THEOTERRORISM - THE DISTINCTIVE TERRORISM THAT RELIGION INSTILS AND LAUNCHES

Religion can be theoterrorism or enable it.  It often is theoterrorism.  Some forms such as Christianity or Islam definitely are!  A terrorist organisation that is lazy with terrorism is still terrorist and most Christians and Muslims are lazy.

Religion sees itself as and functions as a nest in which the egg of community, the egg of politics, the egg of religious education, the egg of culture are to be found in.  Thus as the eggs are always never fully good religion has no right to be taken for something that is totally about peace and love.   It is quite true that as bad as religion is, it is bad because it is getting away with it for society and politicians do not show their disgust at many of the teachings but are sure to have a problem with teachings that challenge their selfish selves.

Just as society and politics would condone murders of the past so does religion.  It is alarming that these three entities can celebrate death and murder and not even bat an eyelid.  The support of their allies is in fact a disturbing. 

Take Ireland.  There is no problem celebrating and applauding the example of those who drove the 1916 rising. 

To say God is good and always right and has indeed told his people to stone innocent people to death makes you no better inside than the actual killers.  It is a retrospective yes vote.  In fact saying Jesus stopped such things makes it worse.  So you don't kill now for you think he doesn't want it done anymore?  That is the only reason?  What about people feeling terrorised by such attitudes?  And it is vile to approve of the killings done by others and get a glow from how you don't have to do it.  It is like you want them to do the dirty work.

At Easter Vigil, the Catholics praise a reading that says God killed the Egyptians.  Calling that reading the word of God is praise.  But they do more than that.  They sing the praises. The story is that Moses leads Israel through a miraculous dry path through the sea.  Instead of closing the sea behind them and keeping the soldiers out God lets Israel get over and the soldiers are half-way across when the water crashes in on them as a result of God empowering Moses to raise his hand and magically signal the water to drown them and then a psalm praising this miraculous mass murder is sung.  That is retrospective religious genocide and retrospective sectarianism.  Young men - and in an age where life is short you can imagine how young they were! - and who were compelled into the army by law or circumstance and who did not want to kill anybody were brutally drowned. 

To add insult to injury, Catholics then receive the body of Jesus who claimed to be this murdering God.  Obviously they think they are too special to get similar treatment from this God who is unworthy of worship.  They don't care that he killed people as long as it is not them.  It is a worry that believers in a really sweet God struggle to get and keep followers while a darker God attracts people better even if they pretend they do not notice or believe in a dark side.  Catholics pretend except maybe at the Easter Vigil! 

Every religion's scriptures speak approvingly of murder when commanded by God or a god.  If the members are nevertheless told to be good then they are doing it because they are told and that is a weak reason.  Real goodness rejects authorities that ever condoned or commanded murder and does good not because you are told to but because it is good.

Society and politics have a bad side in reality and a potentially bad one as well.  Nobody denies that.  But religion is no better.  It is so like them and so inspired by them and they refuse to challenge or be upset by religion condoning such evil as we have read about as long as it was done ages ago that it is clear that society, politics and religion are made from the same bad fabric.  It is an insult to a God if there is one to call it divine.

Religion complains a lot about how everybody is always in danger and everybody gets a bad deal.  That inspires those who wish to hurt others for they reason: "They have to suffer and die anyway so why should we not ensure it is for our benefit or that of our religion?" It is one reason among many why religion is so fond of attacking even some of its own never mind other religions.  Even the thought, "Even if some are okay they are still at risk.  We can hurt them for they are in danger anyway."  It must be admitted that atheism too might hurt people using similar logic.  But at least it shows religion cannot take the moral high ground.

Hate is natural. Hate serves a purpose in extreme circumstances when you need to eradicate an enemy to save yourself or your family. In combat, you are going to lash out instead of trying to mindfully do the “moral” thing. If you pause to care about moral you will be slaughtered. Those who say they hate nobody are either not aware that they do or they are lying. If you see hate as natural rather than as a moral outrage you will be willing to listen to the enemy better and you will be less willing to demonise the enemy. And many people feel they need to hate somebody in order to love their family and friends better. Many feel that hate and love need to go together in this way.

Many assert that neither religions nor ideologies proceed from word to action - that religions and ideologies in themselves come from actions that have already happened and are not down to word.  Others say it is the reverse.

Hitler preached an ideology that led to action. 

 People would have you think that when Pope Innocent III wanted heretics killed, Catholics did it not because he told them to though he did but because they were already killing other heretics.  But then why did they kill any heretics at all in the first place?  Because their religion and their Bible and their political co-religionists and priests preached that the killings must be done.  Word starts action off.  Word and preaching direct action.

Very often the words are chosen to justify decisions already taken, and to lead up to conclusions already reached.

