British Empire was awesome for the colonies that were exploited because they got English and rails and British legal systems and that somehow outweighs the mass murder and brutal exploitation and erasure of local cultures.
E.g. this survey from 2019, where 32% were proud of the British Empire, 37% were neutral, and only 19% considered it “more something to be ashamed of”. 32% were proud of their country’s history of colonialism and oppression. Critically this was significantly higher than for other colonial powers other than the Dutch. At the same time 33% thought it left the colonies better off vs. only 17% who thought they were worse off.
I’m not British, but I’ve lived in the UK for 23 years, and I’ve experienced this attitude firsthand from even relatively young British people (ok, so all of them have been Tories) - a refusal to accept that the fact that a substantial number of these former colonies had to take up arms to get rid of British rule might perhaps be a little bit of a hint that the colonial rule was resented and wrong.
No other modern empire has left behind such a substantial proportion of the world population living in countries that have either a historical identity tied up to rebelling against British rule, and/or have relatively recently rebelled against British rule, and/or still have substantial reminders, such as Commonwealth membership or the British monarch as their monarch. When a proportion of the British population then keeps insisting this was great, actually, there you have a big part of it.
We aren’t giving the others a pass, but this shitshow has a certain Etonian stench. It’s like the British Empire looked at Zionist and saw a shared colonial heart…
He or she just wanted to look smart, nevermind
Religion or not, it sure would be nice if we could not killing civilians and not genocide.
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Religion is a plague. It’s the reason we’re going to destroy ourselves. How many of the people who deny climate change (and every other batshit insane position taken by lunatics) are religious right-wingers? By far, most.
At least someone has common sense
I mean, Bernie Sanders always had that. That’s a good part of why people liked him.
See him arguing against various wars where he stood among few against the many and was so far right on these takes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_om-x323Em0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZo97nFS9GU
One of the comments under the videos puts it well:
For every wrong move america has made in the last 40 years, there is a video of Bernie arguing against it.
Bernie being on the right side of history as usual.
Even when international powers would force the place into two countries the fighting will never stop. Because both don’t have a country and want one and both ground their claim on religion. The religions are incompatible. Hamas consider Jews as the enemy of Allah quite literally.
Jews were pushed out of countries and killed and therefore promised land. So land was simply taken from a torn place that couldn’t protect itself. Palestinians are also pushed out of countries and killed and want their land back. The Brits just left them with this conflict because they couldn’t handle it. And now probably no one will be able to stop Israel anymore because they were given the better hand in terms of weapons.
Asking either side to stop won’t work. Ban religion instead. They could both live there.
Before 1943, both Muslims and Jews lived in Palestine in peace, but as immigration increased, so did tension. It wasn’t about religion, it was about land.
There were plenty of Jewish leagues, sports, ect, called the Palestinian Jewish (league name).
Didn’t immigration to Israel increase due to persecution of Jewish people? So if there was no Christ / bible leading to Judaism separating from Christianity, we wouldn’t have the resulting anti-semitism that caused Jewish people to return to their biblical homeland and displace the indigenous Palestinians. Honest inquiry.
I think so, too. With no religion, anti-Semitism could probably not exist. Although, it isn’t purely a religious group but also an ethnicity.
Jewish people are native to the place Palestine/Israel as well, btw. Even when you leave out the religious claim going back to Abraham, there are multiple archeological and genetic findings that confirm Jewish people have lived there already thousands of years ago.
The only reason being jewish has an ethnic component is, of course, religious. Who else cares which parti-fucking-ticular tribe their ancestors belonged to 2.500 years ago
“In peace”
Not really. There has been conflict between the two groups since pretty much the day the first Jewish immigrants/settlers arrived in the 1800’s. The first recorded violent action was in 1882 when an Arab was shot at a wedding by a Jew so a bunch of Arabs started a small riot vandalising Jewish property. And since there has been so many riots and shooting and checks notes mule thefts, done as retaliation to retaliation to retaliations.
One incident on a certain date doesn’t mean there’s conflict between groups. There were plenty of jewish and muslim neighbours helping/hiding eachother when extremists started trying to bully/kill the other group from villages. Living together in peace requires both groups to defeat their extremists
Jews lived in Arab and Muslim countries as second-class citizens at best. There are also many Palestines in Israel living there, doing sports, allowed to vote, etc. But somehow in that case it’s not okay.
Almost as if it’s okay to treat Jewish people as lesser, but not Muslims.
The whole fights and anger about the city Jerusalem is driven by religion, as well.
Even when Palestinians could live in Israel as first class citizens they reject it because they are anti-zionist. Which is a religious standpoint, even when Zionism itself is of course also a religious standpoint.
Please read this for example, which I think makes a very good point on how religion drives the conflicts:
Oh yes of course banning religion is the obvious answer that will lead to harmony. Even in your magical world where religion doesn’t exist this conflict would then be on racial lines.
Exactly, people use religion to justify acts that would otherwise be seen as irrational and inhumane. But with religion out of the picture, people will still commit the same atrocities and just try to find other ideologies as justification, such as racism.
So land was simply taken from a torn place that couldn’t protect itself.
I mostly agree, but ‘taken’ is somewhat reductive, it was more like a forced partition. Jews already lived there and were already emigrating there en masse long before the end of WWII, Zionism ramped up in the late 1800’s, 60 years before the Jewish state. There was already violence in that area through a lot of early Zionism and a civil war in the few years leading up to partition.
It would be like if the UK decided tomorrow to give 35% of the US to Hispanic Americans despite them only being ~20% of the population, it just a weird way to split up a country that is bound to cause conflict. (Jews were 30% of the population of Israel/Palestine when it was split in half) No one actually expected Israel to survive the wars at the start, as you said they just wanted to push the ‘problem’ onto someone else. If you’re a displaced population what do you do if no one wants to take you and your under threat of death most places you go? It’s important to remember that Jews were pretty much universally hated everywhere in the world prior to WWII, they didn’t have many prospects for peace.
I suspect however that if partition never happened, there would still be ethnic conflict in that area and it would have just shifted who was the oppressed group. Which really highlights the real problem as you implied, the inability for many religious communities to live side by side. Look at India, Nigeria, Ireland, etc. Whenever you have 2 prominent religions in large enough numbers living closely together their fanaticism often doesn’t allow a shared sense of national unity. Banning religion is a great way to make religion popular again though, not the best way to get rid of it. A secular education is the best way to get rid of religion.
If a law carries no punishment, is it even a law?
Seems like more a set of guidelines that people are free to ignore whenever it suits them.
It’s too on the nose when religions claim they are coming in the name of peace yet they continue to leave a bloody trail. Yes, I condemn Hamas just as much as I condemn the killing of innocent Palestinians in the name of religion.
Innocent Palestinians are being killed by an ethno state so let’s make sure we call it what it is. It’s colonial sentiments and Jewish supremacy that are behind this.
Is it in the name of religion? How so?
Well I’m glad to hear more people stating the obvious. Well done Bern.
I guess Israel had enough of Hamas’ shit.
War crimes are war crimes even if you feel like you have a good reason (hint: there’s no good reason to cut off the watersupply to an entire population.)
Best get to releasing those prisoners then.
Or maybe let the Palestinians take care of their own security because it seems the only palestinians with guns do so illegally and fall in with Hamas. How do we expect a peace treaty work otherwise? Do we expect to make sociopaths like Hamas docile with peace?
Pott calling the kettle black.
