The sheer mean spirit in which some responses to my last blog were written reinforces my point: Jesus may have been a nice guy, but you can keep his followers.
And no, the same is not true of all other religions.
Ariel Sharon and Meyer Lansky aside, most people will be hard put to find Jewish authors of murder.
Muslim caliphs were more tolerant of the "People of the Book" than the Christian kings of medieval England and renaissance Spain, both of whom expelled Jews, to the point that for 500 years under Muslim rule in the Balkans and the Mediterranean both Christians and Jews flourished.
Hindus are by teaching syncretistic. They have been more apt to absorb from other religions than to persecute. Granted, the British taught them a lot about ethnic hatred.
And where is the Buddhist massacre or slum or child-raping monk?
4 comments:
Lapwing, I didn't think you were this naive.... interesting...
You've never seen a "Buddhist slum"??? Then I take it you've never been to China, or read much about how the Chinese are treated in their own land. Yes, officially the state "religiion" is Communism, and is atheistic, but Buddhism is the national norm for religion. The land that gave us Mao Tse Tung.... and his lovely bride.... Ever been to Hong Kong?
Muslims - you must not know much Muslim history - from the get-go they "converted" by the sword and with fire. Mohammed's first convert may have been his wife, but after that he used violence and fear. He went out with his tribesmen and they fought, conquered, and converted with their blades. Those who wouldn't convert, died. Don't paint them as all noble. They've been on a jihad since the beginning.
Hindus... they invented the strictest caste system the world has ever seen and treat huge segments of their population like garbage simply because of an accident of birth because of these castes. And they have tolerance? For whom? Not even for themselves...
Jews are survivors. But there are Rabbis and other officials of the synegogus that are brought up on charges every year for doing various things - from embezzlement to child rape. You just never hear about it. For one thing, they aren't Catholic, so they aren't so much fun to pick on, and then there's the risk of picking on a Jew in the American media... you run the risk of being branded a bigot, a racist, and a Nazi sympathizer.... so they just sidestep the whole thing by minimizing the coverage - page 16, a little blurb from the court documents, that's it.
Humans in general divide their evil behaviors pretty much evenly amongst the religions. Esepcially if you figure that most people worship as they do because that's what they were born into, that's how they were brought up. It's completely random.
You've never seen a "Buddhist slum"???
Spend one night in Bangkok Sister.
Lapwing said: Jesus may have been a nice guy, but you can keep his followers.
Nice to whom?
Herod? Jesus called him a scavenging vulpine.
The Pharisees? He called them whitewashed tombs and filth-encrusted dishes.
The Rich Young Nobleman? He told him to sell his possessions and give it to the poor. Sounds pretty condemnatory of greed to me. Unless you can somehow read "tone of voice" into it. I hear socialists frequently call for redistribution of wealth, and I don't find their tone charitable with respect to the rich.
The woman taken in adultery? Sure he didn't condemn her, but he also told her to go and stop sinning. Doesn't that sound judgmental to you? I mean, a woman's body is her own, isn't it? What right does Jesus have to tell her what to do and what not to do with her own body? Doesn't she have a right to choose? If we're going to call evangelicals 'homophobes' for telling gays to stop sinning and Paul a misogynist, don't you think it fair to say Jesus was sexually repressed and had a real problem with a woman's right to whatever she wants with her own body?
Just like your rose-colored assessments of other religions, your view of Jesus seems colored by your own preconceptions. I don't see liberals being any more cozy with Jesus if he were alive today than I do religious and political conservatives.
Hey rick,
Just like centuries of other men, it's clear that you are assuming that The Woman Who Sinned was a prostitute - sinning with her body.... when in actuallity, what do we all sin with? But you have a point - what "right" did Christ have to be telling people what to do and not do. Either no more right than any other rabbi fussing around interpreting the Law as he saw fit - or every right in the universe....
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