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Originally Posted by Original Position
But yet even you acknowledge that a corrupted Christianity was the pretext for the Inquisition. A corrupted Christianity is still, presumably, a religion. Is the idea that when religion functions as a pretest for persecution that it is blameless?
If I may chime in, when everyone's in a large heirarchical organizations, everyone blames someone else. For example, the Collusiums, and the Romans. People didn't know they were Roman's without the spectacle, and murder was cheered on, yet nobody in the stadium is entirely blameless.
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So for instance, let's say some government decides it doesn't like Jews and so requires all Jews to convert to Christianity. The Christian churches willing go along with this, turning in Jews to the authorities who do not convert, or whom they think are only pretending to have converted. Now, plausibly, that persecution of Jews is a pretext for some other concern. But I would still consider the churches, and hence the religion of which they are a part, to be complicit in this persecution as well.
Everyone's
just following orders in a large hierarchy. Can't blame them for
just following orders.
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Not intentionally. It is surely possible for religion to sometimes be an agent of evil without always and only being an agent of evil, or being the cause of all evil.
Jumping ahead, I suspect our disagreement is that I don't think it is correct to reduce the motives of powerful religious people solely to concerns about power - I think the goals of their religion are also factors driving their actions. I believe Muslim jihadists who say they are fighting for their faith. I believe Christians who say they were persecuting heretics in order to preserve their faith.
I think the higher up you are, the more it becomes about the power of the church. The pope had a lot of influence, and denying the pope the answers to the universe threatened his power, and then this becomes an insult to the faith. It's like telling the pope that he's not the pope, for how can the pope be the pope if his explanations to heavenly bodies are incorrect, or not on par with scientific explanations?
Fear of death means you're willing to act like a cog in a large machine. The afterlife alleviates that fear, and allows the large machine to be seen as something else. So, if science starts to make advances in psychology, then this makes the clerics of the day less relevant, and it's like telling a spiritual guide that you don't need guidance.
Kings also use the religion as the excuse, such as crusades, and devine right. While they probably were believers, they were believers in their own ego, created from the image of God, and had lineage. Many religions try to trace their lines back to God. This to me indicates families in control, staying in control by claiming to be closer to God, such as father Abraham, a song I sang as a kid. And many tribal religions use religion as the excuse to keep their particular tribe in power.
Aaron, history is not one of my strong points, otherwise I'd try to elaborate more. I hope this helps. I think when people don't question authority, they work together, but they have little curiousity as to why.