Divisive hearts FUEL the silent terrorism of religion

People - typically religious politicians and liberals - like to make out religion that leads to violence actually does not and is being abused.  They show how irresponsible they are by failing to prove or give evidence for such a diagnosis - it is a terrible thing to get wrong.  If anything is abused too much then the abuse is not really an abuse and there is something bad about having it.

Rule based religion leads to dissatisfaction and rebellion and sectarianism. It leads to hypocrisy. If a religion deliberately plans that then it is passive aggressive and devious. Atheism cannot lead to restricting rules. Not having a God means there is less to worry about terms of what is to be done or not done.

Religion excludes people - it has to.  That is what membership is for accepting some which means not accepting or even rejecting the rest.  If a religion is man-made or false or fraud then this alone makes its exclusivism unjustified.  Only a religion with proven ability to make people holier or better people than average might have the right.

Exclusive culture or religion are exclusive in principle or in practice or both. People say exclusivism does not necessarily lead to inequality and violence but can.

# It is the can that can be the biggest problem. How bad a problem it is depends on how many religious people enable the violent ones and how many are violent.

# The can is the reason we can say that religion is subtly pro-violence especially when it is exclusivist religion

# The can means if it is not intrinsically bad it is still bad for “intrinsically can be bad” is just another form of bad.   If something intrinsically can be red then it has the seeds of red in it.  Intrinsically can be bad means the religion in a way is intrinsically bad.  The more ridiculous and unnecessary the religion is the worse it is - and the more inexcusable the risk it poses to goodness.

Religion readily says and gets even some non-religious to say that atheism shows it is false by producing bad fruit and bad people. That is why its own bad works need to be heard more than the good ones.

There is no compensation for doing harm to others.  Religion does compensating works for the evil it does instead of avoiding the evil in the first place. That is itself evil though it looks like nice evil.  Religion then shouldn’t try to be doing good works that we consider compensation. The answer to that is that it is better to do that than to do nothing.  Religion points to the good it does when you expose its evil side and anybody doing that is trying to compensate for the bad and avoid condemnation. Trying to compensate what cannot be compensated for only proves you are bad. The excuse that it is better than nothing is evil. What a religion should do is do good but deny that they are in any way intended to try to compensate.  That involves admitting that it is not truly that good.

Human beings are inherently violent in the sense that they hope bad things will happen to others. The problem of evil religion is not the low percentage of terrorists or whatever. The problem is the percentage that is openly or secretly happy about the terrorism.

If you are looking for a religion or community or society that is wholly innocent of causing any conflict of any kind - physical or social or whatever - you will never find it.  No human grouping is entirely peaceful either in message or in act.   If no society is or can be untouched by violent activity a religion cannot be untouched either.  A whole society will be criticised for the vile actions of a few because parts make a whole and those who refuse to criticise a whole religion for the vile actions of a few are just hypocrites and it is sectarian to give excessive support to any religion.

Do not let religion manipulate you into equating religious terrorism with bombs and so on.  There are other forms that are just as damaging.  It is stupid and perhaps dishonest to argue that if religion were toxic and violent you would see say Catholics and Protestants firing stones at one another every Sunday on their way to Church.  You don't need to be that kind of terrorist to be a terrorist.  The backbiting that Christianity is famous for is terrorism too and has led to unwed mums being incarcerated as slaves.

When people treat the funeral of a redeemed terrorist turned peacemaker with great glory and attention that the lifelong peacemaker never got there is something wrong.  The people are at least partly okay with the terrorism.

Most religious terrorism takes the form of:

making believers turned unbelievers feel like misfits or stupid

subtle pressure to stay in the religion and give it money

sledgehammer faith which makes them fear the fires of Hell should they leave the religion or disobey it

insulting the work of experts and historians and philosophers by ignoring their findings that the religion is man-made or untrue

Religion has started to pretend to be a force for peace. The different religions work out where they agree. But this is a political and public relations exercise. It does not matter if Muslims and say Catholics say they agree that there is one God. What matters is why they think they agree. If a Catholic says there is one God because his parents told him and the Muslim says there is one God because Muhammad said so that is not agreement. If religions do not seem to make society very divisive, they still have divisive hearts.

Politics is corrupt and is socially acceptable bullying.  Religion has used politics and worked with it to create strife.  If religion were really a force for peace politics would not worry about religion so much. In many cases the Church and the state are virtually the same.  The state likes to have some form of intimate relationship with a religion for it wishes to avail of how religion makes a good placebo for those who engage in violence.
 
Religion judges others and the judging inevitably leads to one religion's people judging the members of another religion. Suppose somebody commits a crime. I must ask what if the person is innocent through insanity or guilty? If judging is a sin then I must decide that the person is insane. That will not help! We all know we need to hold people accountable unless it is certain they are mad.

Any body who is decent would vomit at the stuff commanded by God in the Bible and vomit at the prophets who worshipped him.  What would it say if Mein Kampf was a big of a bestseller as the Bible?  In the Bible we have Moses delivering God's command that innocent gay men must be stoned to death. If a man mated with an animal the animal was stoned to death as well.  In religion, Catholicism in particular, there have been cases of clerics and priests hating Jesus and God and the faith so much that they desecrated altars by having sex on them and using communion wafers to seek favours from the Devil. Another trigger was the terrible violence they experienced as a collaborator with the Church and how the religion fueled wars and even instigated wars of religion.  This is a way of trying to gain control over what it is that is causing their distress and pain.  Religion often engages in spiritual abuse - eg you had sex and that is a terrible sin or you will be tormented for this sin forever in Hell or you killed Jesus with your sins for he has to pay for them.  Victims of spiritual, sexual, mental or physical abuse in their childhood or when they are teenagers who suffer at the hands of trusted peers or older people who were supposed to be looking after them may seek relief from their pain the wrong way.  Spiritual directors, guardians, priests, parents and close relatives cause the worst damage.  If you see yourself as Jesus or God's victim you cannot image how terrible the pain will be.  You think you never get away from God for he is everywhere.  In a sense, victims never get away from the perpetrator. The victim suffers more if God is perceived as the abuser or the enabler.  The victim in some cases may try to release the pain by attacking the perpetrators grave or something special to the perpetrator.  If religion is the abuser, the victim may urinate or defecate on something "sacred" or tear up Bibles or even try to be a passive-aggressive "servant" of the religion.  The latter kind of person tries to put others off the religion even as he feigns devotion. He may even condone a religious war as a means to that.  There have been many in the Church who you could suspect of trying to degrade Jesus who after all did take responsibility for the evils of the New Testament and who went as far as to say he had come to fulful its evil law!
 
Liberal believers won't give up on religion despite all the harm it has done. They just change the doctrines or twist them to put them in a better light or sidestep the nasty doctrines. But it is not faith but luck that leaves one religious person being a non-violent believer and another one dangerous.

Love the sinner and hate the sin is irrelevant. It is a soundbite. It makes you think religion is good until you realise how useless it is. It is a distraction.

If there is a subtle reason why religion is bad or produces too many bad people - one terrorist is one too many- their good deeds are stopping you seeing it. They won’t tell you if you are suffering from misdirection and looking at the wrong thing.  That alone marks them as to be avoided.