Houla massacre in Syria (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Tuesday, May 29, 2012, 08:37 (354 days ago) @ Chris Hum

The reason why such horrors are tolerated is a world wide compassion defecit that perhaps only Christianity can overcome.

I think it is wildly optimistic to think that Christianity, at least in its earthly embodiment, is going to overcome a compassion deficit, if past and current history is any indication.

Even in current history, you only have to look at the Ellis defence to see how the Church is seriously defective in compassion for the victims of its own clergy's sexual abuse, let alone the problems caused by others.

And then there is the real Catholic "culture of death" through HIV AIDs infection where the Church will not support the use of condoms even as a back stop measure, because of some truly bizarre reasoning.

Of course, people will say, "but that is not Christianity", and we will get down to the old chant of "the problem with Christianity is that it has never been tried", which is as tired and as meaningless as the other one: "the problem with socialism is that it has never been tried."

I agree that there is a compassion deficit, and there are aspects of Christianity, just as there is with Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism, that, if adopted, would make some improvement. But it means first getting rid of a lot of the bullshit that Christianity has accumulated over the centuries. Since a lot of that bullshit is tied up with property and power, I don't see that happening too quickly.