Religious people who lack compassion

[jedimaster91]

yes and no. Jesus DID say "whoever of you without sin should cast the first stone" when (IIRC) some people wanted to stone a woman for committing a sin.

It's been awhile since I've read that particular story, but IIRC, the sin was adultery and the situation was basically a trap. In those days, adultery was punishable by death, so if He had said to spare the woman, he wasn't following the law. But if He said to stone her, clearly He's not the loving, forgiving, benevolent Son of God He claims to be. So He took a third option and reminded the crowd that they all have sinned. The average person really isn't meant to make those kinds of judgements on other people. By all means, judge the actions. We all have to do that just to get through life. But don't judge the person. That's not your place.

[Shangri-laschild]

It's been awhile since I've read that particular story, but IIRC, the sin was adultery and the situation was basically a trap. In those days, adultery was punishable by death, so if He had said to spare the woman, he wasn't following the law. But if He said to stone her, clearly He's not the loving, forgiving, benevolent Son of God He claims to be. So He took a third option and reminded the crowd that they all have sinned. The average person really isn't meant to make those kinds of judgements on other people. By all means, judge the actions. We all have to do that just to get through life. But don't judge the person. That's not your place.

Exactly. My niece isn't allowed to lecture or punish her brother. She has to let an adult do that because it's not her place. In this instance, we're all the kids and God would be the adult. But instead the mentality of "being a dick for jesus" keeps happening and it drives me up the wall.

[Mental_Mouse]

Is religion really the issue?

It seems to me that people tend to use religion to justify whatever they seek to do. But where some folks use it to justify their urges to sadism, control, selfishness, vengance, and so on, there are others who use it to justify a different set of impulses: compassion, goodwill, generosity, forgiveness, and the like.

The variations in people's personalities and moral sets seem to come from a mixture of biological predisposition (formal "temperament") and experience (especially "upbringing", that is childhood experience). People use religion as a pretext to declare that whatever they feel and do isn't "just them", but is or should be "everyone" -- and they use the structures of their religion to coerce or train other people to act as they do.

So, going back to the OP title, it's not a matter of a given religion lacking compassion, but of folks who already lack compassion, using the tools of religion to justify themselves and punish others for showing compassion.