One more thing--I would say you have only to glance at the previous posts about this movie to see that agnosticism/atheism (in addition to Christianity--no one is denying that) enjoys more than its share of intolerant people. If anyone thinks that not believing in something guarantees that you’re tolerant of other peoples’ beliefs, you may be in for a shock. Intolerance isn’t caused by a belief; it’s caused by basic human disdain for anyone who doesn’t agree or might be judging you.
Christianity is a moral religion. It is not merely moral, like Confucianism or Socrates’ teachings, but the fact remains that you cannot divorce Christ’s miraculous acts (including the resurrection) from his moral teachings. Among the words of Jesus and the apostles, you will find no direction that Christians kill their enemies—on the contrary, Christ instructs us to love them, and we believe he lived out this teaching when he gave himself into the hands of his own enemies and died (only to be raised from the dead by God—if this seems crude, it is nevertheless the hope of the Christians, and the reason we can afford to love our enemies—-this life isn’t all there is). There’s this passage about Jesus’ arrest—-when Peter cut off the ear of one of the guards who seized Jesus. Jesus turns to Peter and yells at him. “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword,” and he lets the guard take him. Peter afterwards became the head of the church, and similarly died for his belief that Jesus came back from the dead. For about four hundred years, Christians followed Christ’s example in this, until most of the Roman Empire was Christianized (people who are not afraid to die are very convincing). At this point, it was made the official religion of the empire (there was not even a conception of separation between religion and state before this, and I don’t even know that this is truly possible even during our enlightened age), and the rulers had to confront a problem that none of the Christians, including the writers of the Bible, had ever had to confront before: How does this Way--which has essentially been, up till now, an oppressed person’s faith—how does it work when you’re ruling an empire? There’s nothing in the apostles’ letters or Jesus’ recorded words to tell you how to run a “Christian Government.” I think at first, at least, they did the best they could, and while the result was mixed, I would have rather had the teachings of Jesus at least partially informing the way the government was run than an amoral religion, such as that of the pre-Christian Romans or the Germanic tribes. It’s true the government killed people, and sometimes for believing different things, but this is quite obviously in conflict with the teachings of Christ. This is why I make the claim that you can’t say Christianity is responsible for things like the Crusades and the Inquisition—-people are. People are responsible for the 3,000-5,000 people who were killed as supposed “heretics” during the Spanish Inquisition (which ran for about 400 years), just as people are responsible for the 1.5 million executions and 5 million people sent to the Gulag during a few decades of Stalin’s atheistic regime, and the 1-2 million people executed during Pol Pot’s atheistic rule. The difference is, of course, that Christianity explicitly teaches against that sort of thing, regardless of the way Christians later chose to selectively interpret the teachings. You can’t say that atheism or agnosticism teaches against anything. You may be a very moral atheist or agnostic. It doesn’t matter. It is an essentially amoral belief-—it is believing in less, not more, than most people. For every atheist or agnostic who says it’s somehow our duty to help our fellow man, because, after all, people are all we have, you may have another one who says it’s our evolutionary prerogative to advance ourselves no matter the cost to others. I would even argue that if the Inquisition seems more sinister and abhorrent, it’s only because, deep down, we all have the feeling that they should have known better. Why would you expect Christians to behave more than the communists, unless you had some inkling that their teaching, at least, goes against this? There is no moral teaching inextricably bound up with atheism, however, that can judge human evil, even though there might be many very good groups of atheists who would hate the kind of things that Pol Pot and Stalin did (I’m sure most do). But the fact remains that in atheism and agnosticism, you are your own judge, so you decide what is right, whether that leads you to pacifism or constructing gulags. If there’s one thing that history has shown us, it’s that people are moral idiots. They’ll screw up any belief system, but the question becomes, “Does that mean you should blame the belief system and remove it so we can all do what we want?” Beware of creating scapegoats. Whoever you are, Christian, atheist, Voodoo priest, if you want to call something demonic, start with yourself…and figure out how to be saved from you. Best of luck.
Chris
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