Quote:It's not really fair to place at the feet of a religion the thirty years war. There were factors like the reformation, but by in large it was the politics and policies of the time that of expanding and contracting empires that caused the wars and deaths. Gustavus Adolphus is remembered as a brilliant general, a religious man, and pretty much the founder of the modern Swedish society. I think Sweden has been pretty peaceful, because it lost the bulk of its population due to emigration before WWI. The thirty years war, while devastating locally, only reached about 7 million deaths, and it was considered the worst war in European history. It pales in comparison to the general carnage which has no religious under currents.I have not made the argument that religion is the exclusive cause of violence. That would be stupid. There is no lack of reasons why people slaughter each other. What I am claiming is that religion is, in general, a contributing rather than a mitigating factor.
Also, that wasn't the Swedish war I was talking about, not that it particularly matters. There were quite a few wars in Pomerania over the years.
Quote:I don't know if there is a "kinder, gentler" side to that religion, but there are portions of the Koran that promote peace, tolerance, and justice. Most of Islam follows that more peaceful path, however there are these violent sects that give them all a bad reputation. We do owe the Islamic scholars a debt for our system of mathematics and algebra.Yes. And we owe Islamic scholars the suppression of those other Islamic scholars who gave us mathematics and algebra. (And the world's first great historical theorist.) Fanatical religion has doing just fine since the time of Al Kwarizmi, and Islamic science decidedly not doing so hot. If religion played a role in creating these things, a doubtful proposition to my mind, then it played double that role in suppressing them. This is not dissimilar to the Christian experience.
You are correct that religion has been the inspiration for great aesthetic works in all artistic disciplines. I would only add that the same is true of horrible, gut-wrenching suffering.
(Edit: It occurs to me that a good example of the flaw in that argument is that the same thing is true of Monarchy. Without Spanish absolutism, we would not have Las Meninas, to name only one of a thousand great works inspired by aristocrats, but that hardly sounds like a convincing argument for Monarchy.)
Quote:I disagree. This is you totally denying any contributions made my religion in furthering culture. Universities, hospitals, and even societal concepts in peace and harmony are a result of religious influences. You know, people like Mother Teresa are an example of what religious people do, not some weird aberration.Yes, Mother Teresa is an excellent example of what religious people do. She took a lot of poor, sick people, brought them together under one roof, did absolutely nothing to help them stop being either poor or sick, gave them an extended set of last rites, and sent them on their way to the invisible man in the sky. Funds donated to her cause go towards replicating this method of not helping poor sick people around the world.
To use logic similar to yours above, what about Oxfam? What about Medecins Sans Frontieres? There are dozens of entirely secular groups that help out the poor and the sick far better than Mother Teresa ever did.
-Jester