Obviously, not everyone shares the same religious beliefs. Right and wrong, good and evil, those are subjective rather than objective terms and ideas. What's right and good for some can be considered wrong and evil by others. Everyone is the hero in their own life story. An often overlooked example of perspective is that America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan purportedly to fight the terrorists, yet to the noncombatant Iraqis and Afghans it's Americans (who invaded their countries, drop bombs, and launch missiles from planes and drones that destroy their homes, culminating in the combination of the missiles, bombs, and soldiers that kill their children and families) who're the real terrorists. There's the adage that “there's two sides to every coin,” the obverse and the reverse (heads and tails). Coins have a third side that people either forget or completely ignore: the edge between the sides that you can spin the coin on. And just like situations involving contention, there are three sides: You're side, their side, and reality.
Regardless of your faith leanings, even if you're an atheist, the reality is that the three largest religions practiced in the West (i.e. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) all worship the same God. The only difference between Yahweh, Jehovah, and Allah is the same difference between Michael, Miguel, Mikail, et al.: Language. Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God, Jehovah is one of the Christian names for God, and Allah is the Arabic name. This matters because it's the perceived differences that are used as excuses by all sides for the current strife in the Middle East.
And there are those who will say that religion, regardless of its name, is nothing but superstition in the first place and science “provides all the answers,” and it's those superstitions that are the real cause for the various wars. Yet they'll still proceed to use science as a tool and weapon and religion as an excuse to commit heinous acts of violence.
And because that excuse is usually stated both loudly and repeatedly regardless of the theatre of combat, both the targets and those who witness the senseless violence, killing, destruction, and overarching tragedy will typically have an overriding fear/anger response and blame the religion (especially if they're not practitioners of the blamed religion) of their enemy. It's the easy answer. The over-simplified and fails to look at the entire picture answer, but still the perceived easy answer. And who doesn't like simple, easy answers that require little to no thought?
The thing is, while not only is there no religion safe from blame or being targeted, religion in and of itself is never the culprit. The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition were perpetrated by Christians and were just as violent (relative to available technology) as what ISIL is doing now in the name of Islam.
We, this means all of us regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs (including atheism), need to stop blaming religion for the actions of its purported followers and to stop accepting extremists' claims of following their religious beliefs when their actions demonstrate their real motivations are of feeling the need for perceived superiority and their evident desire to bully and dominate others. Just because someone uses something as an excuse does not automatically make that excuse the cause for their actions.
Islam is not the enemy.
Judaism is not the enemy.
Christianity is not the enemy.
Religion, regardless of the flavour, is not the enemy.
Greed, intolerance, hatred, those are the enemy!
Even science and religion really can co-exist without being at odds with each other if people would just get over themselves. Now if only the same could be said of humanity in general.
That title seems to imply that science and religion (any religion, I am not singling out any specific religion here) are at odds with each other. And it seems that the majority of people (well, most Americans at least) share that sentiment: that science and religion are at odds with each other. The reality, though, is that they're not. I'm writing this as an ordained minister and a scientist. Even Einstein said: “I want to know God's thoughts - the rest are mere details.”
Scientists rely on methodology, testing, and evidence to come to their conclusions. Scientists, for the most part it seems, concur that science has all the answers. Science does not have all of the answers; science does, however, provide a way of getting the answers. The catch is that there will always be questions, there will always be mysteries.
Religion was basically the earliest form of science, the earliest means available to explain world and the universe. Science as we know it came about because Religion didn't seem sufficient to answering questions as there was evidence putting holes in many of the core statements of Religion. Part of the problem is a difference in the mental approach. Scientists have ideas that they test and either verify and/or adjust as needed, or reject the idea as determined by the testing and the resulting evidence. Religion, on the other hand, tends to engender beliefs. Beliefs are far more intransigent, much harder to adapt to new evidence. What many people don't seem to grasp is that simply because new evidence may contradict one aspect of a given religion it doesn't mean that the religion itself is wrong, it simply means that our understanding needs to be adjusted.
The Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible (of which the first five books are in fact the Torah) contain an ancient understanding of how the world and the universe were created; but that's not necessarily the whole story. Evolution still fits easily into it all. Especially once you look at the Creation as described in Genesis as the highlights much the same way the sports section of the news (i.e. the evening news, the sports section of the newspaper/newsletter, etc., et al.) doesn't describe every moment of a game/match but instead just gives the highlights for the “big plays”, the big events.
Science will explain how people reproduce, how groups of people form cultures and how those cultures interacted physically, economically, socially, etc. Science in and of itself does not set moral boundaries nor recommend any laws governing how people should treat each other. In many societies, religion does set those moral boundaries and recommend those governing laws. In fact, not only were the oldest documented legal codes based on religious doctrines, but many modern legal codes still spring at the base from religious-based ethical doctrines. That does mot mean that atheists lack morals or that religion is required to create a working and just code of conduct. In fact, the American legal system has roots not only in the 10 commandments of Jewish/Christian heritage/faith, but also numerous others including ancient Roman and Babylonian legal codes as well as civil and common law traditions of Europe.
Ultimately, what's mostly missed in all this back and forth is that both religion and science are really after the same thing: Both want to understand the universe. The difference is simply the approach, the effective questions being asked. Science seeks to explain and understand how it all happens, how it all works, the effective mechanics of it. Religion seeks to explain and understand why it all happens, what's behind it all, a reason beyond “that's just the way it is.” The easiest way to understand it is to think of science as the medical approach to the universe as a body, while religion could be thought of as the psychological approach to the universe. Science will see the body, but for many they'll see that body as a machine rather than a living dynamic entity. Religion tends to treat the body as a living entity and tries to work from there, but occasionally misses that the universe is dynamic rather than static, and has been since the Creation.