Theology is the process by which religious ideas as harmful as they may be take root in the life of the world.  So it is immensely powerful and important, but it cannot work in isolation.  It needs the ordinary person to feel intimidated by how smart it sounds.  Its complexity puts people off researching.  So they tend to just let it into schools and into society to spread its tentacles.  It needs the corrupt hypocrite to promote it.  Religious hypocrites are still able to suck people into the religion.  A religious organisation of hypocrites can still have a significant influence.  Despite knowing the bishops of the Catholic Church created a cover-up culture that guarded clerical child abusers, people still listened to them.  They still took their children to be confirmed by them.  Politicians need society to use and depend on religious labels, eg Muslim and Catholic or whatever.  The labels may be useless when you think about them but they just need people to take them seriously.  The politicians can then pontificate how they respect say the Hindu or whatever community.  Don't do the work of self-serving politicians for them.  Bring down the religious labelling culture.

Religion claims you must forgive and love the sinner but hate the sin.  Politics could not function unless it were doing this too at least implicitly.  When you look at it honestly and strip away the layers of virtue you see it is full of hate.
 
Anyway religion calls itself good because of that teaching. But it is aware that some people have to feel a murderous hatred for the evil person before they can start moving on. That takes the sheen off. That shows the hypocrisy.

It is odd that liberals hate being reminded that Islam is more supportive of violence than Christianity. Or that Jainism is less supportive of violence than Christianity. It is a fault if you mention that out of religious wars, Islam has waged the most. The fact remains that religion as in devotion to God tends to violence. Even if it leads only some members not all to violence it is still to blame. The not all bad excuse is just an excuse and an indignity heaped on the victims.
 
Religion encourages you to think that if you do certain things or believe certain things, God will keep you alive after death and reward you. If a person’s strongest drive is to stay alive, then we see why believers in God have a disproportionally big number of violent criminals and religious people on the crazy train who are not deterred by the death penalty!
 
Religious terrorists are dismissed when they say they really believe the evil they do is God’s will and part of his plan to bring about a greater good. Liberals ignore what they say and put it down to politics or the dysfunctional society they emerged from. This refuses to take account of the fact that Islam, plus the religion of the Old Testament God, and Catholicism for most of its history, had no demarcation between religion and politics. Today though Catholicism and the state are declared separate they are often not really as separate as they are said to be.   Religious people engage in political lobbying. They want to force the will of their religion on you through political means. The liberals are assuming that religion is not about anything other than belief in belief - a psychological boost from faith. They treat religion as if it does not impact on the world and state things as fact. Each religion does make fact claims. Once something that could be a guess is dressed up as a fact anything could happen. The detachment from reality that is necessary for violence to be endorsed has started.
 
Anything that logically justifies trouble should be abandoned by the people no matter if it pretends it is pro-peace or not. You can’t build peace on foundations of sand.

Christians and Muslims and conservative Jews have the strongest tendency to persecute people who disagree with them. These religions have commands from God in their scriptures that tell them to cause religious wars and destroy those God does not like. The Catholic Church has made many official statements calling for the killing and destruction of heretics just because of their beliefs.

Some say that it is not religion or faith that causes trouble in the world but people being sure they are right. But this is foolery because we all think we are right and do not hurt others over it. There is nothing wrong with thinking you are right. That is what opinion, which is the same thing as belief, and thinking and reasoning are all about.  Religion says that once you think it is right you should never deliberately change your mind. If people thinking they are right causes wars then religion is the top offender!

The Church accepts weak faith just like Jesus did. Since God and his truth supersedes all things in importance it follows that to accept this faith is akin to believing a man should kill a heretic on flimsy evidence. If a fanatic kills for the faith, the Church certainly has no right to put all the blame on him. This is because the Church blesses fanaticism. It is crafty enough to make sure that it does not look very obvious.

There is no evidence that the New Testament abolished the legal laws of the Old Testament which commanded the brutal slaying of heretics and homosexuals and adulterers. Not a single civil law in Moses’ regime was forbidden and Jesus himself praised the Jews for trying to keep these civil laws though Rome was ruling the land meaning that the excuse that the civil laws only apply in a theocracy does not hold any water holy or unholy. Jesus said that he did not come to do away with the Law and the Prophets but to see that they would be fulfilled better. The Laws of God in the Bible and the Koran don’t make much sense. For example, putting criminals to death is commanded. This tells us that all Law comes from God and is to be obeyed whatever we feel about it meaning that the Law of the land should be theocratic for what we think is right and wrong is no good and we need God to tell us what’s what.

Whatever disputes there might be about what should or shouldn’t be done the dispute is not about values but how to apply the values. Thus, the Old Testament God approved of hatred and exercised it meaning there was no way he could do away with this approval for his approval made hatred a value. Not surprisingly, Jesus’ authorised apostle Paul teaches a God of hate in Romans.

God says he is king and it is our duty to obey him and believe in him. You cannot obey a king you don’t believe in. He says he must be obeyed because he says so and not because he is good. If he is to be obeyed because he is good then it follows you have the right to make sure he is good and judge him first but he says you don’t have that right. He also says you should believe in his love in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. If you can judge God you don’t need to believe in obeying him for good would be independent of him meaning he has to measure up to its standards like the rest of us. If you can’t judge God you cannot question his ways or his motives and therefore you have no right to think anything other than what he orders you to think.  The idea of duty implies that religion wants unbelievers to suffer for their unbelief. Duty means something you must suffer for if you don’t carry it out.

Nobody, especially a child, should be in a religion that has any links with terrorism even if it is just to take privilege at the expense of the victims.