The Kindness of Peaceful Religions

I am fully aware of the hypocrisy of so-called ‘peaceful religions’. And though I do get mad, on the most part I tend to ignore them. I don’t have to read the comments sections of online newspapers or of blogs of atheists that I enjoy reading to know of the idiots out there. I tend to avoid them because they make me angry and life is too short to have strangers online make me mad.

But there have been a few recent events that I haven’t been able, nor wanted, to ignore, and I just wanted to speak up about them. Before I do begin, I want to iterate that comments of “but these aren’t real *insert religious follower here*” or “but that’s not what *insert holy book of choice here* says” because honestly, that’s the “No True Scotsman” fallacy (look it up, educate yourselves) and I won’t have any of that here. For starters, I am perfectly aware of the contents of some of the ‘main’ holy texts, and secondly people like the ones I am about to talk about seem to be the rule rather than the exception. In fact the quote below taken from the comments section of JesusFetusFajitasFishsticks has probably the best description of it I’ve ever read:

Anonymous Jan 13, 2012 08:28 AM

@Jack: You misunderstand the fallacy. It is a fallacy *because* there is no such thing as an ideal “scotsman” that one can compare anyone against. The “true scotsman” always happens to be the person speaking. If there were such an ideal, you could always measure the closeness of an individual to being a “true scotsman”, and hence there would be no fallacy.

If someone calls themselves Christian, and claim at least the basis of Christian belief (Jesus as the Son of God, the Resurrection, etc…), then they are Christian, whether or not they match yours or anyone else’s ideal of what being a Christian means. So for someone to claim another person is not Christian because they don’t match their specific ideal is a fallacy; if it weren’t, no two Christians could ever recognize each other as being members of the same religion.