Faith and Torture

Jesus was tortured. That means it's OK!

Yes, but it would not prove either his professed beliefs or Buddhism to be a sham.

You care about the labels people of faith give themselves only to the extent that you can use them to declare hypocrisy.

Is it really significant for someone who has an abiding belief in God to conform to a popular notion of the label he or she chooses?

Should they really be expected to live up to the expectations, of non-believers, for their faith?

No doubt you have, at one time or another, labeled yourself. If your beliefs are not in lock step with those commonly associated with the label, does this make you a hypocrite?



You are at a loss because you will not accept axioms other than your own.

Persons who are or who have been considered "holy" (you may prefer "wise" or "learned") have contemplated and written about conversion by the sword, and it is recognized as a very tempting path to take.

Let's begin with the widely held assumption that life, as we experience it, is but an illusion and that in the face of the desired state of enlightenment,the concepts of life and death are essentially meaningless.

From that assumption it is reasonable to argue that since death is meaningless, it is not something to fear or avoid, and if it can, in some fashion, pave the way to enlightenment, it is a powerful device of good.

We next must add the equally widely held assumption that certain belief systems, if embraced, will accelerate one's journey to enlightenment.

From these two assumptions (neither of which can be proved or disproved) it is reasonable to argue that since death, like life, is merely an illusion, and that there is an actual path to enlightenment, it is entirely reasonable to argue that threatening death to incite conversion to the path is not only logical but desirable.

If one believes death is merely an illusory or even temporary state of the soul, then it's use to to lead one's soul to the true goal of enlightenment can be seen as reasonable.

I do not accept this argument, and you might reject it for entirely different reasons, but you will be hard pressed to do so based on anything other than your own personal assumptions.

Again, you are not required to accept or even tolerate this belief because it conforms to an internal logic. If the belief is at odds with your own, you should reject it and you should act to prevent it from infringing upon the rights your beliefs grant you. It is pointless, however, and quite childish to insist your belief system renders any other ridiculous, and expect (or actually demand) believers of other systems to acknowledge you are right and they are pitifully wrong.

Someone does not believe in God.

Fine. I certainly can understand a reasoning that reaches this conclusion, but that reasoning is not reasonable at all if it is based entirely on debunking the beliefs of those who do.

It doesn't take a sage to realize that if you are able to prove that the world does not ride on the back of a great turtle you have not disproved the existence of God.

I truly respect non-believers. I can understand how they arrived at their assumptions; their conclusions. I simply do not agree with them.

It would be childish and stupid of me to confront their beliefs with scorn and ridicule despite the fact that I believe they are as wrong about something as anyone can be.

And so while the initial premise of this thread was interesting what it inevitably turned into was disappointing and boring.

If certain members of A2K enjoy a circle-jerk thread, I'm hardly in a position to deprive them of their pleasure but I hope that once the driven urge is spent they might take a considered view of the object of their lust.

This is precisely the sort of glib nonsense that renders these discussions pointless and boring.

I suppose I could assume that non-believers are such dolts that they cannot imagine a God who is not a comic book character.

Apparently some are, but I know not all, including the ones who play the dolt, are.

When people make silly arguments like (There can be no God because babies die) I immediately understand that it is precisely the fact that babies die that these people don't believe in God.

Such people may be right; there may not be a God, but the fact that babies die, or people suffer is, by no means, an intelligent argument against the existence of God.

Frankly, anyone who makes this argument embarrasses themselves (even if they don't realize it).

Only someone without any subtlety to their intelligence will make arguments like: "We know God let's people starve," in support of a position that God doesn't exist.

The obvious extension of such an argument is that the existence of God can only be proven by a human existence that is devoid of suffering.

That would be a pretty ******* ridiculous God.

Human cattle, deprived of any experience that might be defined as negative (God is good after all and can't let us experience negativity) are likely to even think about whether or not God exists? I don't think so.

If you don't believe in God, fine there are reasonable intellectual arguments to support such a belief, but don't embarrass yourself by promoting your belief with such idiotic arguments as there is no God because there is suffering.

I note with wry amusement that Finn finds such discussions pointless and boring, but is nonetheless moved to write many hundreds of words in response. He must not have been that bored, and must have seen some point, at least in his own response--a legend in his own mind.

I find your post exceptionally boring and unworthy of intellegent comment.

I never worry about that when it is you responding, FM.

I thank you, I think.

PS , if yer gonna correct my spelling , yer gonna be late fer church.

I just took my lauderary outta the drier, so now that i have a little free time, i'm gonna play an RPG . . . which is far more interesting than savage Christians or Finn's phony boredom . . .

Is it because religious people are trained from birth to do what their parents and churches tells them to do?

Religions have a long history of using torture to control the population to protect their power.

BBB

I think that it is because those with a western religious background are familiar with top down authoritarian power dynamics, and have an overabundance of faith in the usefulness of such.

Never said it would.

You make a lot of assumptions, Finn. So many, that the time it would take for me to go through your post and point out where they are false is more than I would like to spend.

I think it kind of depends.

