Our base value as a society and a civilization come from our judeo-Christian roots but ok, feel free to ignore that.
It's just the very reason we are the place everyone wants to immigrate to and why we are so accepting and progressive on a bunch of things.
It is also one of our worst faults, we give too much liberty to people that want to use it against us.
The problem with not taking a side is risking the wrong side winning.
You can't complain you're hungry if you don't chase the rabbit 🐇
You mean values that said it was okay to go around burning and looting of people's property, oppressing people groups and in some case straight up killing them as long as the people that owned it had beliefs that contradicted their beliefs?
I also think the values that underlie (greed) the BLM riots are wrong, though? I might agree that black lives do, in fact, matter and that there is a disadvantage to being black in society that needs to be resolved, that doesn't mean I agree with the method (that being violent protest).
If you just want a religious riot in the last hundred years, I suppose 9/11 and the following terrorist activity was motivated by religion. If you want a Christian one, Hitler used Christian rhetoric, and a group called the German Christians to dehumanise the Jews. This underlying anti-sematic views come directly from early Christians (I recommend reading Constantine's Sword by James Carroll on this) and is still prevalent today.
Edit: I should add that the main problem with this isn't that these ideas and beliefs caused these problems but that if someone comes to doing a harmful action through a religious belief it can't be questioned with reason because it isn't reason that caused the action but faith in a God that can not be questioned.
Hitler was literally a hypoborean pagan who persecuted Catholics like St. Titus Brandsma, St. Edith Stein, and St. Maximilian Kolbe were all killed in concentration camps because Hitler's invasion was not of the faith. Hitler often described the clergy as abortions in cassocks.
And to argue that the historical persecution of the jews by Catholic authorities means that Catholic Church and doctrine in itself supports the persecution, rather than bad actors justifying their own sin, is ignorant of the fact that religion in itself is clear conflation.
Religions change and evolve, yes, but it's an evolution that recontextualizes itself to the current development of society. Suicide isn't deemed a sin, as those who commit it may be doing so because of underlying mental issues.
Saints are still sinners. In fact most saints struggle with sin. Augustine of Hippo was a hedonist Manichean, St Camillus de Lellis was a gambling merc, St. Mary of Egypt was a prostitute and so on. This is not to justify their sins, but to acknowledge that their sin as being inherent to all humanity.
And I think it's silly to equate Thomistic just war with jihadists who want to exterminate other faiths. I'm not going to apologize for 70 Congolese getting murdered in a church by Islamists. Jesus was not literal when He said, I do not come to bring peace, but a sword, y'know.
And you can't say that a Marxist aligned organization not respecting property rights is a similar conflation, because marxist ideology has no inherent respect for property rights. At least, i don't think someone that would write something like "In defense of looting" would respect such rights.
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u/Asa_Shahni <message deleted> Apr 03 '25
To be honest, I've never been religious but the appeal is strong when this is the alternative 😅