Serenity1971 wrote:Kings/ rulers have been around for thousands of years. Religion has also been around for that long and longer. The Presidents are in essence "Kings".
Whether it's "king", "chief", "boss", "priest" or bully, historically leadership has been brute force by the brute who had the force. Ending strongman dictatorships required enlightenment and individual freedom
and responsibility. Small wonder we're returning to strongmen when ignorance is on the rise and seen as respectable instead of embarassing.
Serenity1971 wrote:All of these rulers tend to be bound by their religions no matter who they are. How many times have we seen them attending religious services over the years? These rulers are also the ones who have claimed religious reasoning for putting people to death ie. "Witch Burnings" the "Holocaust" and I'm sure there's many more that I can't think of off the top of my head at the moment.
Pogroms. Blood libel. Crusades. The Inquisition. Cultural and linguistic genocide. Those are for starters.
Religion was an invention by scared people who had no answers. Later, some of them mistakenly thought they
were the right answers instead of a security blanket in times of fear. That's how religion changed into belief; it became organized when someone realized organizing it was a quick way to unquestioned power, status and wealth. Except for serial killers, one-person religions haven't been a problem.
Serenity1971 wrote:Is it really necessary to compare things that were written a thousand years ago to todays world?
The Code of Hammurabi (~1760BCE) predates the "old testament" (~500BCE) by more than a thousand years and still makes for a better legal code than most modern religions' "codes", and the "Golden Rule" has been in cultures as far back as there has been written history (i.e. Babylon). No one has ever had a monopoly on ethics and morality.
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/CODE.HTM
Serenity1971 wrote:Do you think it's necessary for history to continually repeat itself?
Santayana:
The who forget history are doomed to repeat it.Me:
The who ignore history are trying to repeat it.When one knows better but doesn't do better, one is trying to make mistakes instead of learning from others' mistakes.
In response to:I said this in another thread, and I will say it again. If we collectively think that things are only going to get worse, they will. If we collectively think that we can change things and make them better, we will.
The worst thing that happened in the last fifty years was Ronald Reagan: not his political or economic policies, but his
"me decade". It turned into the
"me generation" and
"me society"where nobody thinks of the collective good anymore, just an "I got mine" view of life.
When I say collective, I don't mean communistic, I mean thinking about consequences and the effects of one's actions on others. Nowadays, few think that way anymore, and use the cop out of
"I'm a good christian/jew/muslim/hindu/whatever" to rationalize selfish behaviour.