Quote:
Originally Posted by Inxu
My point (by badly chosen analogue, I admit) was that we often view the surface when deeming things to be "good" and "bad" while we should go a bit deeper than that. Religion itself doesnt kill it's people who do and they are going to find millions of excuses to do so. Biology isnt bad, yet nazis used it to justify their actions, altruism is noble and yet communism killed even more people than nazis. Similarly the things most religions teach are good. It just takes someone to put a twist on them in order to make them bad. I also doubt that religion is the reason but rather an excuse for the one pulling the strings.
I think I understand your point... and I did, and still do, disagree with it. Religion
does kill people, because religion (some of them) is a set of beliefs that, when accepted, holds that some killing is good. That is entirely unlike the gun analogy, and biology in the hands of the nazis. The former is, as I explained, merely a tool, while the latter is an excuse for what the people in question wanted to do anyway. But religion, by contrast, may be (and is) used by some as an excuse but it is
itself the cause of many, many deaths. Guns don't want people to die; biology doesn't want people to die; many religions do, absolutely, want some people to die.
If a Muslim accepts all the tenets of his religion — and many Muslims do — then he believes that under appropriate circumstances, jihad is justified and in fact required. It is the teachings of the religion — in other words, the religion itself — that causes the devotee to be inclined, in certain cases, to blow people up.
If a Jew accepts all the tenets of his religion — and many Jews do — then he believes that under appropriate circumstances, war in defense of the right of the Jews to occupy their supposedly divinely given homeland is justified and in fact required. It is the teachings of the religion — in other words, the religion itself — that has caused some wars.
It's more complicated with Christianity because of the multiplicity of variations on the teachings, but for many mainstream Christians it's the same: The teachings of the religion (as generally accepted by Christians) justify and even compel war in some cases. The Christian bible has caused numerous wars, dating back to the First Crusade. That's right, caused — not just been an excuse for.
None of these three is a "religion of peace", because each is a belief system whose tenets include that war is, sometimes, good. And again, that's different from any analogy you can draw to anything that is not a belief or a collection thereof. To return to the OP's question, Islam
is, among other things, the belief that killing infidels in jihad is good. It's not just associated with that belief, it
is that belief (plus others).