I strongly suspect that many decent christians have either strongly disapproved of the Bush torture policies, or been part of organizations fighting them.

Just as, while many southern baptists were some of the most savage pro-slavery touts, other christians were deeply involved in fighting slavery.

Immediately following the imminent End of Days and the ascension of a particular sector of the christian community (mainly, southern white protestants) Pew's subsequent survey results will come out quite differently.
Or, to put it another way, this survey likely tells us rather more about the cultural history of America than about christianity.

But at the same time, there's the variable propensity of personality types (for lack of a better phrase) to fall either towards or away from authoritarian and punitive responses to others around them (we'd assume a bell curve in any given population, wouldn't we?)

Toss together the authoritarian personality and a localized set of cultural institutions which facilitate authoritarian behaviors and you're bound to get the KKK and lynchings or church-goers happy to shove a crucifix up someone's arse for their crime of being different.

This Pew result doesn't surprise me. A converse finding would have.

Slavery was almost certainly a regional issue, and not one of religious confession. Thomas Jackson, known as Stonewall Jackson, was seen as staunchly religious, although there was little to no religion in his youth, and he became nominally an Anglican while at the US Military Academy, which had a de facto Anglican establishment. While in Mexico City during the American occupation, he secured a 15 minute appointment with the Archbishop, and spent between two and three hours discussing religion with him, and came back on several occasion to discuss religion with him again. He was popular with the Catholic families in the city, and may have thought for a time of converting to Catholicism, although that is just speculation. After some unpleasantness in Florida, he left the Army and became a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, and while there, was confirmed as a Presbyterian--so he came to religious conviction rather late in life. He was actually somewhat popular with blacks, both slave and free, in Lynchburg, because of his religious work among them (to whatever extent a slave owner could be popular). He was one of the two men most instrumental in organizing a corps of chaplains for the Army of Northern Virginia.

The other man was James Ewell Brown Stuart (and contrary to popular notions, no one then ever called him "Jeb"), who was the very type of the dashing cavalier cavalry commander. He was a life-long Anglican, from an Anglican family, and he was every bit as evangelical as Jackson the Presbyterian was. This is something few Americans know about him. Tent meetings, what are known today as "revival" meetings, had been a desultory practice before the war, but became very popular in southern armies, and Jackson and Stuart both encouraged these tent meetings, as well as making a point of being prominently seen to attend the prayer meetings, sermons and teaching sessions of army chaplains on Sundays. Jackson avoided engaging the enemy in combat on Sunday, but would not miss an opportunity just to adhere to the practice.

It seems from the available evidence that as the cause of the Southern Confederacy sank lower and came closer to defeat, the religious fervor of the people grew in inverse proportion. This embraced just about every confession, and people of every religious confession then common in America served in southern armies--including Jews, the evidence for which is special orders issued by Lee and other commanders to explain to them that they were not being singled out when they were required to serve on their holy days, that the Christians, too, were being required to give up their religious holidays.

After the war, "revivalism" became established in the South, and in much of the rural North, because of the solace it apparently brought to those, North and South, whose world had been turned upside down. (The domination of American historical myth by Northerners cannot change the fact of the dismay with which many Northerners watched the influx of newly freed slaves; many of the race riots and strife in the years just after the war, most of them, occurred in cities of the North with populations who didn't wish to accept the new black neighborhoods which had sprung up as freed men and women came seeking work.) In the latter part of the 19th century, an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants lead to a bizarre nativitst movement which was also racist and religiously bigoted, and commonly known in American history as the Lily White movement--they stood for white Protestant supremacy in matters religious and secular, and the movement was popular in the South and the North.

Sure, there were lots of goofy Baptists in the South, but the other confessions were as likely to justify slavery, and to attempt to appeal to the mass of the white population by harking back to good old days which, as is almost always the case with appeals to "the good old days," had never actually existed.

What do you mean you don't know what to make of it? How do you think christianity spread? Love and kindness?

Truth will set you free.

The key word there was "reasonable". Just because somebody made the case and followed through doesn't make it reasonable.

That's more like it.

http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/05/richard-land-of-sbc-no-room-fo.html

Well, aliens on alien territory have no rights under the US Constitution.
As to extracting military information from them,
the question arises of whether our government has more loyalty
to the well being of alien prisoners or more loyalty to the well being of American citizens.
Let us imagine, for the sake of argument,
that we have captured an alien Moslem in Iraq who knows of where a nuclear bomb
has been built or smuggled somewhere in an American population center, to go off on the 4th of July,
and imagine that the CIA is curious about that, but he is less than forthcoming with it.
What to do . . . ? Wait until the 4th of July and ask everyone to listen carefully? Evacuate America ?

Let's imagine for a moment that you somehow know all of this stuff -
You know there is a nuclear bomb
You know it has been smuggled into the US
You know that it is set to go off on the 4th of July
You know that the captured person knows where it is.

That's a pretty big imagination there David.
If you really know ALL that stuff, why would you not know where the bomb is?

I can think of only one reason why you would know everything you imagined but don't know where the bomb is. That reason is you are trying to justify torture.

Indeed. David has started another thread to discuss his scenario here.