TheBitcoinBattery on Nostr: I will say this. When people disagree on something, and that something is fundamental ...

I will say this.

When people disagree on something, and that something is fundamental to how they see the world in a sense of good/evil, they will often resort to extreme measures to enforce what they see as 'good' and remove what they see as 'bad'.

This doesn't apply only to religion, this also applies to any group identity that is concerned with another group that they see as wrong. Things get especially bad when the opposing group and it's beliefs are seen as irredeemably evil.

Think opposing sides in any international or intranational disagreements, religious conflicts, or political conflicts, and so on. If the two sides cannot come to common ground through open communication, founded upon mutually agreed upon independently verifiable truths that unite them, they will often escalate until violence breaks out. This occurs due to disagreements themselves, regardless of the subject matter of the disagreement.

Whether or not we agree on which events are genocides, or just plain violence against other people, there are countless events throughout history in which religion or religious ways of thinking was either a primary or secondary factor that exacerbated the situation.

Religions and religious beliefs are things which humans do not and cannot ever agree on. Why? Because they are things which self admittedly are grounded on things that require faith to believe in.

If religious beliefs do become independently verifiable truths, then they no longer require faith and just become shared truths of humanity. For instance nobody worships the sun these days because we now understand what it is: a ball of nuclear fusion that radiates energy at the center of our solar system, to which our planet is gravitationally tethered. It doesn't hear or answer prayers, it has no consciousness and doesn't even know we or itself exists at all.

Things that require faith are things that have no independently verifiable ways of determining their truth. If there are no independently verifiable ways of testing any religious beliefs, then we will never be able to find common ground in them.

Without a way to find common ground, we self organize into groups who disagree on details that have no concrete agreed upon answer.

These groups will come to violence if they cannot find common ground, and that isn't possible with faith based beliefs.

The only common ground religions have is when they group together against another group with alternative viewpoints in which they disagree.

For this reason the world can never be peaceful until it grows out of the cradle of religious thinking. Not because religious thinking itself is bad, but because it is just a branch of the type of irrational thinking that breeds conflicts through disagreements on things for which there is no obviously verifiable truth.

Show me a religion that doesn't require faith and is purely based on independently verifiable objective truths that everyone agrees on. There aren't any, because that's not how religion works.

Religions are a type of organization that train people to just accept things that they're told on faith, to be subordinates. They make people who are willing to bow to authority figures who often claim they have been given this authority by an unseen being. This leads to good people being willing to do things they otherwise wouldn't, such as assault or even murder others.

Until we find a way to separate humanity from unverifiable beliefs, and discourage blind obedience and subordination authority figures of all kinds, the world will never have peace.