Thoughtforfood said:
Hey, thanks for proving my point! People will develop whatever excuses they need to justify the slaughter of others. Religion is just the most convenient one, but there are many others...which means that maybe the justifications aren't the real problem. Yea, run with that.
Once again you have missed the point. Let me try to explain it better. During the ancient Roman world the pagans made no separation between the "affairs of gods" and those of men, indeed they were "inextricably conected." Making sacrifices to the gods were thus an act of civil participation to the pagans, which all citizens of the empire were expected to perform. The Christians, who had initially developed out of traditional Judaism, refused such civic participation on their religious grounds. Even this would not have led to their periodic persecutions by the Roman authorities however, that is on purely religious grounds, because, as I have mentioned before, the pagans were very religiously tolerant and alowed a multitude of foreign gods into their traditional State cults. Yet what could not be tolerated was their refusal to make that pledge of allegiance to the State in the form of an anual tribute to the emperor, which Christians refused also to do this. Even the Jews did this. Consequently it wasn't because Christians worshed a deity whom they called the Christ (from
Christos in Greek which means Savior), but because they were civil disobedients - many also refused to be conscripted in the army - in an age for which certain civic behavior was compulsory not optional. Tacitus thus described the Christian as the worst breed of civil disobedient, who practices witchcraft. The Roman historian even accused them of
atheism.
As I said before, TFF, the world began to know the ugly side of religion only with the Christian persecution of the pagans (and Jews) begining with the Edict of Theodosius of 380. From that moment forward in the late antique world, religon would forever change its nature in mutating from a predominantly polytheistic status to a
monotheistic identity. And the great monotheistic religons (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) have all in some shape or form also shared political aspects, which in my mind has led to the disaster. When any religious institution mixes too much of the sacred with the profane, and thus the spiritual with the political, the good teachings of those faiths more often than not become emersed and bogged down in the power conflicts of the ages. And this is what precisely happend within that long list of religious based conflicts I have previously provided.
Consequently when these religions make politics too, as the Christian Church did down through the Middle Ages just as was true with Islam during the period, the outcome is inevitably political. And politics is a most dirty business, TFF. It's why we eventually came up with a separation of Church and State in our democratic constitutions, something which hasn't taken place in several Islamic States. Yet as I see it, especially in the American political scene of late, that important separation of Church and State has become frightfully tenuous if it still exists in a meaningful way at all.
Rationalism, reason, enlightenment and science begining in the XVII century had allowed the State to eventually be emancipated from the religious institutions, where a return to constitutional laws (as was actually the case with the Ancient Roman State), not religious dogmas, were from now on going to be the guiding principles for which the actions of men would be judged for or against in terms of their rightousness. It's true, though, that with an excessive pride in modernism, scientific positivism and a false utilization of socialist ideology on the right and left wings alike we did experience the disaster of the XX century Nazi, Fascist as well as Stalinist communism movements. Though, again, this was a fortunately brief historical experiment and in these cases, at any rate, the zeal of ideology had transformed the State into a "religion." Thus the same mixing of the "sacred" (in the form of ultra nationalism, racial purity, a missionary calling to uphold some political dogma or ideal) with the political, led these regimes to perpetrate the same types of crimes against humanity, which formally had been commited by the State under complete sway of the religious institutions as my list has demonstrated. Religious institutions since late antiquity, which, through the belief in holding exclusive ownership of God's will and the Truth, had provided justification for the worst type of crimes and injustices that happened throughout this long historical period as cited on my list.
Consequetly for me religion is not to be so easily let of the hook for its crimes. Such would be an all too convenient method of cleaning the dirty laundry of history. And many of its good teachings we can in any case find in the great philosophers' works of the pagan and enlightenment civilizations. In the end, the religion of today, the one that likes to play politics too: has become a weapon of mass destruction for the ignorant, the fascist, the desperate and the frustrated (or all of the above). And it is like this in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish States alike.
And yes, this is why, it is quite an arduous task indeed to separate a political discussion from a religious one. Precisely because the religious leadiship has always demanded to have a political voice. And in our world it has been that way since the days of Theodosius. The Evangelical movements in America, especially in the Republican party, tells us that this is still true today.
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