In Reply to: As I said in my OP, unless they're screaming at me, I do let them posted by sprinter on April 30, 2024 at 08:53:26
right? :)
I'll try to hit the main points without turning this into a polemic, but the way I approach religious conflict is that ideas clash with ideas and people clash with people. The problem in religious wars is not that the religion demands a certain course of action but that people who adopt a particular religion and bond with others around that religious identity also develop a separate group identity that takes a position about other group identities. Tribe against tribe is the one of the most basic primate reactions I can think of and it's in our DNA, practically.
Groups form around religion, language, a firm believe that this guy should have succeeded the prophet as opposed to that guy, or this local team as opposed to that local team. If we did not kill each other on the basis of religion, we would do it on the basis of language, or the family the groups descended from. We will find something.
The underlying problem, to me, is the pathological relationship individuals bear with groups (= tribes) that their demographics dictate that they belong to. As long as children are not taught to establish a healthy distance between the individual and the tribe, this sh*t will continue.
That's why the same area can go through periods when different religions live side by side and intermarry and all that, followed by periods when they are at each other's throats. What changes between those periods is not the faith each party adheres to but the social and political circumstances they live in.
Circling back to the person who's yelling at you (probably because they were not able to develop a personality or individuality that lies outside of their tribe), yeah, that's a big problem. But the problem is not what he's yelling at you about, whether it is that you'll burn in hell or become food for worms, but that they have a pathological hole in their lives they've filled with some belief, some point of view, whatever sounded great to them at the point of devotion. The person who's yelling at you because you'll burn in hell, will next day yell at you for eating your burger with mustard instead of ketchup.
it's most certainly a central tenant of Christianity that those that believe go to heaven and those that have doubts go to hell.
Yeah, because Christianity, like other Abrahamic religions, and perhaps many other religions, is an identity signifier. It's an affirmation that you belong in a tribe and that tribe is naturally the one favored by your god ... it all grows from that. It's a PR line that attracts new recruits, at the end of the day.
What would you say then is the reason somebody wears a cross on the outside of their shirt rather than the inside?
Self-expression. The same reason people people wear Metallica t-shirts. They are signalling something about themselves to the rest of the world.