Originally posted by nycflasher
No doubt.
I try to stay out of people's religion so long as they leave my spirituality the **** alone.
I sometimes come down hard on the Catholic church, though; for all of the good the Church has done I can name alot of bad. But I don't expect someone to abandon their faith due to faults in leadership.
Likewise, you have to wonder what is wrong with the direction parts of the Islamic faith has taken. How it is happened and how it can be stopped, rather.
But I agree with you, NewGuy, I have a hard time talking to anyone about Islam these days because some people won't recognize that like all widespread religions it is sacred and fundamentally good.
The problem is people. Faith is only part of life. Actually living and conciously deciding not to murder people because it's not your nature is what makes you...human?
Ok....I will tiptoe around this as best I can.
I agree on the catholic church point, although I can go into further detail as to why it isn't even what it claims.
As far as islam, the koran speaks for its self. It is evil in its entire context.
We can all read something and change it ever so slightly into something good. Does that make the text good? -No. That makes our CHANGE with it into something good. -Or SEEMING good. If the text is a literal rule book, as the Bible and koran are, then you cannot change them and keep within their context or confines.
People ARE the problem, you are right. I do NOT agree however, that all religions or all people are inherintly good. In fact, I think all people by nature are savage egotistical lustful selfish greedy suckers that are lucky we are being given the right to breathe.
Our faith determines our desire to better ourselves to a goal, though. That faith drives us and becomes our core. Everything we do or believe branches outward like a tree from its roots. If one's faith is fundamentally about killing a group or robbing for gain, that is how a person will shape their views and actions. If this faith requires behaviors for salvation, those actions will be unstopable.
If a faith dictates peace and salvation by gift of grace, and not through works, you have a different situation. -One in which a person does what they do for the benefit of what is right, and the benefit of others (like God) and not themselves.
If you put any human in a situation of kill or be killed, we become savage.
If you put a person in a place of "Don't kill, you are saved anyway", you get something 100% different. This is what our nation was founded on- Our Christian heritage. We have definitely strayed, and the idea remains in limited nearly unrecognizable and corrupted form.
This is why I think America and the rest of the world have no clue about what is going on. Nobody knows right from wrong, who believes what, why anything happens, or anything because we aren't looking at what makes people do what they do. The answer is their core beliefs.
The answer: "religion".
:
