by nmblum (Posted Sat Dec 21, 2013 3:47 am)
Martin Brock wrote:Non-fundamentalist Christians don't need a pass from you.
There was never a time when most people feared being killed for saying that the Bible contains contradictions. Jews have always said that Christian interpretation of their texts is mistaken, and though antisemitism has always existed, Jews typically weren't killed for saying so. Jews weren't killed during the Holocaust for this reason for example. Islam is all about saying that literal interpretation of the Bible, by both Jews and Muslims, is mistaken and contradictory, and Muslims have never killed themselves for saying it.
Faith is called "faith" precisely because historical or scientific evidence does not substantiate the belief. Why would I care what sort of comforting fairy tales people tell themselves? Scientisticians imagine space elevators and terraforming Mars too, and I don't care about their faith either.
There is not an accurate sentence in the above:
There was never a time when religious heresies weren't tantamount to threatening the life of a king in terms of relative significance and the warranting of punishment..
Certainly the Hebrew bible is full of intimations of heresy as being worse than all other crimes and worthy of a death sentence.
Out of a mere 10 Commandments, fully 2 or 20% are devoted to the implacable and non negotiable demand to love god above all else, and to avoid taking his name in vain (blaspheming).
That does say something about keeping a civil tongue in your mouth when talking about god, in any other way than adoringly, uncritically.
And while it is true that the Jews of Europe were not slaughtered in the first half of the 20th Century, in the name of religion, it was the religion, in fact the Christian religion with it's insistent reference if not roots in the deicide for which Jews were deemed -unquestioningly so - the guilty instigators, that made the horrendous act of chilly, malice aforethought, mechanized slaughter possible.
And would make it possible again tomorrow.
No Jewish kid was chased down the streets by Christians kids screaming : "why do you have so many accountants?"
Not at all.. they chased them, and in certain places in the "Christian " world, still do, crying "Christ killer!!
So there IS that : once I've killed your god, why SHOULDN'T I be killed for it: an eye for an eye?
But there are also , and codified in the Hebrew Bible… as well as the Q'uran, suggestions that the punishment for heresy is without question, death….
Even Monty Python is aware of that.
And while I don't know what your experience of Muslim religion is, but mine is that while there are certainly nations and communities that are less than Orthodox (that is biblical literalists), the ones that are, do not permit heterodoxy, and have the options of following Allah's requirement to punish blasphemers and heretics to death…
(Thieves only have their hands chopped off.)
But that aside, it is also true that Muslims have, in the course of internecine strife, actually slaughtered each other in the name of being true believers versus heretics.
And most famously, the remarkably progressive Muslims who gave the period of the Moorish domination in Spain its reputation for tolerance and scholarly and scientific achievement, were forced out of their Arabian homelands, because they were made non grata for their iconoclasm.
NMB
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