Are You Using Your Religion To Hurt Others?

Music group R.E.M. did a song in the early 1990s called "Losing My Religion," but I think some people could do a song with the title "Using My Religion," because they twist and turn their religion into what they want it to be. And what they want it to be is a validation of their lives, no matter how contrary to their actual religion they live their lives. We have people from so many religions using those religions to behead or bomb others, even killing people who traveled to help sick and injured people in other countries. Then we have those who send others to commit suicide by carrying bombs into crowds, trying to take as many lives as possible. We have politicians claiming religion, while they plot to cut benefits to some of the country's and the world's poorest and most vulnerable citizens, with the further intent of giving tax breaks to corporations and to some of the wealthiest people on earth, many of whom in the last few years have already seen their incomes rise far more than those less well off. While not everyone will agree with me, I see religion as being a force to comfort people in times of hardship, not a force to be turned on others to kill, maim, inflict mental anguish or pillage. When religion is used to strike terror into the hearts of others, it ceases to be religious.

The perverted forms of religion aren't going to go away, so we have to learn how to deal with them. We need to start with ourselves. Each of us needs to think for ourselves. We need to stop saying that things written a couple of hundred years ago or thousands of years ago can't be challenged or changed if need be. People from long ago didn't usually have the means to see the universe or the world in the broad way we can see it in more modern times. The vast majority of people likely lived and died in a small circumference of where they were born. People in one area didn't even know there were people elsewhere in the world, because their immediate area WAS their world. We can excuse the people from back then their narrow views, but for us, with so much information and so many ways to access it, to restrict our views to those of centuries ago is just ignorance. The past isn't always bad, and it carries many lessons, but we have to live in the present, otherwise, with the weapons we now have, and the hatred stirred by some claiming religious dogmas from long ago, we might not make it into the future.

WORD HISTORY:
Scathe (Scathing)-This word, now more commonly used in the adjectival form "scathing," as well as in the negative form, "unscathed," goes back to Indo European "sket," which had the notion of "to damage, to harm, to injure." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "skatha," with the same meanings. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) the noun "sceatha," meaning "injury, harm," and the verb "sceathan," meaning "to harm or injure," which became "scathe" and "scathen, respectively, before settling on "scathe" for both. The hard "c" sound "may" have been picked up from the closely related Old Norse, "skatha." Old Norse was another Germanic language brought in some measure to England by the Danes and Norwegians, although often just termed "Danes." The modern usage of "scathing" means, "harsh and injurious criticism;" while "unscathed" simply means "unharmed." Common in the other Germanic languages: German and Low German have the verb "schaden" ("to harm, to damage"), as well as the noun "Schaden" (damage); Dutch noun "schade" (damage, injury) and verb "schade," more modernly as "beschadigen" (to damage, to hurt); Icelandic noun "skathi" (damage, harm) and verb form "skatha"; Danish and Norwegian noun "skade" (damage, harm) and the same form as the verb; and Swedish noun "skada" (damage, harm, wound) and the same form for the verb.