''... but apart from that there's not much point trying to engage with you.''Yet you did. Then you tell me that there is no point trying to engage with me.
Perhaps the actual point is justification of belief. You make the claim that ''the outcomes of religion and religious belief have profoundly effected humanity in positive ways and outweigh the negative effects of religion'' - yet history shows division and conflict. Take Christianity, which splintered from the beginning when Christianity split into various groups who did not agree with each other, then Judaism did not agree with any version of Christianity, rejecting Jesus as the Messiah...and the list goes on. We know the story.
The Bible and violenceThe
Hebrew Bible and the
New Testament contain
narratives,
poetry, and instruction describing, recording, encouraging, commanding, condemning, rewarding, punishing and regulating
violent actions by
God, individuals, groups, governments, and nation-states. Among the violent acts included are
war,
human sacrifice,
animal sacrifice,
murder,
rape, and criminal
punishment.
[1]:Introduction The texts have a history of interpretation within the
Abrahamic religions and
Western culture that includes justification and opposition to acts of violence.
[2]Sociologists Frank Robert Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn question "the applicability of the term [genocide] to earlier periods of history, and the judgmental and moral loadings that have become associated with it."
[149] Since most societies of the past endured and practiced genocide, it was accepted as "being in the nature of life" because of the "coarseness and brutality" of life.
[149]:27 Chalk and Jonassohn say the Old Testament contains cases they would consider genocide (if they were factual) because of women and children being killed even though it was war and casualties in war are excluded from the definition of genocide. They also say: "The evidence for genocide in antiquity is circumstantial, inferential, and ambiguous, and it comes to us exclusively from the perpetrators."
[149]:64Historian and authorWilliam T. Cavanaugh says every society throughout history has contained both hawks and doves. Cavanaugh and John Gammie say laws like those in Deuteronomy probably reflect Israel's internal struggle over such differing views of how to wage war.
[150][120][151][152]Arie Versluis says, "...indigenous populations have also appealed to the command (in Deut.7) in order to expel their colonizers. This is shown by the example of
Te Kooti...in the nineteenth century who viewed the Maori as the Israelites and the colonizers as the Canaanites."
[153]Scholar Leonard B. Glick states that
Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, such as
Shlomo Aviner, consider the
Palestinians to be like biblical Canaanites, and that some fundamentalist leaders suggest that they "must be prepared to destroy" the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not leave the land.
[154] Several scholars draw similar conclusions.
[155][156]René Girard, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science says that, "desire is mimetic (i.e. all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.".
[157]Philosopher, sociologist, theologian and author
Jacques Ellul says: "I believe that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political)...Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc.). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty..."
[158][159]
