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A comment posted by Scrap:
Gentlemen, let me throw out something that you rarely hear and that I had never thought about or heard until a couple months ago. So much is made of how scary/awful "extreme or radical religious beliefs" can be, but what about the danger of extreme or radical NON-religious thinking?You don't have to follow organized religion to believe in someone else's "dangerous" ideas. Remember Haley's Comet? The 80-90 fools that committed suicide a few years back because their leader said it would send them up to join this comet and they would live forever? Nothing to do with religion. The people in the 70s who followed Jim Jones into the jungles of Africa and drank kool-aid filled with cyanide and instantly died...not religious to my knowledge.But that's just small scale. What about Communism and Nazism? Neither of these had anything to do with religion (in fact, communists ban all forms of religion and we all know what Hitler thought of Jews...and though he at first put on the front that he might be some kind of christian, he later called Christianity the "mistake of the Jews"). Nazism is tagged with the deaths of roughly 5 million and historians tell us that communist regimes are responsible for multiple times that amount (Some historians say Stalin killed over 10 million of his own people and from other Eastern European countries. Let's not forget about Pol Pot or hundreds of thousands South Vietnamese slaughtered by the North Vietnamese when we pulled out).Therefore, I believe one should say "ALL extreme beliefs CAN be dangerous". As anyone, religious or not, can have extreme beliefs. And thoughts aren't that scary unless they're acted upon.
My response:
You talk about "non-religious" radicalism as if it's any different than religious radicalism. How is 80-90 "fools" committing suicide to hitch a ride on a comet that much different from thousands and thousands of them sending money to Pat Robertson or Benny Hinn to secure a mansion in the sky?
The danger is when you combine extreme, radical thinking with a lack of logic and understanding. Logic would dictate to most of us that committing suicide is not going to get us a lift to the mothership, or whatever. Understanding of Christianity would tell us NOT to send money to rich men pretending to be holy. Christ himself chastised men such as these, read the New Testament.
You can not logically show me a reason to believe in the message of Nazism, or the Klan, or communist extremists, or whatever. When one follows these ideas without forming their own thoughts and beliefs, they end up at the behest of maniacal leaders. That's where the danger is. Not in religion itself, but when religious leaders (or non-religious extremists), start to get too extreme and their followers don't even think to question it...
Gentlemen, let me throw out something that you rarely hear and that I had never thought about or heard until a couple months ago. So much is made of how scary/awful "extreme or radical religious beliefs" can be, but what about the danger of extreme or radical NON-religious thinking?You don't have to follow organized religion to believe in someone else's "dangerous" ideas. Remember Haley's Comet? The 80-90 fools that committed suicide a few years back because their leader said it would send them up to join this comet and they would live forever? Nothing to do with religion. The people in the 70s who followed Jim Jones into the jungles of Africa and drank kool-aid filled with cyanide and instantly died...not religious to my knowledge.But that's just small scale. What about Communism and Nazism? Neither of these had anything to do with religion (in fact, communists ban all forms of religion and we all know what Hitler thought of Jews...and though he at first put on the front that he might be some kind of christian, he later called Christianity the "mistake of the Jews"). Nazism is tagged with the deaths of roughly 5 million and historians tell us that communist regimes are responsible for multiple times that amount (Some historians say Stalin killed over 10 million of his own people and from other Eastern European countries. Let's not forget about Pol Pot or hundreds of thousands South Vietnamese slaughtered by the North Vietnamese when we pulled out).Therefore, I believe one should say "ALL extreme beliefs CAN be dangerous". As anyone, religious or not, can have extreme beliefs. And thoughts aren't that scary unless they're acted upon.
My response:
You talk about "non-religious" radicalism as if it's any different than religious radicalism. How is 80-90 "fools" committing suicide to hitch a ride on a comet that much different from thousands and thousands of them sending money to Pat Robertson or Benny Hinn to secure a mansion in the sky?
The danger is when you combine extreme, radical thinking with a lack of logic and understanding. Logic would dictate to most of us that committing suicide is not going to get us a lift to the mothership, or whatever. Understanding of Christianity would tell us NOT to send money to rich men pretending to be holy. Christ himself chastised men such as these, read the New Testament.
You can not logically show me a reason to believe in the message of Nazism, or the Klan, or communist extremists, or whatever. When one follows these ideas without forming their own thoughts and beliefs, they end up at the behest of maniacal leaders. That's where the danger is. Not in religion itself, but when religious leaders (or non-religious extremists), start to get too extreme and their followers don't even think to question it...
posted by Marklar at 10:03
2 Comments:
My main point with my last post was simply that extreme beliefs also lie outside the realm of religion. Since the dawn of bush's presidency and the rise of muslim terrorism, many people are focused on how destructive religion has been/can be. I just want to point out that there's all kinds of extreme beliefs.
I'd like to discuss further the issue of religious radicalism. We can all see what's been going on in the Muslim world. I'm interested to here what types of Judeo/Christian extremism you're referring to. Throw out some examples and we can discuss (I certainly won't be able to defend all/any of them...just curious as to how you're defining "extreme")
I certainly agree the any form of extremism can be dangerous. But MLK jr. was an extremist as well. The reason that religion and extremism are so closely tied is that within a religion there is an imediate following. With a following that trusts a leader, and is asked to exhibit faith, or blind faith, in the hands of extremist manipulators, this can be so deadly. When the Hail Bop people and Jonestown people are brought up, you are speaking about a cult. Fairly harmless to mainstream society due to the fact that they don't have the numbers. Cult's often do have religious basis. Christianity was once a cult, just ask the disciples, and my boy, JC. Hitler may have not believed, but he used a religious guise to accomplish what he wanted. I consider most of your examples of a religious nature.
I'm not exactly sure how to describe 'extreme'. In my simple and uneducated mind, I define it as: a group whose ideas separate themselves from the mainstream, often accepting no other possible outcomes other then those they deem to be correct.
Feel free to rip my argument and definition apart, but I figured we needed a starting point.
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