Reply to post: Re: All you treehuggers need to look at the numbers.

Re: All you treehuggers need to look at the numbers.

>Cherry picking from one religous book to justify predjudice?

Easy to do, although presenting sentences from different books as a single quote may be more than just cherry picking. "Take the text out of context, you're left with a con." Cut off her hand? Well, if she tried to forcibly castrate someone in the heat of someone else's fight (Deut 25), maybe that was considered appropriate. For teaching? Probably not, but that wasn't the context.

There is more merit to the argument than you are admitting though. While putting together the odd quote is dangerous, we do seem to be very surprisingly shy about evaluating beliefs. "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets were popular at one time. I see no reason why we should not ask, "What Would Mohamed Do?" As the chief exponent of Islam, how did Mohamed behave? Why not apply IT or business analyst skills to the problem? If we take the life of Mohamed and the Quran as "architectural governance" what sort of HLD or detailed design for life do we end up with? If we take the Bible and the life of Jesus, what sort of principles do we apply to come up with a detailed design for living? If we take the Hindu, Buddhist, Communist, Nazi or Atheist writings, what sort of values can we derive from them?

I'm not talking about taking any old person as an example of their value system. The question is, who is considered the best model of that belief system? Did they live up to the values they espouse? Were their actions compliant with their beliefs? If we did a traceability matrix what would be the result?

When we look at the follower's actions, are they compliant with their beliefs? Westboro Baptist church for example, is probably out of compliance with their nominally stated belief system. If I follow the humanist manifesto or the communist manifesto or Buddhist scripture or Mein Kampf or Donald Trump, is there a logic, stated or implied which governs (or fails to govern) my actions?

We need to stop pushing religion into the "private only" sphere because it is really about what drives us and like it or not, it has a public effect. Religions certainly re-badge "values" as "religion." Put aside reservations about the supernatural, re-badge "religion" as "values" if that makes the analysis easier.

All religions are not the same. They logically contradict each other. Lumping them together is about as sensible as putting the Taliban leaders and the Swiss government in one category, on the basis that they are both political. We need to evaluate the content of value systems and the compliance of our leaders to the value systems they espouse, not just take a sound-bite and get back to watching "The Good Wife."