when the second mycean council adopted saul of tarsus it rejected christ. it takes christs name in vain to call itself christianity. it claims the lie that it knows the will of god. it promotes itself by appealing to collective narcissism of nations and humanty. it is only too broad, when it includes beyond how christianity has defined itself after its year 425. until that time, it had been created with the best of intentions. people are welcome, christians, or anything else they choose to call themselves, to lie to themselves to their heart's content. when the go out of their way to create difficulties for everyone who refuses to tell themselves the same lies, then yes, that is harrassment. whether it is done face to face or by the enacting of laws, political structures, or raises money to support putting legal harrassments in place. there may be many gods, or one god, who's nature is unknowable if you prefer, but you won't find them in books or churches. no god is the evil of wishing to be feared. if you want to love and be loved by them, look for them in nature and beyond the unknown.
God has been creating for thousands upon thousands of years. We are in the 7th creative day. it's not over yet. There is more to do.
I wasn't talking about proselytizing. I was talking about the religion itself, hence the thread title. My whole life I have been led to believe that only Christians can avoid hell. Therefore Christianity is a form of harassment.
Based on some your other threads where you come across as making scathing indictments of atheists , I find it ironic your points here don't sound too far off from Richard Dawkins and personally, what I find one of his more provocative arguments. Dawkins has equated religious indoctrination of children to that of child abuse, you seem to be equating primarily esoteric or nebulous aspects of the religion to a form of harassment.
If I'm not mistaken, Cows are sacred animals in India. I think this has something to do with their religion.
Satan is the master of deception. The father of the lie. The Bible says he is roaming the earth like a vicious lion, looking to devour someone.
If you do not have any social interaction with a church like the Amish, how can their lifestyle be a form of harassment? When I was in Melbourne last I was accosted by a man at the main entrance to Flinders Street Station who was from a full gospel church. I told him I had been to such churches in the 1980s and found them to be amiable but clueless and irrelevant. He clamped up after that. I think churches do have a useful social function such as giving some people a moral compass that they might not other wise have. In the old days, churches were the school and the hospital. They still exist to this day. In terms of organized charity The Salvation Army was the first of its kind. The are are some members of clergy that have respect and admiration such as Jack Shelby-Spong, Richard Holloway and the late Bishop James Pike. He was ahead of his time on many social issues.
Sounds like you are trying to put a religion as a whole away as harassment because one form of christianity (I'm sure you can acknowledge there are different forms) taught you something unfortunate. You don't want to answer: ?
The fault does not lie with Christ , but with those who interpreted his teachings through their own conditioned mindset , and disseminated their interpretations instead of the original essence of the teachings worldwide. That which is conditioned is bound to be dualistic, manifesting in conflict and hence the perception of harassment.
I gave up on Christianity when the "New Mass" was introduced to Catholicism in 1964 virtually ending the Latin, Tridentine Mass. The mass used to be a mysterious, mystic event but then they introduced all that lay singing and I found out what the priest was actually saying up there... So, anyway organized Christianity is a form of harassment if we view it in the light of forced Christian school prayer which I had to endure as a child, the Judeo/Christian "In God We Trust" on my money and its replacing "E Pluribus Unum" as our national motto, Christian religious scenes and prayers depicted on public buildings, and the forced Christian religious test laws written into the constitutions of eight U.S. states.
You are not mistaken in the case of Hinduism. I have no idea if Buddhists regard cows as sacred. But many Hindus and Buddhists are vegetarians.
Cows have been venerated in many cultures. For example in ancient Italy there was a tribe known as the Sabines who were at war with the Ombrici. They vowed, if victorious, to consecrate goods to the Gods. One of the goods were the children whom they called "the Sons of Mars". The tribe resided at a spring and when the population grew they sent the Sons of Mars out led by a young calf that they worshiped (vitello in Italian). The calf was a gift of Mars. When the calf stopped they found a new colony on that spot. They were then called something like vitellos, which came down as itallo or Italy.
1. Believe not in the word of man. 2. Beware of the devil for his number is 666 - the number of the roman emperor. 3. The emperors the Holy Roman Empire canonize the Bible and later enforce it - Everyone follows it.