Recently I was debating an individual in another forum who blamed the mass murders committed by Communist regimes on their ideology. The ideas of people like Marx and Lenin did it! I argued against that claim pointing out that ideology has no causal power of its own, and the blame for murders committed by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot rests on them. To be consistent, I realized that the same logic should apply to people like Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of The Spanish Inquisition. Christian dogma cannot cause anything much less cause violence. Those religious people who commit violence commit violence because they are violent people. Belief systems like Christianity are more of an effect of violence than a cause of violence. Those who wish to crush their enemies can do so while using religion to describe the reasons for that violence and attempt to justify their violence. For example, if a group of people are in dire need of vital resources and think that they need to use force to wrest it from those who already possess it, they can attack their victims and take what they possess telling the world that God commanded it!
So it looks like bad people making religion is the answer to my question.
Agree? Disagree?
So it looks like bad people making religion is the answer to my question.
Agree? Disagree?