brightpilot6 said:When I speak of religion, I’m not just referring to the sanitized, official versions we see today; I mean every iteration we’ve encountered or might encounter in the real world. I’m talking about everything from militant Christianity to militant Islam to various nationalist religions. Many of these versions do indeed peddle the idea of a blissful afterlife as a prize for taking out one's enemies.
As for Christianity, if you simply look at the Old Testament, Yahweh behaves somewhat like Sauron toward his enemies—and honestly, even toward his own people if they fail to follow his commands.
Religions—specifically those darker iterations we are discussing—tend to strike low. They prey on people who are susceptible to them (and there are plenty) by instilling a deep-seated fear of divine retribution if one fails to live up to certain standards. At the same time, the moral guidelines provided by these faiths are often nearly impossible to maintain in daily life, which creates a feedback loop where fear and internal guilt constantly amplify one another. That is the foundational step: fostering self-dissatisfaction and terror. Sometimes, that alone is enough to trigger negative social phenomena, where people try to compensate for their inner turmoil through outward aggression—some feel the need to be more "holier than thou" by persecuting anyone deemed unconventional, whether it's the LGBTQ+ community, people living outside traditional norms, or political dissidents back home. But let's go further. Occasionally, when it suits religious leaders, divine punishment is seen to fall upon others for failing to conform, even if you’re just standing by watching. This breeds a fear of "the other," which is then compounded by the fear of God. When you add a bad economy or the anxieties of globalization as catalysts, you get the kind of escalation we see today. Neither a belief in science nor being a die-hard Atletico fan tends to trigger these kinds of irrational terrors, or a fear of one's neighbor based on something as monumental as eternal life.
Nah, I can't go along with you there, ZZ. I really don't agree, because by that logic, even the hooligans who gather under the Atletico Madrid flag would count as some kind of "version" of religion. They just interpret football and their love for the club a bit differently, adding their own weird spin to it.
But let's not get carried away here, because I honestly can't keep up a debate about Atletico Madrid forever.
By the way, that speech from the fallen officer's brother? That's the answer for everyone pointing the finger at religion as the sole reason for what happened in Paris. What a moment 🙏🙏🙏
And just one more thing, ZZ, you seem to react most strongly to comments like 'they got what they deserved,' and that was pretty much the first thing you noticed.
For me, though, the things that really jumped out were the entries like 'all religious fanatics should be wiped out, skin them alive.'