Giving doctrinal justification for intolerance is a big one. Obviously it doesn't apply to everyone but enough people certainly do.

I think my least favourite part about both religions is the way they tell you to treat women and in Christianity (can't speak about Islam because I don't know their view on the matter) how they view animals.

My brother's wife is a Buddhist from Thailand, and she won't even kill millipedes in the house.

Mind you, I don't think Christians are superior over animals any more than the entire western world is. At the end of the day, to sustain such a big global community with so many people, animals will suffer. That's a fact of the world we live in.

The way I see it, we're omnivorous, and any philosophy that claims to respect the dietary rights of animals needs to include humans.

As a member of the third faith, I should probably feel honoured. Instead, I'll just point out that Judaism is only harmful to Jews. And that's mainly because we're a minority religion in all but one country. And... just don't ask about the seperation of synagogue and state in Israel - it's pretty fucked up.

Only harmful to Jews? Palestine, Nate?

That's nationalism and territorial possessiveness. Not religion.

Your saying that Gaza is a conflict that has nothing to do with religion?

Don't get me wrong there's a lot of fighting over supposed territorial boundaries. But Israel is a Jewish State and Palestine is a Muslim State. I'm not going to condescend you with a history lesson but let's not forget the Palestinian Arabs explicitly told Britain and the Jews that Israel would not work.

It's not like putting a people who are hated for religious reasons next to the people that hate them is going to cause trouble right?

I'm not making this about extremists at all. It's about nonsensical, ancient sets of rules that do not apply today, and are used primarily to keep women uneducated, and under the thumb of the men in their society. The rules in your religious texts are ridiculous, and no one should follow them.

Again, the rules interpreted as having the intention of forcing women to certain ways of life are only viewed as so because of extremists, terrorism isn't the only form of extremism we have, you know.

If those idiots who say that anyone, including women, should be uneducated, that flies directly in the face of ALOT of rules in my religion, misinterpretations like this existed because some people prefer to twist rules and take advantage of them.

Infact, the only rule that's kind of forced on women is pretty much the one about hijab, which isn't as rejected as the media makes you think, besides if a woman doesn't wanna wear one, she just feels guilty, no one is literally gonna try to force her to wear one.

And you didn't actually read any of it for you to know nor did you ask qualified people and not just uneducated freaks who misinterpret or bend rules in their favor.

Besides, what right do you have to call the texts ridiculous without even reading them, especially since a small but noticeable percentage of the global population follow what's in those texts? statistically speaking, we're not as many as christians but we're still noticeable.

I've read the Qu'ran so do I get to say it's ridiculous?

If it makes you feel better I think the Bible and the Torah are ridiculous too. There are just too many silly passages...

Yes and no. You can't properly say it's ridiculous until you've read it in its original form. Translation is an art, not a science.

I agree with WoF but if you show me the original and translated parts you read, I'll gladly ask about and correct any inconsistencies or mistakes in there.

But I guess ridiculous is an opinion, but what some of you view as ridiculous, we view as dedication, I won't bother explaining that philosophy though because I seriously doubt that you want to know and I doubt you'll stop calling it ridiculous anyway.

I dislike OANST's (And others) habit of reducing a religion to what's said in the core holy book and then picking it apart.

Religion is interpretative, right? What works for one age is simply not applicable for another. That's why theology exists.

Jews and Muslims and Christians coexisted peacefully side-by-side in Palestine for centuries. For most of the time since Muhammed founded Islam, Jews have been far safer in Muslim countries than in Christians. It's only really since the late 19th century that things have been going downhill. And that's largely as a response to Jewish nationalism and an increase in Jewish population in the region. So, as I said, nationalism and territorial possessiveness.

You could argue that both Jewish and Islamic nationalism and territorialism comes from the religious history/myth. And that would be true. But it would also be against the point, because we were talking about the religious laws, not the history.

Who says that's what I was doing?

Regardless of how you interpret it, the proof of harm is everywhere. These religions cause a great deal more harm than good, and they always have. And let's not forget that they aren't real. That seems like a particularly important point to me.

I've seen you make the argument before that if you don't follow the bible to the letter you're not a real Christian. You might have been being facetious but it's hard to tell with you when a topic particularly gets your goat.

Religion is hardly the only thing that's ever been usurped for political purposes. It's almost definitely the easiest to usurp and the most triumphant example of, though. That claim is meaningless though, because it can't be proven. Religion is a natural thing that happens in the development of society. You can't stop it

A religion's sole value isn't in its epistemological claims. Religion is simply a natural expression of a cultural identity.

I'm not saying that some religions aren't nasty and gross or that fairly straightforward interpretations of any Abrahamic holy book won't lead you to evil conclusions, but denouncing the concept or religion or claiming one religion is superior to others helps extremist views spread. Extremists believe we're evil or corrupt or unenlightened or whatever and the best way to prove them right is to deride and mock what they've built their lives around.

The argument that I've made is that Christians who don't follow the actual teachings can't say that the ones who do, and who take it to the extreme aren't real Christians. Very little of Christianity is about love, no matter what Christians might like to make you believe.

Saying that religion has been usurped politically is kind of an oxymoron. It has always been political in nature. And yes, it can be stopped. With time, education, and a willingness by the people who have acknowledged its false, and harmful nature to talk about it.

