Catholicism has something like 1.5 billion members, so it’s also sort of a big thing.
Again though, I’m not saying this thread or the other is bad, it just struck me how easy it is for us to attack Christian sects, but we seem much more reluctant to level the same kind of criticisms at other religions whose members do real bad stuff.
Asked and answered above.
This is the bottom line why.
I don’t have the level of knowledge to really discuss the various branches of Islam in a meaningful way. I’m willing to discuss and lambast specific bad actors that are in the news (ISIS, the Saudis, etc.) That said, I lack the personal experiences I have with some Christian faiths so I don’t think my interest/motivation would be as high to follow news and carry on discussions regarding the faith as a whole. If Republican fever dreams came true and Islamists were trying to impose Sharia law on America, I’m sure my interest in discussing the faith would go up dramatically!
Put another way, I’ve never been into comic books but I’ve seen some comic book movies. I might pop in a movie thread if there’s something I want to discuss about my experience or opinion of the film I saw but I don’t spend any time in comic book threads. It’s not due to any reticence in having those discussions, they’re just out of my wheelhouse.
Add me to the list of folks w/ a similar trajectory. Hell, I have a college minor in New Testament Greek.
Maybe we should form a support group. With bourbon.
Koiné is fun! ;)
Well, I don’t drink, but I would join that support group gladly. I wish I had one years ago, when I went through the worst part of my deconstruction process. Luckly I had some experience in braving through things without any external help, after a life of experience in that regard, but I can only imagine how easier it would be if I had support from people who went through the same thing… and I shiver to think of people going through that without the same kind of mental stamina I had developed at that point and without support.
I suspect it’s because we mostly agree on those Islamic sects and they’re not likely to be part of our communities.
If the Southern Baptists are doing horrible shit, well, odds are good they have a church in our towns and members of their flock are people we see every day. If Wahhabists are doing horrible shit, we literally couldn’t find one, much less their mosque if we tried.
Also a discussion of “the Saudis are fucking awful” is one we’ve had, but everyone just agrees their fucking awful and that’s usually the end of the discussion. No one is pretending otherwise. When it comes to Christian organizations they’re supposedly non-evil. Our President is a Catholic. Every town probably has a Catholic church in it, or near it. I’ve literally never seen a mosque in person that I’m aware of. And I lived in a city that had one. My hometown has like… 5 churches.
Well considering child marriage and women don’t have a voice (in the Middle East)… it’s kind of a given that there is nothing but horrible abuse there.
But Christians always try to claim they’re “the good ones”, and “we’re better than everyone else”. Considering the high almighty perch they put themselves on, it’s only right that perch should be chopped down when they represent the opposite of what Jesus taught.
In faraway lands there are various groups of primitive and/or fanatical dirtbags of a certain religion who might like to crash a plane into me (but they never will) or shoot me (but they never will) or stab me (but they never will) so they can say they’re number one.
Here at home there are literally millions of primitive and/or fanatical dirtbags who would very much like to see me suffer to some degree for being an atheist, for having sex with nonwhite girls and girls on the Pill, for fraternizing with Jews and foreigners, for being highly educated, for not pretending to consider it a possibility that the tribal god of the ancient Hebrews is the only real tribal god but no longer loves the Hebrews because he impregnated a Hebrew virgin with himself and arranged to be executed and tormented by the Hebrew adversary god so that he could get an eternal exemption in the cosmic justice system for all those who “invite him into their hearts” in the future, and above all for refusing to say that “we” are number one.
They are eager to appoint someone supreme dictator if he’ll tell them what they want to hear and give them power over others. They actually tried and will try again.
As Muhammad Ali once put it, Ain’t no Islamist ever called me the Devil for playing D&D and owning a copy of High Voltage!
Also, Southern Baptist chicks are fat.
Go to a Southern Baptist pot luck.
Go for dessert first otherwise won’t be none. Two plates of dessert before the main course is the norm.
This right here is how I can tell you aren’t kidding about having a SB background, Craig. This is the unvarnished truth about the pot-lucks.
Every Wednesday night at the church I grew up in. That shit was epic.
Heh, well the Muslims think they’re the goods ones, too.
I know. It all sucks.
Anyone who doesn’t occasionally ponder whether they are the baddy is probably the baddy.
By way of example (I picked two random results from a google search.) Point being, even religions with pacifism as tenents are still used to persecute ‘out’ groups. I suppose we might make the (I guess obvious) conclusion it’s not the religion per se that’s at fault as much as it is the people who practice it.
I imagine religion will exist for as long as humans do as it seems that’s the only way (many) people can find comfort with the chaos of life, i.e. bad things happen because it’s all part of “God’s plan” and not because you know random shit just happens.
While I don’t personally begrudge anyone their religion it’s when they want to foist it on all walks of life, from law and business to education and entertainment that I have issues. Faith is just that, it’s a voluntary belief. I think almost everyone here probably agrees with that though.
“What Jesus taught” is itself a matter of dispute, in interpretation and accuracy both. Every believer tends to pick-and-choose, really, because contradictions and anachronisms abound.
Yup.
I don’t. Faith is not always voluntary; it’s something usually imprinted on people, normally from a very early age, by either family or culture. And I’ve known plenty of people who were prisoners of faith (which in some ways explains why all the hypocrisy is so common), because they didn’t see another faith (or lack thereof) as a viable option.
It isnt often that I agree with lectroids, but in this case JMJ speaks truth.
Its hard to talk about things you know little about. I dont know much about islam.
I know plenty about the evil and hypocrisy of christianity, and some of them want the goverment to put rape victims in jail for getting an abortion. Fuck them and the false god they rode in on.
Apropos of nothing probably but distantly related: In Jerusalem, when I visited the Church of the Sepulcher, because well why not, I had a chance to chat with the caretaker. There are something like six different Christian sects that all claim authority over the site, which is supposedly built on the place Jesus was crucified and where he was (temporarily, as Christians have it) buried. As one might imagine, these different brothers in Christ behave about as well as you would expect brothers to behave. That is, historically they’ve been at each other’s throats, descending even to physical violence among the clergy over things as banal as who gets to sweep which rooms and who gets to change a light bulb (no, I’m not making that up, though I cannot independently verify any of it).
The story goes, and from what I can tell this seems to be the case, that to avoid conflict and never-ending struggles over supremacy at the site, a Muslim family has been entrusted for centuries with the key to the place, and the overall maintenance and operation of the compound. They figured the Muslims didn’t have a dog in that fight really, and so far it seems to have worked.
As I recall, arguments over which denomination got to be in charge of which holy sites was a major cause of the Crimean War.