Stoning, burning at the stake and all manner of brutal methods of torture and execution have been used throughout history by Christian societies and Muslim societies alike, so I do not think that we can call that a salient difference in terms of the characteristics that each religion attributes to god.
That kind of thing (ETA: I am sorry, I should have been clearer here: I mean specifically executions for adultery, not brutal executions in general.) does not happen in secular societies (including secular Muslim societies such as Turkey and Indonesia), so it is not a difference of religion. It is a difference between secular and theocratic societies, the latter of which is no stranger to Christianity historically.
For all sorts of shit… and I’m guessing including that, too, yes. You cross the wrong person, you get your ass turned into the authorities as an enemy of the state.
Again, it’s always more about power than about a religious or secular society. It’s about imposing an ideology on the population, brutally, and frankly, I’m not sure it matters if it’s a religion, political worldview, race, or whatever that’s the justification, it’s about the powerful imposing their will on the less powerful.
Yes, that is indeed true. I apologize if it sounded like secular societies are somehow better than theocratic societies. You are right that that is certainly not always the case.
I merely wanted to push back at the suggestion that theocratic Muslim societies have beheadings while Christian societies do not, which was the subtext that I read in John’s comment above.
From what I can tell it happens when people create a religion or religion-like experience out of a political or even financial ideology too. I mean the Nazis themselves were an example, right? I don’t believe nanking was motivated by religion either. Unfortunately religion just seems to be a common flavor for this ugly aspect of humanity. I think people who find common ground over literally anything abstract have to guard themselves against this because apparently grouping together, dehumanizing all others, and ultimately killing the fuck out of anyone who so much as breathes wrong is part of human nature and the only thing protecting any of us is the threat of our doing the same to others.
FWIW looking into that abyss is what made me a hawk who doesn’t believe in the chance of lasting large scale peace or the possibility a large human population without nation states and war. So don’t dwell on it too long I guess?
I’m sorry, I really should have been clearer in my original post. I have added an ETA to clarify that I did not mean that secular societies do not carry out brutal executions, just that they do not do it for things like adultery.
My point wasn’t that secular societies are better, just that secular Muslim societies do not stone people to death, and Christian theocratic societies have historically stoned people to death, so it is not fair to describe stonings for adultery as a trait of Muslim societies, but as a common theme in theocratic societies both Christian and Muslim alike.
I guess my thing is just that I don’t see stoning as unique because it’s just the method certain religious groups use to brutally murder members of their population for the perceived violation of social values. I see this as the same thing that any other authoritarian group does to uphold norms through brutal repression and acts of terror.
I don’t see it as unique either. I was reacting to IAmAlsoJohn’s post, in which I detected a hint of Islamophobia. I could be wrong about the intent of that post, but it smelled a bit off to me.
Something that stands out to me about stoning is that it’s not just brutal, but that the community is involved. It’s not the police taking someone away never to be seen again. Everyone has the chance to come out and enjoy torturing them to death.
The immediate parallel that comes to mind then is lynching. I don’t know how often America lynched people purely for adultery, but they definitely did for sex with the wrong race. And I’m not sure if you want to count that as secular but the US sure wasn’t supposed to be a theocracy.
Yeah I think part of the ingroup/outgroup thinking makes this possible. Kind of like how the QOP here is always talking about pedos while they bend over backwards to make sure that years-long child rapists serve minimal sentences so long as they are white christian child rapists.
People say “oh look at what those dirty muslims do” when in fact they are just as often literally no better and their own faith (or whatever “higher power” they invest in) is no less brutal or perverse when it gets into real power and that power is challenged in any way.
Everyone thinks their way will lead to peace and I realize this is probably due to some psychological flaw in humans. Hubris?
However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
– George Orwell
I think that some people actually believe that is the “cost of peace” but very much still peace, sadly.
Some folks just literally can’t be happy unless they smell corpses in the oubliette. And most people are actually great at denial because it is a legitimate requirement for survival in many situations. To me authoritarians work more like abusive parents. We have a happy family and everything is great except mom’s arm is broken now because she did a bad job of showing how great everything is and how happy we are!
Once a situation seems sufficiently hopeless out of sheer urge to stay alive plenty of people will find it easier to simply pretend the situation is actually fine even when the consequences are piling up.
Most of my life the Christians I heard the most from ultimately believed “peace” means absolute mind/body control over every human being on earth with deadly consequences for anyone who messes up and absolute submission to the whims and perversion of any and all religious authority without question… in perpetuity… that just means Christ is compelling them to live right. They live and die by this delusion. They abandon and sacrifice their own children for it.
They are often kind, and see themselves as good people. If you ask what they want the things they want sound perfectly nice and reasonable. But it’s window dressing on an ugly authoritarianism that refuses to look honestly at the harm it causes to itself and others because that would betray the reality that the rules they actually live by are nothing but a naked power grab and a method of enforcing submission on the disempowered.
It wasn’t that long ago that Catholics believed that torture was justified because it was simply helping sinners pay off their sins ahead of the curve so they’d burn in hell a little less.
Similarly, the belief that we weren’t colonizing a place, committing genocide, and then taking all the resources… we were “bringing them to Christ” and they just couldn’t cut it! Christ chose us!
that, actually really threw me off the rails. -former deleted- e/ in which way have religions brought good into the world? or do I just dont get the sarcasm? Im fucking confused.
… people trying to sell something follow the trends of whatever the marks want
After the world wars of the early 20th century people wanted peace, so leaders sold war as “peace,” all the way up to Clinton continuing the Gulf War and calling it something else
Since 9/11, and with the World War II generation dying off, America doesn’t talk about peace anymore — the debates are back to just which wars are the right wars, do we fight Russia or China or ISIS or the “border invasion”
Well, that was often just the pretext. As Ida B. Wells argued at the time, the motivation was almost always about Black success of one kind or another. The ATL race riot came during an election year, when Sweet Auburn was producing some serious wealth in the Black community of ATL. The rumor was that Black men were sleeping with white prostitutes, but it was probably not true. It just got working class white men angry enough to do the dirty work of the white elite seeking to kneecap the rise of Black financial power in ATL…
Yeah, that MLK, for one… what did he ever do for anyone? Other than preaching a gospel of love and inclusion, giving his life to push America to embrace true equality. He certainly wasn’t employing an argument based on religion… being a preacher and all, he’d never do that… /s
They have had an indelible impact on art, literature, cultures and even languages. It is impossible to separate them from the grand story of humanity that is history or understand cultures without their influence.
I mean, trying to disentangle the effects of religion from everything else people do is difficult now and impossible for most of history. Trying to answer what ancient or Medieval times would have been like without religion is like trying to answer how WW2 would have gone if Europeans were aquatic. The baseline is so completely counterfactual there’s nothing to gain by trying to measure against it.
You mean, the earliest humans, doing their best to understand themselves, their sense of sentience, and the vast planet that they inhabited? Sure, I guess they could have actually been cackling madly over their fire, dreaming of ways of fuck up the lives of their descendants by “inventing” religion… I mean, it’s probably far more plausible that they were trying to explain the world around them and themselves, create institutions that would serve them and help them navigate the world via a narrative that made sense to them… but sure, they could have done it all as a lark just to fuck with us…
