You don't seem to be making any coherent statement about war and religion apart from the assertion that warmakers often attempt to justify wars on religious grounds.
Then you are missing the major issue. Religious thinking, twisted and fanciful and fake, is so instilled in society that appeals to kill on religious grounds, whether specifically stated in the articles of war or not, have been fantastically successful in prosecuting war.
Vietnam is a sore point. I was there, in country. I was also there at home both before and after my tour where the conservative law-and-order anti-commie crowd waved their flags and their crosses and held community prayer vigils assuring the nation god will grant us victory. If you were there at that time the nation was all Vietnam and god. Billy Graham in the Oval Office. Evil incarnate.
Don't you lie to me telling me Vietnam was not religiously, immorally, maintained by the church. I was there. I lived the god damn fucking reality. And yes, Nam was that bad and, yes, I am that scarred.
The fact is that religion is all about the personal and communal construction of meaning. It's a way of life, not just a suite of claims about the world that you affirm on a provisional basis.
How wonderfully apologetic for absurd thinking. It makes you feel good. Makes you happy in life. Basing your life's meaning on a lie. I won't tell you are not going to heaven.
I am not concerned by the little old woman who feels warm and fuzzy huddled in her Jesus blanket. I'll fetch her a hot toddy and kiss her on the forehead. I am concerned by the movers and shakers, the priests and popes, that lead the organized religions into these evils. We can leave granny out of this.
It's not because we're right and religious people are wrong.
Of course it is. Between fantasy and reality only one of them is right.
You're just telling us you've been defining it in the most puerile, reductive way conceivable and you demand that everyone else take your tendentious definition at face value.
Idiot. I demand nothing. I can't demand anything. The religionist demands society act in accordance with their creed. The apologist demands to be held on equal footing with the priest.
I teach. I spout. I demand not a damn thing. I can't even demand that you read my missives. What the hell good is demand?
What I do is I cite three major issues I find with religion. Let's go through them.
Religion requires a belief in the supernatural. Do you dispute this?
I'm not talking the Sunday Socialite out for some social bonding. I'm talking the priests, the laymen, the acolytes, the pious masses that fill the pews every service. I am talking the true believer. Religion requires the believer to accept the supernatural as real. Example: you must believe in the afterlife and the power of god to take you there.
And in believing so the priest has established his precedents for disconnecting from reality. There is no longer a distinction. Fantasy and reality fold into one.
Religion requires the believer to act in accordance with the fantasy. Do you dispute this?
You must face east to pray and you must eat the cracker. Do onto others. Do not suffer a witch to live. The others must repent of their original sin or have it burned from their souls. In practice through the millennia it was not the believer deciding the action but the priests, and beneath god's holy banner you obeyed.
Finally, the combination of these two, the requirement to believe the fantasy and the requirement to act within the fantasy, has caused no end of evil for the human species.
The history of religion and religious action is filled with violent bloodshed and death. More so than any other philosophical structure ever devised. Do you dispute this?
By discarding reality for fantasy the priests easily justify the blood, the war, to a blind populous that accepts this as authorized by god. That is evil.
So, what is your apologists view of the evil that is religion?
Edited by AZPaul3, .
Edited by AZPaul3, .
Edited by AZPaul3, .
Edited by AZPaul3, .
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