Weird and Religious
In parts of medieval Europe, people believed in “ordeals” as a way to let God decide guilt. An accused person might carry a red hot iron or plunge a hand into boiling water. If the wound healed cleanly, that was taken as proof of innocence.
Religious image of the day.
In the name of religion
2016, Syria, sectarian militias. Various Shia and Sunni Muslim militias committed atrocities during the civil war. Fighters justified actions as defending their branch of Islam, protecting shrines, and fighting heretics or unbelievers.
Fact
In Islam, certain foods such as pork and intoxicants such as alcohol are forbidden, and Islam links these rules to obedience and discipline.
Spiritual Awakening
Religion did not descend from the heavens. It emerged from predictable errors in perception, memory, emotion, and social behaviour. The gods were not revealed; they were inferred, assumed, and inherited. This is not an insult to humanity but an explanation of how deeply human religion really is. To move beyond it requires no spiritual awakening. It requires something far simpler and far harder. It requires accepting that the brain we trust to find truth was never built for that task and learning, at last, to compensate for its flaws.
Quote of the day
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” Steven Weinberg.
Ask the right question
If moral behaviour can be explained by evolution and social cooperation, what extra explanatory work does religion do?
Religious Crooks
Paul Schäfer led Colonia Dignidad in Chile, presenting it as a Christian community while running an isolated compound where followers’ labour and assets were controlled, later exposed as a site of extensive abuse and corruption.
For more information, google the name.
Almost all of the crooks appearing in this section have their own wikipedia page.Every country in the world has its fair share of spiritual crooks.
Today we took a look at yet another religious crook but there are hundreds of thousands of them. You could spend a lifetime researching the topic.