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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005 Posts: 135421
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| Posted: 19 December 2025 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | 1
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VATICANGod’s Peace as defined by what?
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Trevor Smith Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 21 September 2006 Location: Canada Posts: 3626
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| Posted: 20 December 2025 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | 2
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Like the Romans creating a desert and calling it peace, I'm pretty sure god's peace means nobody left that believes in anything other than him.
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Jim Lynch Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 21 August 2006 Location: United States Posts: 662
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| Posted: 21 December 2025 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | 3
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I grew up Catholic and used to love the Christmas songs. I gave it up long ago, but last Christmas I heard a song playing on the radio that mentioned Jesus bringing peace and whatever. I had to ask aloud, “Really? Don’t you think you ought to get around to it at some point?”
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ron bailey Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 16 October 2016 Location: United States Posts: 1218
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| Posted: 23 December 2025 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | 4
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Whenever I argue that, I'm always told, "Imagine how much war there WOULD be!"That said, it's just low hanging fruit to keep poking holes in the logic of organized religion's tenets.
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Evan S. Kurtz Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 04 July 2022 Location: Canada Posts: 200
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| Posted: 23 December 2025 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | 5
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I sincerely don’t believe that religion is the root cause of war. I think the root cause of war is a combination of several factors, including:- Our evolutionary compulsion to group together for safety
- Our inherent fear and mistrust of anything that appears or behaves in any way differently from what we consider to be the “norm”
- The tendency of sociopaths to obtain power within our social structures through manipulation
We can rightly attribute blame to organized religions because they have been the most successful at exploiting the way our brains work as a collective, but I think the problem is how our brains work as a collective.
To me, believing that the absence of religion would resolve our problems feels too much like a different kind of magical thinking. It reminds me of a documentary I watched in the not too distant past about a group of white supremacists who figured out that they can exploit a legal loophole to build their own whites-only communes. One of the women living there speculated on the documentary that it would be “interesting” for there to be entire cities of only caucasians, presumably because she believes it would be crime free and safe, or whatever. Except I grew up in a town that had no visible minorities, and I remember how people derided the “wellies,” and the stoners, and the gays, and, and, and - we always find reasons to “other” people, and those reasons are only religion when it’s convenient.
Edited by Evan S. Kurtz on 23 December 2025 at 7:20pm
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Trevor Smith Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 21 September 2006 Location: Canada Posts: 3626
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| Posted: 23 December 2025 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | 6
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Well no, it's not "the", as in one and only, sole. It is, however, a giant, high up the chain "a".
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Peter Martin Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 17 March 2008 Location: Canada Posts: 16300
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| Posted: 23 December 2025 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | 7
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Some wars ARE started by religions, quite clearly. I'd say the main cause is good old land grab compulsion. Some is hatred of the other. A variant on the hatred of the other is the Holy War. You cannot possibly look at the Crusades and say they weren't caused by religion.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005 Posts: 135421
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| Posted: 24 December 2025 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | 8
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I sincerely don’t believe that religion is the root cause of war.••• Once a group decides it has God “on its side” it doesn’t take long for hostilities to develop against those who embrace different views. And once that happens, open warfare is an inevitable consequence.
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Michael Penn Byrne Robotics Member

Joined: 12 April 2006 Location: United States Posts: 13073
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| Posted: 24 December 2025 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | 9
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"Peace on earth, goodwill toward men" is a very nice-nice set of sentiments that we might all generally get behind... but it's of course out of context, and that context, i.e., the largest portion of the human species avowing a belief in the singular saving-from-sin divinity of some little Jew-baby born a couple of thousand years ago, is bonkers.
So, unless the new Pope was being radically new, he surely meant to invoke that specific context. Same old ( greatest) story ( ever told)...!
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