DO NOT HONOR VILLAINS!: SAINT PAUL, MUHAMMAD...

In the realm of religions, there are a significant number of historical leaders who have preached harm to innocents and who, despite this, are sanctified, praised, extolled, and devotedly followed as examples. Two textbook cases are Saint Paul and Muhammad.

SAINT PAUL

Saint Paul was truly a villain, as he:

• Was a defender of slavery.

• And also of despotic and repressive regimes.

• Was a sexist who preached the inferiority of women to men and their submission to their husbands. He degraded them by saying that none of them are sensible.

• Was a homophobe who denigrated homosexuals and preached oppression against them.

• As if that were not enough, he devalued and lowered the following types of people to the category of social outcasts:

• • Those who drink a lot of alcohol.

• • The stingy.

• • Those who exercised their religious freedom by choosing rites and beliefs that fell outside the orthodoxy that Saint Paul wanted to impose.

• • Cowards.

• • Followers of other religions.

• • Free thinkers.

He stated that they are so evil that they deserve to burn with fire and brimstone, even if they are innocent people who have done no harm to anyone. Read more at…

LET US LIVE WITHOUT HARM! Contextualizing the harmful verses of the Bible

A person so intolerant and repressive deserves social condemnation and rejection.

Read LIVING WITHOUT HARM: Reforming the harmful part of Christianity

MUHAMMAD

For traditionalist Muslims, the Prophet is the role model, a perfect man, the compass that is supposedly meant to guide us. This is why the second source of their religion, after the Quran, is the Hadiths, which are ancient biographies of Muhammad. Well, that highly admired prophet whom a good conservative Muslim should emulate was a very violent and cruel man who:

• Undertook more than 80 military campaigns, some of them against tribes whose only crime was not wanting to convert to Islam.

• Carried out massacres of unarmed and bound men.

• Tortured.

• Raped women.

• Took slaves, as well as sexual slaves, as he was very fond of women…

• …and girls, as he was a pedophile who sexually abused a 6-year-old girl, his wife Aisha, whom he began to penetrate when she was 9 years old.

• Stole and looted.

• Ordered the murder of innocents, such as homosexuals, sexually free women, or people who leave Islam.

• Ordered aggression against infidels, especially those who were not Jews or Christians, for whom the only alternatives he gave were conversion or death.

• Encouraged jihad, the war of conquest against non-Muslim peoples, promising great rewards in the Muslim paradise to jihadists who died in combat against infidels. And in this world, he presented them with the spoils of war, slaves, and sexual slaves, which was a great incentive for more and more opportunists to join his army.

To be fair, it should be clarified that all of this was normal and widespread in his time, but that does not constitute any mitigating factor. In any case, a healthy and civilized society cannot take as a model a person who committed all those atrocities.

Otherwise, we will find ourselves with fundamentalists and jihadists who commit terrorist attacks, rape, oppress by imposing Sharia law, punish innocents, etc.

Read HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT HARM? Reforming the harmful part of Islam

Read FOR A WORLD WITHOUT HARM: LET US SEE the harmful part of religions

Read THE ART OF LIVING WITHOUT HARM: REFORMING the harmful part of religions

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