Originally posted by OdBod
150 young people killed in Kenya because of religious differences. An Atheistic Humanitarian approach has got to be the way forward. Religion divides and hurts us!
Hmmm. For your point to hold across the board, you have to dismiss out of hand those people—whether a minority or not (and that’s an empirical question)—whose religious convictions are precisely what leads them to stand against such atrocities. I could cite a number of examples from various religions—and I am not excluding secular humanists, by any means: just that the OP is about religion per se. It was precisely his religious convictions that led Rabbi Abraham Heschel, for example, to march with Martin Luther King, Jr. It was precisely his religious convictions that informed Archbishop Oscar Romero’s activities in El Salvador (which led to his murder). Etc., etc.
If you want to paint such people as exceptions, then maybe. But, frankly, I think that the sentiment expressed in the OP is simplistic. Not that religion—or rather, dogmatic, unquestioning religious belief—isn’t responsible for a great many atrocities. It is. But so is unquestioning, dogmatic belief in non-religious ideologies.
Of course, one can narrow one’s definition of “religion” so that it excludes much of what the word has meant throughout history—and means today. For example, today I would class myself as “religious”—and yet I hold no unquestioning beliefs (at least, I hold no beliefs that I am unwilling to question; as a matter of fact, the particular religious paradigm that I find myself in requires that I question). I am not omniscient—I have many flaws and am ignorant about many things. And I don’t think that anyone here can claim omniscience with respect to moral questions.
I am not Catholic (or even Christian), but I think that Catholic theologian Urs Von Balthasar was spot on when he said: “When it comes to shaping one’s personal behavior, all the rules of morality, as precise as they may be, remain abstract in the face of the infinite complexity of the concrete.”
Again, the point in the OP is not totally off the mark—but it is simplistic. In my view.
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EDIT: By the way: many things divide us. That is likely to always hold. But I think that Jewish philosopher Martin Buber asked the right question: In our differences, do I see our relationship as one of “I-It”—that is, where I ignore your human subjectivity either because of your (opposing) beliefs, or because of what I can instrumentally gain from the relationship—or do I see it as one of “I-Thou”, wherein I recognize your essential humanness is the same as mine? And how does that inform my response?