Zone1 Are all people equally valuable?

[Orangecat]

Are all people equally valuable?​

It depends on what you value. Regardless, I’d say no.

 

[sparky]

You are likely correct about MOST religions, but the True Religion that Christ gave us does not at all teach anyone to hate. Like I said, I hate what people say.. I hate their arrogance and their unwillingness to repent, but I do not hate them. I try to pray often for my enemies. The Virgin Mother appeared in Fatima 1917 and asked the children to pray for people on their way to Hell, so that they don't go there. She asked them to also offer up their sufferings for that cause. You can also, per Catholic Church teaching, offer up your sufferings (which God of course allows us to have...) for the sake of YOUR own sins, to expiate the damage caused by them. For example, if you commit adultery, that obviously harms your relationship w/ your spouse, sometimes irreparably and it always causes damage to your soul, your relationship with a Holy God. So you can offer up the various sufferings of life for the sake of being purified from your own sins. But she appeared to children, who did not have mortal sin (except she told the boy he would have to pray many rosaries before entering Heaven.. I don't know if she told the girls that).
There are so many false religions in the world that it is no wonder you think as you do. However, just because 99% of them are false, does not mean God did not establish a Church. He definitely did (Mt 16:18). The sinners have all but destroyed True Catholicism, yet it cannot be utterly destroyed (same passage). It's just scattered today... (LONG story)

I find it hard to pick apart those of such sincerity Fork
If there's any point i'd like to offer in these religious threads, it's that 'religion' and 'faith' are in two distinct and separate places in the dictionary for a reason

i'm hoping we can at least agree on that......~S~

 

[ding]

Just use your handle - confront reality

I try. It is primarily physicists who have expressed the pervasive relationship between mind and matter. The recognition of existence cannot be separated from existence. As Erwin Schrödinger put it: “The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence.”

 

[ding]

Obviously, but is that really what Christianity is doing? This religious, Christian-based "civility" and "hope" comes with a lot of unnecessary baggage, which isn't very good. Whether it's our blind support of the Jewish Zionist State of Israhell, or the American Protestant/WASP view of the poor, which in general, blames them for living in scarcity and not working hard enough (i.e. The so-called "Protestant Work Ethic"). The rich are good, they deserve all of their riches, because they all worked for it, whereas the poor are lazy, and stupid, and hence deserving of their self-inflicted deprivation. In general, anti-Science and in many ways misanthropic, anti-human. Christians see the world, as consigned to destruction and hence why invest too much time and energy into it? It's all going to be destroyed in Armageddon..etc.

Could it be that your Christian civility and hope is a false one? Based on unnecessary assumptions, that aren't true? It's based upon a vast cornucopia of hocus-pocus, religious gobbledygook. All of those Christians that could be more pro-science and find practical solutions here on Earth for our mortal, often pain-ridden human condition, rather than looking for one in another dimension or throwing up their hands and saying "Oh well, that's the world. One day we will go to heaven and that's the REAL LIFE, not this one, the one we actually have now, but a future life in the ethereal realm of the spirits".



No place ever abolished religion, not even the USSR or now, the DPRK-North Korea. And you're also not factoring in the fact that it was the Western capitalist powers, mostly the religious world that invaded Soviet Russia after WW1, in 1918, forcing communists to defend themselves against a foreign invasion, which led to the centralization of power. What was once truly a soviet republic (i.e. soviet being the Russian word for "council", or a democratic worker's community council), became a more authoritarian-based system, with a strong leader, to survive.

Religion is often used by the ruling class to control the masses, especially when said religion tells its adherents to obey their slave-masters and do as they're told. Christianity is one of those religions, unfortunately, that tells the faithful, to serve their masters as if they were serving God. In the 1940s the Soviet Union (Soviet in name only, because by then power was much more centralized and in the hands of Stalin - although still democratic in some ways, not as it was in the beginning), was invaded by 4 million German Nazis. Now, the Nazis in many ways were non-Marxist, religious socialists. They were right-wing socialists.

Some good people go to church, but that says nothing about whether what they believe is true or not. Religion as I mentioned in a previous post, is just an obsolete human coping mechanism to handle the brutal realities of human life. A better solution to our precarious situation, living in a universe that is constantly trying to kill us, is by developing technology that allows us to have dominion over our environment and have more control over our lives, avoiding being overwhelmed by chaos, disease, and death. In other words, humanity must work together to save itself. Save yourself, you are the answer. it's there within you. The potential and power is there.

By any objective measure Christianity is a force for good. But you have to look at the whole picture. If it were true that religion is just an obsolete human coping mechanism to handle the brutal realities of human life - as you suggest - it would have died out long ago.

Your argument against religion is very similar to Marx's argument against religion; provide for man's material needs and he will have no need for spiritual enlightenment. That just isn't the case. The more materialistic man became, the unhappier man became. We are free to pursue fame, fortune, power and pleasure but in the end none of those will satisfy us because we were made for more.

 

[BreezeWood]

By any objective measure Christianity is a force for good ... If it were true that religion is just an obsolete human coping mechanism - it would have died out long ago.

desert religions are not coping mechanisms they are assertions of authority disguised in false pretenses of the supernatural to sway obedience that otherwise are only opinions not universally shared -

and historically are not what has been good but rather selective self indulgences, moses and abraham et all who claim heavenly personification for their own purposes that never occurred.