Americans need to start implementing some common sense rather than trying to legislate everyone else's lives based on their own beliefs.
If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry someone of the same gender.
Regarding the debate over abortion ("pro-life" vs "pro-choice"): In a recent Salon article, writer Irin Carmon said, "Abortion foes would like nothing less than to focus the debate on later abortions… because they make more people uncomfortable." But what anti-choice zealots are refusing to recognize is that it's cruel to ban abortion at a time when most women get prenatal testing to find out about their own health and the health of their pregnancy. It's callous to disregard the complicated circumstances that cannot be diagnosed until later in pregnancy. And it's morally wrong to deny women the essential medical care that they may need.
For every woman who's gone to Planned Parenthood regarding a pregnancy (i.e. to determine if you are pregnant and/or what to do about it), you need to realize that what happened next was your choice. There is neither accusation nor admonishment in that statement. You made a choice based on the options given. If you feel that the wrong choice was made, that means you have regrets; it does not mean Planned Parenthood forced you into anything. Their job is to advise based on the information given to them by the patient. Blaming them for a decision you now regret is not the right answer. Taking away the ability of another person to make their own choices because you regret the one(s) you made isn't the right answer. We all need to come to terms with the choices we've made in life. The reality is that every choice and decision we ever made was done for the same basic reason: Because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And making bad choices is, unfortunately, the best way for us to learn. While, yes, it is better and less painful to learn from the mistakes of others, ultimately we cannot force others to "learn from our mistakes." At the end of the day, everyone needs to learn from their own mistakes regardless of what we may think/believe.
If you don't agree with abortion (for whatever your personal reasons are), then don't have an abortion.
If you want your children to learn about the Christian concept of God, take them to a Christian church.
If you don't like the personal choices that other people make for themselves, then don't make those choices for your own self.
Trying to create laws that restrict other people's personal decisions is the wrong way to go about doing things. We need to educate people rather than legislate them!!
First let me start of by stating that I am an Ordained Minister of the Christian faith with a degree in archaeology. Nothing I’m saying here is meant to deny or take away from God. Rather, it is intended to educate so that our understanding is based on facts rather than misconceptions.
The modern view of Christmas actually isn’t the same now as what it was to begin with. While the holiday is intended to celebrate the birth of Jesus, it is not actually his birthday. For starters, in fact, no one knows exactly when he was born.
The modern calendar, the Gregorian calendar, is based around the approximate birth of Jesus; meaning that Jesus was born 2,016 years ago and that 0 AD would be the year Jesus was born. Unfortunately, it seems that when the original date was being calculated, they mistranslated the Roman numerals and it should have been what is by modern calendars approximately 4 BC. More recently, some scholars have determined from various references in the Bible that Jesus was born between 7 – 5 BC.
Then there’s the day itself. Jesus was not born on December 25. The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ “birthday” comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.” Even looking at the setting of the story, things like the shepherds bringing their flocks in at night, dates between May and October have been suggested.
Even where Jesus was born is somewhat in question. The Gospels say Jesus was born in Bethlehem, yet Jesus is called “Jesus of Nazareth” throughout the rest of the New Testament. This small detail is causing scholars to question just where Jesus was actually born.
The term "Christmas" originated from the Catholic Church as “The Mass Of Christ” or more commonly “Christ’s Mass.” Christ’s Mass was eventually bastardized to become Christmas. The date of Christ’s Mass was placed on December 25 for two reasons. The vast majority of Catholic Christian holidays were responses to pagan holidays, primarily in an attempt to “overthrow” older religions and practices. The first reason Christ’s Mass was originally celebrated in December was to offset the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, also known as Yule. While we might then logically conclude that Christ’s Mass should also be on the winter solstice as well, the Catholic Church went a step further, which leads to the second reason. The ancients didn’t have watches, and clocks weren’t ubiquitous like they are now. As a result, they were more attuned to nature and the changes in the seasons. The 25th was chosen as the daylight hours were getting longer (they could more readily see that the daylight hours were getting longer immediately after the winter solstice) which came to represent the coming light of the Lord. Since not only many pagan religions also give presents during the winter celebrations, the story of the Magi in the book of Matthew (for example) also bringing gifts, that practice was also incorporated in the Christian celebration. The tradition that there were three wise men arose from the fact that the Bible mentions three gifts (see Matthew 2:11), but the Bible doesn’t ever actually say how many wise men made the journey to see the baby Jesus.
In fact, many of the other trappings of Christmas are either borne of older religions or are later additions from cultures that are also not Jewish. (Always remember that Jesus, whose
name was in fact Yeshua, which translates to Joshua but was such a
common name that it was later translated to Jesus to separate him,
ignoring that the Hebrew alphabet has no letter J, Jesus/Yeshua was first and foremost a Jewish Rabbi, meaning he would have observed all of the Jewish holidays and customs.) For starters, the Christmas tree developed in early modern Germany, where it is today called Weihnachtsbaum or Christbaum, with predecessors that can be traced to the 16th and possibly 15th century, in which "devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes".
You know the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe? Well, the use of mistletoe can be traced back to ancient druids who believed it held magical powers, brought good luck to households, and like jack-o-lanterns, ward off evil spirits. The notion of mistletoe creating love and celebrating with it came from Norse mythology, while kissing under the venerable plant got started in jolly old England. The original custom of kissing involving mistletoe (now often hanging over doorways and in hallways or being carried by someone who wanted to make certain of getting that kiss) began as something of a game started by such that if someone could pick a berry from the sprig of the plant and there were no more berries, the kissing would cease.
Those are just some examples. So much of what’s equated with the Christian religion is really borrowed from or “in answer to” other, most often older, religions.
