There are plenty of other threads for you; why camp here and complain?
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Oh. So that’s why you never drink it?
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If you just worked harder you could get this thing to 10,000 comments and we’d be done.
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Am I in here that much? Honestly I just give it a run through periodically to keep the numbers up.
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That is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.
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You posted: “What is the point of all this ridiculous copypasta”
Your comment is chronically symptomatic and indicative of the phrases: selective memory, poster child–and the idiom: "pot let me introduce you to kettle"or "pot calling the kettle black.
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You are ridiculous.
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How can religion free anyone from oppression when the fundamental tenants of religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism are inherently oppressive and promote oppression.
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Well, I think you are intelligent, intellectual, engaging and possess a cutting wit. 
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I second that. Monkey kicks my rhetoricall ass all the time.
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It’s the tape loop of cheering noises and the audience’s unenthusiastic attempts to mime them that makes it for me.
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While it’s comforting to look at things in stark, simple, black-and-white terms, in the sense that it gives you a nice simple villain, it’s also unfair and naive. While there are aspects of those religions that can be used to oppress, there are aspects that have been used to liberate. Abolitionism, Indian independence, the Civil Rights movement, and many other positive social changes that overthrew oppression were justified by, and supported religious teachers, and were primarily accomplished because of the force of religious adherents fighting for them. They can be used to oppress, but they’re not inherently oppressive. As @anon61221983 noted before, how these religions are interpreted makes all the difference.
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Talk about oversimplification.
Slavery ended because of state economic disputes, a Civil War, lobbying by abolitionist groups etc…and legislation was passed to abolish slavery. The numerous civil rights and voting rights acts were passed because legislation was passed ending segregation and voting restriction laws. Religion was not the driving force behind ending slavery and Jim Crow segregation, the driving force was people who had a upright moral sense of justice; who fought and died to end slavery and segregation. You don’t need religion to know right from wrong or how to treat people the way you want to be treated.
Not everyone in the Abolisonist Movement, founders of the NAACP (who were predominantly white) and Civil Rights Movement were believers or zealous followers of religion.
Quotes on Slavery and Religion.
“In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.”—Mark Twain
“I assert, most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is mere covering for the most horrid crimes, a justifi er of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifi er of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. I hate the corrupt slaveholding, woman-whipping, crude-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”—Frederick Douglass, civil rights and abolitionist leader
“Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God, let him go to the Bible. I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation. Slavery existed then in the earliest ages and among the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are told that it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You find it in the Old and New Testaments, in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized and sanctioned everywhere.”—Jefferson
Davis, president of the Confederate States of America
"We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babies sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.”—Frederick Douglass, civil rights and abolitionist leader
“Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.”—Robert Ingersol, abolitionist leader
“The delegates of the annual conference are decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave as it exists in the slave-holding states of the union.”—Methodist Episcopal Church, 1836 General Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio
“There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land except one, the pulpit. It yielded at last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight and then did what it always does, joined the procession at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery text in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all.”—Mark Twain
“It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.”—William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist leader
Where was Jesus or the Christian God during the Atlantic Slave Trade and when slavery existed in America?
The fact is the biggest advocates for and supporters of slavery, were found in the pulpit on Sunday mornings. Slavery was justified and lasted so long, because Africans were dehumanized; and it was taught that even though you were enslaving Africans, their spiritual souls were being saved by indoctrinating them into Christianity, so that justified slavery.
Put the slaves in barn on Sunday morning and have the slave master or his brainwashed and chosen slave, indoctrinate the slaves into Christianity. The result is during and after slavery ended, some of the most ardent supporters of Christianity were and are African-Americans.
The Tanakh of Judaism and specifically the Bible of Christianity are operational manuals that provide detailed instructions and guidelines for enslaving humans, including the beating and killing of women and children.
Where was Jesus and the Christian God, when the last thought and breath was going through the minds and lungs of the thousands of African-American men, women and children who were in most cases, not merely hung, but in barbaric and savage fashion burned alive, mutilated, tortured i.e… lynched in this country?
Where was Jesus and the Christian God when, three weeks after the “March on Washington” right before Sunday School was about to begin, those four young girls were murdered in the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama? To many the darkest and most disheartening day of the Civil Rights Movement.
Where was Jesus and the Christian God when, Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway and home in Mississippi?
Where was Jesus and the Christian God when, Viola Liuzzo was murdered in Alabama?
Where was Jesus and the Christian God when, Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi?
Where was Jesus and the Christian God when, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis?
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You know, just because we say that “all religious people aren’t bad” doesn’t mean we’re religious. I just refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Of course we know that these things are more complicated than “religious people did it”. the point is that some abolitionists were motivated by their faith. And the black church wasn’t the sole source of black liberation in the civil rights era, but they provided safe spaces for African Americans and their allies to get together and organize. No one is suggesting that “the Christian God” intervened and made these happen. We’re suggesting that maybe not all religious people are bad and shouldn’t be assumed evil just because they follow a book written thousands of years ago that they don’t all interpret the same way. Once again, maybe we should judge people by how they actually exist in the world rather than with some broad sweeping pronouncements.
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The world is a complicated place, that’s why.
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Black-and-white thinking and non-sequitur. While abolitionism played a significant role in ending slavery in the US. I made neither claim the claim that it ended slavery per se, no that it was some single factor.
Laws were passed because laws were passed? Tautology at best. Also a non-sequitur.
I made no claim about religion being some single cause, only that it was used. I think if you learned a bit more about those eras, esp. the 1870s-1880s you’d notice that there was virtually no aspect of American public life that wasn’t framed in terms of religion which dominated and defined the public dialogue on abolition. While there were non-religious who were involved in the Civil Rights era, most participants were religious, and it was the Churches that turned out the marches and did much of the actual footwork.
This is totally irrelevant to anything I said. I’m not religious, but your naive and childish religion-bashing is a one-sided affair that looks at religion in black-and-white terms and then pays attention only to half. This is foolish, as it’s a gray matter.
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You posted:
“We’re suggesting that maybe not all religious people are bad and shouldn’t be assumed evil just because they follow a book written thousands of years ago that they don’t all interpret the same way.”
Who said all religious people are bad?
I have said that religions are mythical.
I have said that the extant scriptures of religions like Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism and Islam are sexist, discriminatory and violent.
I have said that the world would be a better place without religion.
You are right that churches served as buildings for organizational, social and protective purposes during slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. It is the central reason why they were targeted by the KKK and other racist bigots for bombings and fires.
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Pretty broad brush, and approaching getting personal. If your stance is that religion has been used as a tool for oppression… Yay! You are among friends! There is a spectrum of opinions here, but that kind of opinion is well respected.
If your stance is We Don’t Know That, take a gentle step back. We can all learn to have mutual respect, but it’s gotta come from a place that isn’t adversarial.
Unless it’s about Kemetic pizza.
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