Has religion been manipulated and taken advantage of?

Question

Do you feel politics has taken advantage and twisted religion for the political scene?

Answer 1

I think anytime there is a fusion between politics and religion you will have a sorry state of affairs. and i don't say it in terms of "your religion is bad and i don't want the state involved with it". i say it more because politics is always going to be corrupt to some degree and if you fuse religion with it, the religion will ultimately become corrupt also. you can't be corrupt in one and not the other if they are ultimately the same entity.

And for that reason I don't really agree with states that model themselves after a religion. In the United States, the way Bush has run the country on a type of moral crusades is a poor political idea because it easily lends itself to obvious hypocrisy in the public's eye.

Answer 2

Religion has definitely been taken advantage of. Millions of people have used Christ name to gain power and prestige, and many of those people have so much dust on their Bible that if they took it down from the shelf the entire room would fill with dust. 80% of the people who talk about Jesus and the scriptures have no idea whom or what it is that they are referring to.

Both sides of the political spectrum like to run adds of the candidates standing in front of a Church.
But when you come down to it one candidate believes in killing kids before they are born but letting murders live, the other side believes in the exact opposite. Both sides can not be followers of Christ no matter what the ads say.

Answer 3

Yes, it has.
Take Osama bin Laden as a very good example.
He has manipulated Islam in order to gain political ends and manipulate the global conscience of Muslims.
Or Crusades - Pope Urban II has manipulated the conscience of Christians to invade and destroy Jerusalem - a city of all faiths.
There are menay examples of such incidents in history, but the moral is that all these beginnings have ended in a disaster.
Let humanity learn from its own mistakes.

Answer 4

Is this a trick question?

Religion IS politics!

Religion twists anything into a GOD says we are gonna kill ...through out history.

God is a POLITICAL TOOL....come on ...where have you been?

Flags and nationalism come in a distant second as political tools for manipulators such as popes, preists, mullahs, ayatollahs...etc

Answer 5

Every major war has had to do with differences in religion, of course it has been manipulated and twisted to suit the needs of the person wielding the weapon. you would have to be naive to think that it has not be manipulated and taken advantage of.

Answer 6

Short answer is yes. I believe that religion has been manipulated to fit a means to an end. I'm not sure that makes sense but to describe it would be a lenghty post.

Answer 7

Yes, but that is the point of religon isn't it? To manipulate and take advantage of the masses.

Answer 8

Yeah....everyone feels that God is on their side.
I don't think God has much interest in who wins the ball game or who wins the war. He gave us free will and lets us take care of the rest.
After all, he's got a whole universe to run.

There are some folks that would have you think that they personally talk to God.......and that he talked back to them.

I agree, it's kinda twisted.

Answer 9

Yes it has always been that way though.Organized religion is a tool with which to control the masses.

Answer 10

Of course it has, and it has throughout history, but as time goes on its influence is less and less. This is mostly because of education which teaches people how to make informed decisions and how to determine truth by evidence.