Your suggestion did actually contain a claim or do you want to deny that? The claim implied was that the history of the catholic church would support your point. That there is a relationship between the church and state isn’t in dispute. However it is also a fact that the church counterbalanced many political abuses throughout Western history, because it provided ordinary folk with an alternative authority to turn, too. That both political and religious institutions often act in hegemony can be subscribed to the fact that there was an ideological hegemony in existence.
While the occurence of religious fraud is not in dispute - You still would have to prove that this is universally the case.
I don’t think that’s true. The church and the state were basically the same thing. It was the church who decided what ‘heresy’ meant while the burning was done by the ‘secular arm’ (acting according to the wishes of the church of course). The church also commanded armies I think ? Maybe these soldiers turned the other cheek ?
Why do I ‘have to’ ? All revealed religion is religious fraud.
I read Block’s article posted on LRC and I was not impressed by it at all. Arguments like “well the church was not that bad because it killed less people than the state” don’t seem sound to me.
Raico : “In this way, Berman bolsters Lord Acton’s analysis of the central role of the Catholic church in generating Western liberty by forestalling any concentration of power”
I’m afraid I disagree no matter what Acton thought about his church.
It seems to me that for every Quaker who’s a real pacifist there are a thousand ‘christians’ who are quite happy blowing up (or firebombing) civilians in the middle east, in asia, or even in christian Europe…
I don’t see how that’s my example, my particular case in point was Judaism, which I hold was revealed on Sinai. Jesus was turned over to Roman authorities by one Jew, and according to the Talmud, there were many rabbis arguing that this was inappropriate. He did more than take issue with the religion, though, he also, for instance, declared himself King.
I think that’s the core fallacy of your “argument” - There is no such thing as the church. In fact there were/are various types of churches. And within that there were various roleplayers, as well as streams of thought. So what your argument boils down to, is the following: Because there was wrongdoing of some of the roleplayers, All the roleplayers and by that the institution itself must be false, wrong, evil or whatever. Block did however have a look at the bigger picture an stressed that counterbalancing role churches did play during history against the political roleplayers. There’s of course more to look at, since Christianity was the set of ideas that influenced many people and hence ideas in Western Civilization. Well that doesn’t mean one has to embrace all the televangelists, crusaders, philozionists etc. that populate many churches. Just because that favoring the idea of liberty, doesn’t mean that we have to embrace every single bomb planter that opposes government, now does it?
But there’s such thing as revealed religion and churches, and the historical record shows their evil actions. And that’s especially true with regards to the oh so great western religion. As far as I can tell buddhists for instance have a more consistent respect for peace than christians do.
I’d rather say there was wrongdoing of a large amount of ‘roleplayers’
I didn’t say all roleplayers - I explicitly acknowledged that there are exceptions. I do claim the ‘institution’ is false, wrong, evil and whatever, though.
Which is doublethink. Churches are political players. So at the very least he should say they were ‘benign’ political players - but mostly they were not.
A general and vague claim. Yes, some christian ideas imply respect for individuals but christians didn’t invent those ideas and often violated them.
So a lot of christianity is the mess you just described, no ? And they explicitly support the mass killings the state carries on every day, right ?
Just a guess, I figured it was one of the Abrahamic religions.
I seem to remember a trial of Jesus that was instigated by the Jewish majority in that movie I saw.
Or him kicking over the moneychanger’s tables that were part of a scheme by the church to skim from the tax dollars that were required to be paid by the citizens.
Jim Morrison declared himself the Lizard King, why should anyone care enough to kill that person just because they declared themselves King unless you accept the validity of their claim?
Eric Clapton’s nickname is God, should we kill him too?
Just because that one is favoring the idea of liberty, doesn’t mean that we have to embrace every single bomb planter that opposes government, now does it?
It’s seems that your whole reason for not acknowledging the positive role christianity played in Western history boils down to abuses by a few as well as general human fallibility being misrepresented for the sake of creating a “christianity” straw man.
On the other hand all the moral, philosophical and yes also scientific impulses that christianity lead to are simply ignored.
