killing for god

[juldea]

Still reading Trinity. It's really appalling the killing and other atrocities done in the name of god.

Even if you can point and say, "That was them, they were mistaken, they totally did religion the wrong way," I have never heard of someone killing another human being "for atheism."[1]

I can't think of a better reason to be an atheist.

[1] Feel free to provide examples if you have them.

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Okay, so we're interpreting things differently.

Chrisitnaity is built around the idea that Jesus came to earth as the physical incarnation of God to live as a man, and then suffer and ie for our sins. As long as we (Christians) believe that (and are actually sorry for the sins we may have committed, and different denominations have different standards for this.) we get to go to heaven. Also, we're supposed to try and live good lives and have as few sins as possible to be sorry for.

The "living good lives" bit is where it gets mucky. The hating people who don't believe as you do thing (even if those others are Christians, just a different demonination) is acceptable to some people. And they think God is alright that. Some think that hating others is not so much a good thing, but eating pork is fine. Some think that tithing is manditory, so give what they can afford, some don't bother. What *I* think is a good life, what *you* think is a good life may or may not be what God thinks is a life. That's between you and God and me and God.

Someday I want to sit down with God and ask just what the hell he was thinking. Because I do not believe for one second that this mess we have now is what he intended.

[tpau]

mm, yes. i agree with everythign you say.

and yeah i tink we are all fuckign it up royally...

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

As long as we (Christians) believe that (and are actually sorry for the sins we may have committed, and different denominations have different standards for this.) we get to go to heaven.

Well, there's that whole Doctrine of the Elect bit put for by Calvin, which argues that it really doesn't matter what you believe or do, God's already decided who's getting into heaven and who's not.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Which I totally do not get. At all. As I recall (I don't know much about Calvinism) the standards for behavior are pretty strict. No drinking, no dancing, laughing is frowned upon kinda way... if your afterlife fate has been decided already, where's the carrot and the stick to keep people doing what they're supposed to do?

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

I don't get it, either, but then, I don't get much of Christianity. As I understand it, your good behaviour in this life was a way of demonstrating that you were of the elect. Sort of like a dress code for the Pearly Gates Country Club.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

If you are of the elect, you will behave in the right way; if not, you will not. Elect-ness is not something that you know in advance that gives you a free pass. Predestination is from God's perspective, not yours.

...which really makes it kind of a pointless distraction to mention it in doctrine, but this comes from the time when they had all these philosophers asking questions like "why didn't God just make us all good instead of setting up a boobytrapped universe leading to eternal torture?" and they had to come up with answers that didn't make God look like a complete sadistic asshole.

This is just the "you're not actually important in the grand scheme of things; your entire existence is just a good-and-evil sorting process on the way to making God's ultimate thingummy with everything in its proper place" answer, as opposed to the "uh, I guess he doesn't do the eternal torture thing after all" answer that you get from the Universalists. The Catholics, of course, try to have it both ways.