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| Topic | "Maybe it's not to late to learn how to love and forget how to hate" |
| ParanoidObsessive 08/01/19 11:29:28 AM #15: | kind9 posted... BUMPED2002 posted...Hate is in America's DNA and that goes back to the Colonies and the Black codes which were a set of law used to divide the races. Don't blame either - the real problem is humanity. Europeans were incredibly shitty to each other (and to others), but so were Asians, Africans, and even Native Americans long before Europeans found them. Like it or not, violence, oppression, conquest, and a willingness to see others as lesser (thus justifying enslaving or killing them) has been part of the human psyche since the dawn of the species as we know it. The moment there was something worth fighting for, we immediate started fighting over it. The problems with religion only really exist because humans invented it, and humans basically ruin everything we touch. Krazy_Kirby posted... religions caused more deaths than anything Not even close. Doubly so when you realize that a hell of a lot of deaths blamed on religion had almost nothing to do with it. Like the Crusades - as much as religion was used as the professed motivation, for most of the people actually fighting in them, material wealth and political power were far more significant motivations than faith. In the same vein, the Inquisition was usually more concerned with politics, economic disparity, and a desire to redistribute wealth (and they never killed as many people as most people think they did anyway). Religion was the excuse, but it was never really the cause. (Also, no matter what a hysterical Wiccan might tell you, there was no such thing as "The Burning Times") Counterbalance that against things like disease (especially things like the Black Plague, which wiped out more than half the population of Europe - twice - or the smallpox outbreak in the Americas that killed off something like 90% of the native population, and paved the way for European conquest) and the massive death tolls of WWI and WWII, along with other wars of conquest throughout history, and religion has probably killed comparatively fewer people than any number of other things. And regardless of what edgy teens may believe, religion HAS provided a number of positive contributions to human history (a large part of why it exists in the first place), so that complicates matters even more. Whether you want to accept the idea, religion, like most social constructs humans have created, is a blurry mess of both positives and negatives, and probably did as much good as it did harm throughout history. And even if everyone turned atheist tomorrow, people would still be incredibly shitty to each other on a regular basis. Because that's who we are. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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