Well I reject the premise that Christianity has enhanced liberty in “the west”. On the contrary, I’d argue that what has enhanced liberty in “the west” has been the revival of Greek (and particularly Aristotilean) thought, and liberty began to increase precisely when religious orthodoxy was beginning to be seriously questioned (I.E. the enlightenment). Practically all of the proto-libertarian thinkers throughout western history were not really Christians (at least by traditional standards), they were deists at best.
Of course, I also view the formal Christian religion (not so much the original Christians, which was just a particular flavor of Judaism, such as the Nazoreans) as a direct product of the Roman state to begin with, for the purposes of unifying the public so that they can more easily be controled. Furthermore, I view traditional Christian morality as the perfect ideology to enable servitude, and it really does seem to boil down to a strong emphasis on servitude and sacrifice.
Technically, yes. However, that small extremist sect (the pharisees) were also in the seat of power during that time. And they didn’t just turn him over, they stood in force and demanded his execution even though Pilate said he found nothing to convict him with.
Weren’t you just condemming the historical school in another thread, or was that someone else? A Christian strickly following the New Testament (or even a Jew strickly adhering to the Old) isn’t going to infringe on your rights in any way at all.
Please explain to me how a strict adherance to the bible would naturally lead to a purely voluntaristic ethic. I fail to see this. From what I can tell, at least in America, the vast majority of self-identified “Christians” use the bible to inform their politics, which leads them to advocate state policies enforcing their religious preferances onto the masses. You can of course point me to libertarians or anarchists who are Christians, but such people are an exception to the general rule and do not represent a common interpretation of the bible.
There is a theory that the followers of Mohammad, before the Turkish corruption, were the main source of Liberty flowing back into the west.
It isn’t too coincidental that the Enlightment started in cities who were major international trading centers that had weak central governments and spread out from there. Or that Spain under European rule had a signifigant number of people who were formerly free embark upon the dangerous voyage to the New World to seek freedom and escape the Spanish Inquisition.
809,215,732 death toll from religious wars. Some of the data may be dubious though, so even if we assume that only 50% of it is correct, that would still be the equivalent of over 67 holocausts.
At which point in time, I don’t really care about the goodness and spirituality that religion may bring about in people. Since I don’t think there’s any truth value in it anyway, then considering the death toll, the consequences of religion by far outweigh any benefits. This number also destroys the idea that religion is somehow an incentive for morality.
P.S. If someone has the time and knowledge, it would be nice if they could critically analyse that source to see how much of it is credible or not.
Careful not to lay the blame soley on religious institutions..it’s the human mind that made them up, and the human that acted on the atrocities. Fervently held "-isms"can lead to all sorts of bad things–regardless of intentions.
To those who doubt the value of religion consider the order Confucianism brought to the Warring states period. Consider the monoculture that Christianity created in Europe–and the great thinkers who were, incidentally, monks. Inherent truth or falsehood of belief is irrelevant in these cases.
Well, I don’t think that my religious belief implies believing that bad things aren’t done in the name of religion. Aren’t bad things done in the name of anarchy? But, this kind of argument only matters if you start out by believing that religion is false. If it is true, this is irrelevant. If the world weren’t made better through religion, then G-d wouldn’t have taught it to us.
Here’s a question - if people hadn’t killed each other over religion, what else might they have killed each other over? Who is to say that those deaths, and more, couldn’t have come about in wars fought over other topics?
It’s one thing to tell soldiers “If you die in combat, you will rewarded with an eternity of pleasure.”
It’s another thing to tell soldiers “If you die in combat, that’s it, it’s over. You wasted the only life you get.”
Christianity is a slave religion. If you brainwash people “It’s acceptable to suffer abuse while living, because you will be rewarded after you die”, then you’re training people to be slaves.
Anybody who claims they know what happens after you die is a fool/troll or is conning you.
What kind of an argument is that? So you’re saying that just because people might still kill each other for another reason, we shouldn’t get rid of the current one?
But yeh fsk is right, religion is one of if not the greatest incentive for war on a soldier level.