This pastor is disgusting. He is not a man of God, he is in it for attention and fame and to frighten his constituents. (so he can get more attention and more fame)
If you're going to claim that no force can cause someone to do something bad, and that they're inherently bad people who were going to do bad things and just waited for the right excuse, you're going to have to carry that through to every ideology and say that every person in history who's ever been indoctrinated wasn't actually indoctrinated and was actually just a shitty person pretending. Which is a position that you can take if you like, but it requires a sort of black and white thinking that means that 99% of people are just born shitheads looking for an excuse to let it out (and that's not an exaggeration - let's look at recent German history), and that a lot of shitheads are willing to die just to be assholes - especially religious ones.
You're confusing "pretending" with "accepting a cognitive framework that already justifies what someone would have done anyway". And otherwise, yes, more or less. I think 99% is a vast exaggeration: the vast majority of people are just lazy. What makes Germany terrifying isn't that 99 percent of the population was indoctrinated: they weren't. What's terrifying is that people are so lazy that it takes a very small group of committed partisans to run an entire nation.
To put it another way: my main objection to your statement is the "especially" religious ones part. There's a statistics game, yes: for the vast majority of human history the vast majority of people have been religious of one stripe or another. But the twentieth century is strewn with people who committed massive atrocities in the name of non-religions ideologies. This leads me to conclude that the problem isn't religion, but humanity's willingness to be dicks.
ETA and what is it with me and the word "vast" this morning? Sheeesh...
You don't think that religion makes people more likely to die for their dick beliefs than other motivations? After all, greed is a big one but dead people can't spend money. On the other hand, religious people will go off to ~take back the Holy Land~ with the full expectation of losing their lives, and religious people will blow themselves up in the name of God, and all of them are doing it because they believe that they'll be getting rewarded by God afterward. People who just want money don't tend to rush headlong into death because they think it's a great way to get rich quick.
Most suicide bombers are, in fact, suicidal. Recent studies show that suicide bombers aren't people who are otherwise happy with their lives who think that this is the great way to top it off. They're people who are devastated, desperate, and likely to kill themselves anyway: martyrdom provides a way to make that act more meaningful. "Taking back the holy land" was as much economic as religious: the holy land has been a mess because it's the center of a great many trade routes, and all those pilgrims bring serious cash. It's not that religion has no motivational force: it's that it shapes motivations that are ALREADY THERE. If the medieval Spaniards hadn't been scapegoating Jews for religious reasons, they would have scapegoated someone else for political ones.
It's not that religion has no motivational force: it's that it shapes motivations that are ALREADY THERE.
For another example, take Ireland. England had been shitting all over Ireland for hundreds of years before there was such a thing as the Reformation. The anti-Catholic stuff was just another excuse for hatred and persecution that was already there.
Your assertions about the economic motivations of the Crusaders are old meme, and it's not a historically sound meme. SOME people went because they wanted to gain something tangible. Bohemond of Taranto, good example, all sorts of ulterior motivation involving land grabs. MOST of the Crusaders? Not even remotely the case. If you don't expect to come back alive, which people even back then were realistic enough to realize was the likelihood, economic motivations are kind of meaningless because you won't be around to spend what you pillage. The vast majority of the Crusaders did not leave expecting to come back with wealth, and they got what they expected. Many people sold or mortgaged what they had in order to be able to afford to go, because going was not cheap. Saying that anything but a small minority of Crusaders went to the Holy Land because they thought they were going to gain something tangible and economic is utterly unsupportable. It's a classic case of people sacrificing their possessions and their lives for religious gain,
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But it doesn't. I just gave you an example of religion causing people to do terrible but ultimately sacrificial things they had no reasons to do otherwise. So this idea that people are just looking for excuses because they're inherently bad and religion is convenient doesn't really hold up to historical evidence.
Also, suicide bombers might not be happy people, but suicidal people don't generally try to take down others with them for no reason.
suicidal people don't generally try to take down others with them for no reason.That is not true -- the two AREN'T necessarily mutually exclusive at all. One has only to look at how frequent familial murder-suicides are. Or look at a lot of the random public shooting sprees, where the assailant[s] have every intention of not leaving the scene alive
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You're completely misinterpreting everything I've written. Religion does not necessarily cause people to do bad things. But religion can cause people to do bad things that they would not have done otherwise. It can also instill people with incredibly harmful viewpoints that they have a great deal of trouble letting go of. To say that religion is never the root of problems and that people only use it as an ~excuse is incredibly dismissive of the terrible shit that people go through at the hands of religion.
I do not believe I am misinterpreting what you're saying.
You said: suicidal people don't generally try to take down others with them for no reason. It's pretty unequivocal, that.
How people CHOOSE to interpret religious tenets, how they may use them to serve their own desires, is where things tend to fall down. Simply saying "religion can cause people to do bad things that they would not have done otherwise" is oversimplifying because it's ignoring the agency of individuals in both interpreting and rationalizing, let alone making judgments for themselves within the pretty broad scope of religious tenet.
To say that religion is never the root of problems and that people only use it as an ~excuse is incredibly dismissive of the terrible shit that people go through at the hands of religion. Ah. That's what this is about, then. In that case, I'm not going any further with this
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THIS ISN'T ABOUT SUICIDE BOMBING. You can make excuses all day long, and you can keep pointing out that yes, people have free will and people aren't generally good, but that doesn't take away the fact that motivators exist and religion is one of them as much as greed is, as much as lust is, as much as power is.
I'm quite surprised that people here are finding it hard to grasp that some religious people really are motivated solely by their religion. Some people like this guy in the article legitimately believe that their hateful shit is FOR GOD, and have absolutely no other ulterior motive or using it to shield some undercover secret operative to achieve personal gain.
I MEAN REALLY, LOTS OF PEOPLE REALLY DO THIS KIND OF CRAP FOR GOD AND GOD ALONE.
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ETA and what is it with me and the word "vast" this morning? Sheeesh...
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For another example, take Ireland. England had been shitting all over Ireland for hundreds of years before there was such a thing as the Reformation. The anti-Catholic stuff was just another excuse for hatred and persecution that was already there.
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Also, suicide bombers might not be happy people, but suicidal people don't generally try to take down others with them for no reason.
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You said:
suicidal people don't generally try to take down others with them for no reason. It's pretty unequivocal, that.
How people CHOOSE to interpret religious tenets, how they may use them to serve their own desires, is where things tend to fall down. Simply saying "religion can cause people to do bad things that they would not have done otherwise" is oversimplifying because it's ignoring the agency of individuals in both interpreting and rationalizing, let alone making judgments for themselves within the pretty broad scope of religious tenet.
To say that religion is never the root of problems and that people only use it as an ~excuse is incredibly dismissive of the terrible shit that people go through at the hands of religion. Ah. That's what this is about, then. In that case, I'm not going any further with this ( ... )
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people aren't generally good Is THAT what you think I said?
that doesn't take away the fact that motivators exist and religion is one of them ...And that? You think I said that?
As for the rest of it, I'm not going any further with it with you, because at some point it's lost, and it's ceased to be about the actual issue.
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I MEAN REALLY, LOTS OF PEOPLE REALLY DO THIS KIND OF CRAP FOR GOD AND GOD ALONE.
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