"Harm" wouldn't happen if people who follow a religion/claim to follow it don't bend it in their favor and be more tolerant and if people who don't follow it/dislike religion don't dismiss their beliefs, and yes religion has been mixed with politics, and as a muslims, something I've read and learned about directly from my religion is that mixing religion and politics can lead to countless problems with huge consequences, yet people, including ones who claim to be muslim and therefore should understand that, still mix it with politics, religions are always gonna be the victims of political leaders.

And also, to answer your other point, something I also learned as a muslim, bear with me for the sake of the point and speculate that god exists, "religion", is a manual of the connection between a follower and god basically, so no one really has the right to say someone isn't following a certain religion if they're not doing a particular thing in their religion or if they're bad at it, because it's no one's place to decide if they're following a religion or not but themselves, I mean have christian and muslims friends who drink, do drugs, have sex, etc, and in my opinion no one has the right to dismiss their being followers of whichever religion they want to follow.

Yes. Harm happens regardless. It doesn't matter how well meaning the people are. They harm scientific, and social progress at every step. And we dismiss it because it isn't real. I want you to imagine someone telling you that they believe that bubbles have the power to turn chewing gum into kittens. Now, I want you to imagine how the rest of us feel about your religion.

Sure, you can be a Christian if you believe in the Christian god, but what's the point if you're boozing, drugging yourself up and fucking whoever you want? If you get to pick and choose the rules then you certainly don't get to follow the denomination your parents brought you up in. Even if I was still a Christian today I certainly wouldn't be a Roman Catholic. I probably lost that right even -before- I had pre-marital protective sex.

To address this bit specifically:

To pick the religion you're most familiar with, the sad thing about Islam is that the people who are following the religion in closest accordance to the Qu'ran, the teaching of Muhammad, are those of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

You cannot dismiss half the word of god as outdated, like the bits that say you have to have your arms hacked off if you steal, but still keep the bits that say gays are evil and women are possessions. At the very least ISIS are doing what Allah told them to do, even if it does make them terrible humans.

Well that's not what I meant, I'm not saying it suffices to choose a religion and not to follow the rules, I'm just saying it doesn't deny you the right to belong to it.

Islam, as well as any other religion, doesn't have to be modernized, but it has to be treated in relation to the time we live in, and yes we do have bits that say things about gays but about women being possessions? the only bits in the quran about that are the ones describing how badly women were treated in the time during which islam was still a new religion, so yes, I believe we should understand it in context, not just blindly apply it but at the same time, not "Change" it either.

That thing that you're explaining. It's modernization.

You'd say it's bullshit. I'll say it seems like an innovative method of sculpting

I think it is similar to modernization yes, but unlike modernization, you don't "Change" religion or rules, you just interpret them in a way so that you can do them as closely as possible without breaking the rules and traditions of your own time.

Yeah.... That's called change.

No, "Change" is when you modify it, when change the rules of a religion itself, instead of knowing the rules but applying them in a way suitable to your time, the difference is that you don't actually change what the religion itself says.

That reminds me of "NnT is definitely not an HD remake, it's just a remake that happens to be in HD".

To change means to modify it by any means, and since it all comes to interpretation, it gets 'changed' very frequently.

For example, if the bible says "Thou shall not kill", one can interpret it as an rule not to kill anybody, but the other can interpret the bible as a kind of woman who says 'no' while meaning otherwise. The other didn't change what the bible said.

I actually do get what abe619 is trying to say. There's a movement in/stream of Judaism called Modern Orthodoxy. It's the stream I used to be a part of back when I was religious. It starts with the understanding that the Torah, the Talmud, and the laws stated therein are fundamentally true, but then makes the point that you can interpret those rules conservatively or liberally.

For example: The Talmud says that women must dress modestly. An ultra-orthodox Jew would say "Well, for generations we've interpretted that as meaning that women must only wear skirts that go down to their ankles, no trousers, non-revealing tops that cover their shoulders and arms down to the elbow, and keep their hair covered at all time. And I see no reason to change that." A Modern Orthodox Jew would point out that the concept of modesty is a cultural one, and in the widespread Western culture, it's possible for a women to be considered modest if she's wearing pants or a short-sleeve shirt. And so on.

There's plenty of wiggle room in religion, if you're prepared to throw tradition out the window and are open to new ideas.

It makes sense. And I like that religion is changing. I like that in some areas of the world it is becoming less violent, and oppressive. But we need to remember that this isn't really a case of religion catching up to progress. It's a case of religion holding back progress. Yes, the grip that religion has on society loosens (very slowly), but religious leaders tend to keep as hard of a grip on their society as possible. An enormous amount of people still believe in religion, and that's simply because they've always had it in their lives. I'm not attacking them as people by saying that it isn't real, and that it's harmful. I'm discussing a mythology, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be told that I shouldn't discuss it simply because it emboldens the extremists. Extremes in society are always emboldened before they are snuffed out. Unfortunately, our planet doesn't shake off the crazies until they have caused so much damage that no one, not even people who belong to the same religion, can stomach them anymore.

I've noticed that generally the less power a religion has, the more liberal its adherents are. And when they are in the minority, they are much more likely to support tolerance of different faiths than when they are in the majority. This seems transparently self-serving, even if that is not a conscious effort.