I was born in rural Florida, left really young with the death of my father, and returned as a teenager several times to meet with his kin, and the people there paid way more attention to the old testament than the new. I remember talking to one older man, not any relation, who said that the bible called for the separation of the races, basing this on the old testament's injunctions about the tribes not mixing etc.
If people can accept the notion of a chosen people, then it's not far from that to being accepting of racial superiority, and from that, to having no problem with invasion, killing, torture.
Let's just recall the words of the esteemed Madeleine Albight, who thought "it was hard, but worth it" to kill half a million children. all of whom were Semites, but that's another story.
People will always find justification for their worst behavior to include an atheist like myself. Whether it's an avowed atheist like Stalin, or a good Catholic like Franco, only the trappings change. The atrocities remain the same. In this country there was an entire body of Christian work in the South justifying how god supported slavery at the same time there was a body of work arguing arguing slavery was morally wrong in the eyes of their god. In Nazi Germany you has Christians who bowed to Hitler's authority and Christians like St. Maximilian Kolbe who after previously writing some antisemitic things ultimately gave up his own life to death the concentration camp so a Jewish father could be set free in his place.
No where else in society will you see such a veried group of such varied group as you will find in religion since faith in a particular deity is usually the only thing that binds them. While there is no question many if not most Christians share the same hypocrisies we all do, I've found that the rare .001% that are the Maximilian Kolbe's in every culture are almost always religious.
People bring their personalities/natures with them when accepting any ideology, and some people are just born authoritarians, a particularly dangerous trait when paired with either belief in a monotheistic religion or in a belief in an all powerful state government.
I am ill situated to criticize the faith of the faithful -- not being one of the faithful myself -- but professedly "Christian" torture and murder advocates still blow my mind. I don't know what kind of moral gymnastics you have to perform to get to that place mentally and be OK with yourself.
I am like, "You know the person you accept as the Son of God and your personal savior got tortured to death by an imperial bureaucracy, right? How cool do you think He really is with empires and torture?"
I was born in rural Florida, left really young with the death of my father, and returned as a teenager several times to meet with his kin, and the people there paid way more attention to the old testament than the new. I remember talking to one older man, not any relation, who said that the bible called for the separation of the races, basing this on the old testament's injunctions about the tribes not mixing etc.
If people can accept the notion of a chosen people, then it's not far from that to being accepting of racial superiority, and from that, to having no problem with invasion, killing, torture.
Let's just recall the words of the esteemed Madeleine Albight, who thought "it was hard, but worth it" to kill half a million children. all of whom were Semites, but that's another story.
People will always find justification for their worst behavior to include an atheist like myself. Whether it's an avowed atheist like Stalin, or a good Catholic like Franco, only the trappings change. The atrocities remain the same. In this country there was an entire body of Christian work in the South justifying how god supported slavery at the same time there was a body of work arguing arguing slavery was morally wrong in the eyes of their god. In Nazi Germany you has Christians who bowed to Hitler's authority and Christians like St. Maximilian Kolbe who after previously writing some antisemitic things ultimately gave up his own life to death the concentration camp so a Jewish father could be set free in his place.
No where else in society will you see such a veried group of such varied group as you will find in religion since faith in a particular deity is usually the only thing that binds them. While there is no question many if not most Christians share the same hypocrisies we all do, I've found that the rare .001% that are the Maximilian Kolbe's in every culture are almost always religious.
People bring their personalities/natures with them when accepting any ideology, and some people are just born authoritarians, a particularly dangerous trait when paired with either belief in a monotheistic religion or in a belief in an all powerful state government.
It's wild.
I am ill situated to criticize the faith of the faithful -- not being one of the faithful myself -- but professedly "Christian" torture and murder advocates still blow my mind. I don't know what kind of moral gymnastics you have to perform to get to that place mentally and be OK with yourself.
I am like, "You know the person you accept as the Son of God and your personal savior got tortured to death by an imperial bureaucracy, right? How cool do you think He really is with empires and torture?"