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Originally Posted by crukster
No, not all, I mean I don't like the way atheism clicked.
You're right Geddy I apologise. If you wanna debate it another time I'm cool with that Janszoon.
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Not trying to be a jackass but I don't want to have to read pages and pages of arguments when it's not really what the thread is for.
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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
Agreed. One reason I am interested in seeing what sorts of religious rules or laws or philosophies people follow, and why, is that sometimes beliefs encourage followers to hurt others. I wish no belief system encouraged this.
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Unfortunately the fluid nature of many religious texts (including my own!) allow people to claim that whatever violence you care to name, from suicide bombings to wars and murders, are license to kill, injure and destroy 'in the name of God'. You've also got the major issue that different denominations and different groups accept some texts to be more important to others, or reject completely some books/chapters/readings, such as Christian denominations and the debate about the Apocrypha, or the Muslim groups who reject the Hadith (there are a growing number of groups who do this).
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I think most people want to be able to practice their religion or lack thereof in peace. When a person doesn't let you do that, feeling angry in response is only natural. I know *I* want autonomy. So, I feel it is wrong when a secular regime (such as China's) forbids the practice of certain religions. And I feel it is wrong when a religious regime forbids the practice of certain religions and non-religions.
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The grand majority of attempts to ban religions and ideologies is largely doomed to fail. It didn't work in ancient Rome with the Christians, it didn't work in Stalin's Russia and it isn't working in China either. You can knock down a building (such as a church) but you can't police what is in people's heads.
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This brings us back to the issue you mentioned earlier: sometimes the way people observe their particular belief systems involves interfering in the lives of other people who don't want interference, such as people who want to marry the adult whom they love, or teachers who want to teach science in science classrooms rather than religious beliefs attempting to mascarade as science, or people who don't want to die at the hands of terrorists.
When one person's observance of her beliefs (whether they are religious or not) interferes with another person's autonomy, then we have conflict.
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Again, the fluid nature of many religious systems means that whilst some periods in history and some cultural groups see people of different religions live happily together whilst others do not. The Roman empire is a prime example: there were some 5000 different recognized religions, belief systems and cults, both from within the Roman empire and outside it. You could pretty much believe in any gods you so chose, one or many, Roman and foreign, local, national or from the pantheon, and there was so sense of conflict in doing so.
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I'd be troubled, too, by anyone squelching a discussion of evolution, since I feel that learning about how life procreates and has changed over time is a wonderful way to understand and appreciate life more.
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It wasn't just the evolution thing which struck me but the constant keeping happy of this group by our ministers and lay preachers. They constantly wanted the worship band to stick to 'traditional' songs rather than what they termed 'throw-away' modern songs (I was in the worship band so this annoyed me because no-one else had an issue with the songs we did), they didn't like things like the youth groups' annual service (where all the children of the church did the entire service), complaining that it was 'out of character for the church' (it consisted of things like song/dance acts, plays, shorter sermons than the normal service and only a small worship music section). I personally thought it good to encourage the kids to do it.