I have been asserting and has provided evidence that the Abrahamic religions has partly contributed to evils as committed by SOME of their fundamental ever since they emerged within the history of humanity.
Phyllo brought up the point that the Abrahamic holy texts has also prevented evil. I have no doubt about that but this point has no direct relevance to the above proposition. However, he persistently complained,
Phyllo: Everything that you are unable/unwilling to discuss, you label as irrelevant.
and
Phyllo: However, you have no objective statistics on how much violence is prevented by the holy texts.
So to show that I am not avoiding the question, the question of this OP is thus;
How much Evil is Prevented by the Abrahamic Holy Texts?
I agree the Abrahamic holy texts do prevent evils, thus this a one pro.
However, imo, the cons of the Abrahamic religions partly contributing to evil outweigh the pros of it preventing evil.
Anyway, your question is preposterous an unanswerable because nobody who comes to this thread is likely to have a useful definition of ‘evil’.
For example, is eating pork evil? Gay sex? Polygamy? Drunkenness? If you are the type of person who thinks so, then Holy Texts have probably done a whole lot of evil preventing. But if you're a "Everything about 21st Century Western Progressive Politics is true" kind of person, and the only things you'll actually admit to being evil are rape of women and murder of non-white people, then holy texts have prevented somewhat less evil as defined by you.
Holy Texts don’t much agree with the modern, internet-savvy English speaking person’s definition of ‘evil’, and don’t much concern themselves with what first world people consider to be pressing issues, in other words. I remember the thread in which you condemned basically all of Monotheism for not embracing the super inclusive perspective that you imagine Eastern Religions to have even though they don’t. So I would tend to think that TO YOU, holy texts probably promote more evil than they prevent. To me, it’s the other way around.
Btw, it was not my question exactly but raised by Phyllo and in the spirit of philosophy, there is no harm raising it for further discussion.
Is that my fault?
As far as I am concerned, I am very responsible philosophically.
I am very aware of someone will raise that sort of question.
I have done very extensive research on the question of secular evil.
(to justify, I have read many books and tons of articles on this subject).
I suggest you do the same.
As I had said somewhere, ‘evil’ is a very loose, wide and complex term.
As such to use it effectively, we need a conceptual framework and a taxonomy to support the context we are using it.
So far most posters has used the term as we understood it conventionally, i.e. ‘evil’ in contrast to what is ‘good’ without much issue.
Note, if necessary we need a conceptual framework for the very loose term ‘good’ as well.
I can and will address and answer each and every query you raised about Abrahamic religions, especially Islam.
But, not right now but only after some days. Right now, i do not have much time and those kind of issues take time.
But that's just an agreement among friends. You can decide Evil = "Us vs Them" and then use that to declare things you don't like evil, and if you perform this stunt in the right crowd you will get nods and people will throw change.
But that doesn't mean you've actually said anything about evil, or about the religions or verses you called evil.
That’s why the question I asked in that other thread is important. You said that Abrahamic religions are spiritually inferior because they have an ‘us. vs. them’ mentality. But you didn’t say what makes ‘us vs. them’ mentality a spiritual feature, and your criticism of it stems mainly from it having political consequences you don’t desire, which is the very opposite of the spiritual by any measure I am aware of.
And now here again you are saying that ‘evil verses’ are include any verse that pushes an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. So we’re no longer talking about explicit advocation of violence or abuse, we’re talking about something much more abstract that you want to call an ‘evil verse’. So no, your working definition of evil is no longer what would be understood conventionally by most people.
So anyway, to go back to my point- I’d say a great deal of evil is prevented by the holy texts of the major religions if you define evil as what the writers of those texts considered evil. In other words, they succeed in their aims. If you take some other person’s definition of evil, and try to see if a holy text works to prevent it, you will get mixed results. But this is like judging a screwdriver by its ability to pound nails.
One also needs a measure of intensity of evil in order to distinguish a mild rebuke from a violent assault.
Then it may be possible to produce a comparative count per line of holy scripture. Although the result still ignores ‘good’ text and ‘evil by omission’ text.
For example, you could define slavery as an evil:
You could count passages which promote slavery.
You would miss passages which denounce slavery directly or indirectly.
Slavery may not be mentioned directly and may be indirectly accepted as normal by the writers. Again not counted.
