The ability of people to deny that their religion has ever done a single thing wrong throughout history, attributing all such "errors" instead to the devil and fallible human nature, is a miracle of deception that only a god could pull off. And since such people are sure that God is incapable of ever engaging in any evil whatsoever, and deception was the very evil that cursed Adam & Eve as much as it crucified Christ, so grand a deception as this could only have been pulled off by devil himself.
It is this very fact that leaves us to wonder if religion is itself not simply a means by which we sugar coat every evil in the sacred robes on one religion or another, allowing us always to find a way of living with whatever sins we feel we had to commit, to secure our salvation, and in service to our God.
On the one hand, "it is impossible for a human being to willingly do wrong," argued Socrates, “because
our instinct for self-interest prevented us from doing so.” On the other hand, "people never commit evil so fully and so joyfully," as Blaise Pascal pointed out, " as when they do it for religious convictions."
But if "religion" is about preventing people from doing wrong, in addition to many other things of course, why is it that people "never commit evil so fully and joyfully" as when they are doing it for their sacred religions?
Is there something about religion in particular that turns people from perfectly sane Church going folk, into pure psychopaths for their own salvation? Is religion simply an inebriating elixir that miraculously turns souls as pure as water into ones as red as wine? Does religion alone have the god-like power, in other words, to transform any act of evil into a supreme act of virtue by simply recasting our terror of the eternal fires of hell into a "love" for the very deity who not only created such a place, but likewise threatens to hurl us headlong into it?
Or to put it another way, is our wholly "self-interested" pursuit of eternal salvation the very thing that allows us to recast as a sacred virtue our willingness to murder the whole world in order to obtain it?
The irony of religion, then, is that there has probably never been a single act of evil committed collectively by humanity that was not seen by the vast majority of those who participated in it as not only having some unquestionable moral and even Biblical foundation, but as also being something, however tragic it may have been in fact, as always being an act of faith that necessarily served some much greater "good" or God or "divine plan."
It is not as if the millions of people who supported slavery and Christian imperialism of hearts as much as souls, who marched off by the millions to fight war after war after war, or those who committed genocide from Native Americans to Armenians to Jews to Cambodians and Tutsi's, had all suddenly overnight thrown off any and all of the moral constraints that an entire life of Christian conditioning had been relied upon to keep in place. And even if they had, what then does that tell us about the efficacy of such Christian conditioning, that it can so easily be discarded?
Yet this is exactly what every priest or pastor, parent or politician, would have their children, congregations, and constituents believe, and exactly what they all willing choose to believe across the globe.
And they believe this, whenever they accept the idea that only religion and a belief in God can keep us moral and from tearing out each other's throats, while rejecting the fact that most if not all of those who willingly engaged in such bloodshed and horror, did so only after they had convinced themselves that no matter how unbeknownst to them the reasons and the causes of the conflagrations they haplessly found themselves thrown into, or how evil the ultimate aims may have been of those special few who had forced them to participate in it all, their own soul was insulated from any responsibility for any of it, because they knew in their own hearts and minds that they were ultimately only doing what they did out of sincere Christian service to, and a deep and abiding love and trust in, their Jesus and their God.
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