It should be noted that it was fifteen years before the Civil War that the Southern Baptists split off from all the other Baptists specifically because they believed that the Christian Bible sanctioned and supported slavery.
Interesting side topic. Funny how often even today people tend to forget there was little in the way of a market economy, and the definition of slaves circa the time of Jesus included what today are employees. Wage labor iirc arose sometime after the Black Plague, when farm labor was suddenly scarce.
It helps a lot when your church tells you that your insistence on keeping slaves is Godly and Christian.
True of all dogmas: they provide the mental shortcuts, the pat answers, the comebacks, all to justify whatever worldview is in play.
... This is getting into subjects explored much more in depth in the religion and philosophy section, but how much a religion causes violence and how much it prevents it is, in my view, not strongly correlated to what it's main words say. All the major religions tend to have peace at their core. I don't think Catholicism caused Nazis, but likewise Buddhism didn't prevent Imperial Japan. They're all pretty adaptable and two-edged swords. Which is why so many Muslims are fighting Islamists and getting along pretty well in western societies.
Here is your problem, a commonly held fallacy. Moreover, in general terms behavior has genetic, unconscious acquired heuristics, post-amygdala adjustments to automatic responses, and finally conscious, deliberate actions. Dogmas and creeds affect the last, or Nazis would have gassed no one, Pol Pot would have had no killing fields, and several major wars, both religious and political, would not have happened.
These differences in behavior are reflected in things like criminal law, distinguishing 2nd degree murder from 1st degree, premeditated stone cold killing. Accident, emotion, or conviction: degrees of personal accountability, from incidental to fully intentional.
Which actually brings it back to my main objection that everyone seems to want to dance around and whatabout; innocent Muslims deserve no punishment and they are not a rare breed. Do you think that they deserve punishment like some other posters here?
Agreed. Humans are responsible for personal actions alone. However, that there may be nice followers of any given creed does not say anything about that dogma, only that humans have a similar common tendency to listen to their natural empathy, an evolutionary adaptation required for social animals, in spite of what a madman might be preaching at the moment.
