True. Also I always wonder about Hitler.
I think all that Aryan race stuff was bullshit. Cause think about it, Hitler had black/brown hair and brown eyes. If he openly said people with blonde hair and blue eyes were the ideal human being then almost 80% of his troops would go "I have brown hair, does that mean I will die at the end of this war?" and never would have fought in his army.

I think the Aryan thing was just propaganda spread by the allies. That, along with the fact that NO German WW2 documents can be released to the public until 2099. That was fucking sketchy as hell.

I'm not saying Hitler was good, I'm just saying that I don't like to be lied to by historians. There is so much information about WW2 we will never know for sure, so much knowledge intentionally manipulated by the governments of the time.

IKR!!!

Especially Islam!

Killing is natural. We do it all the time, just because the life we take is a human life doesn't make it any better or worse than the lives of animals or plants.

All life is worth equal value, killing any life, works in the same way

Saying that all life has an equal value, or has a value at all, is either an ideological or a religious statement, not a proven fact. Value is something people give to things, not an intrinsic characteristic of things.

Also, saying that all lives have an equal value causes some rather strange situations; does it mean that, when I brush my teeth and kill millions of bacteria, I am committing a genocide (bacteria ARE alive, after all)? Is it as morally reprehensible as the killing of as many humans?

@MarcO
I'm saying that all life is valuable to me. Not that it is valuable to all. Just look at the difference between African countries and western countries, they have VERY different values for human life.

Also I'm mainly referring to sentient life. So anything that can think for itself, mammals, aquatic life, etc.

It is rather doubtful that this is how religions started. A more likely hypothesis is that it came out of trying to make sense of the unknown, coupled with specific rare characteristics of people (in some places, schizophrenia, epilepsy and even sleepwalking could be seen as being a medium for other, unknown entities; people who had such characteristics, which we consider health issues nowadays, often become shamans due to that).

The emergence of castes of priests and such, where the notion of wanting to control the masses and perpetuating your group's political power, most likely started around the beginning or larger civilizations, like Egypt and maybe Sumerians before that.

b>@MarcO, the belief in agency is a part of our evolutionary package, but belief in agency is not enough to be religion. I suspect that ritual and systematized activity probably did start up in prehistory, but that would have been without fixed codification until things could be written down -- cast in stone. I agree that what could be loosely called religion began quite early, but it had to wait until after the hunter gatherer phase had run its course before it could take hold when larger groups of people were living more or less stationary lives and societies were growing in size. That would have been about the time of the Sumerian culture at about the same time that centralized power became a norm. We are in agreement about that.

That's a very concise answer. It's also the most accurate one.

You are correct. In the scriptures there are multiple incidents of immoral and heinous activity. I am mainly discussing the modern day religions and their influence on the religious communities. I personally believe that religion is one of the most influential forces in society.

Human beings have always engaged in heinous acts of barbarism against one another. We will continue to do these things for the foreseeable future.

The "live together with minimal hostility" part only works when there is only 1 religion in an isolated community. If there are 2 or more religions in an isolated community then there will be much more conflict than not.

It was mainly a comparison of similar religions which originated approximately in the same region. Also I already commented on someones comment about these not being the 3 main religions.

Basically, these '3 religions" are all different branches and sects under the umbrella of the Abrahamic one, and each of these 3 have sub-religions existing within them.
I would personally label the major 3 as Abrahamic- Hinduism-Buddhism-but this is a technicality, and Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion because no deity is worshipped.

I have to be honest, I don't completely understand all of your comment.

@lancer I'm agreeing with the OP's argument. The Pentateuch has a lot of innovative rules for ensuring success for the new age of urban/settled agriculture/city-state living. There are specific innovations for parasite control and famine avoidance. Many civilizations in that period fell to disease and starvation.

Okay. I understand what you mean now. Someone I know raised a similar point about ramadan, part of the muslim faith where the people would fast for a period of time to reduce the nutrients in their bodies which parasites would feed on, starving the parasites of nutrition. I don't completely know if it's true because I don't have time to research it

To be honest. Killing in the name of god and god killing people are separate. If we believe god does exist then his kill count could include basically every human death ever. But for the sake of "there is no god" we assume that people who kill in his name just use it as an excuse.

So indifference and failure to understand the direction of creation makes one so good when your good but if it we're a man we would call him evil you sir have given god a double standard or have mislabeled your devil as your god

I personally believe that every human is responsible for their own actions, regardless of the excuses (god) they use for their actions. Hence why we incarcerate people when they commit crimes even though some say it was for the sake of their religion.