Honor before revenge

[Aerows]

Why isn't that the cornerstone of every religion? It would make us better people if you think about it. The penalty for something against religion isn't death or dismemberment. It is ostracism and education. If that won't work, then ostracism.

You don't start fights, and you slough off insults. Why is it necessary to be soldiers for any religion and attack first? Protection I understand. Zealotry, I do not.

Is it more honorable to let your enemy spiral to madness, -OR- as a rational society, try to help them so that they don't go into nutjob territory and kill a bunch of people.

Religion purports to prevent these things, but I just see them causing mass murders and lunacy.

I would like to see a religion that holds up being honorable before taking revenge on people. I realize that many religions say this, but they don't really do it in practice.

Why is peace such a disgusting idea for so many? Why is it so horrible to contemplate a world where we don't gun down our fellow humans because we disagree with them?

Just questions I have.

[Igel]

1. It often is.

But you have to understand what "honor" means.

For some it means self-worth resulting from abiding by one's values and being true to one's principles. You can have quiet dignity while being thrown into a cesspool and having insults involving you and your god being intimately involved in relationships with quadrupeds.

For others, it means maintaining one's appearance and public face or image. You cannot be thrown into a cesspool and maintain your public appearance. You cannot have ever been involved romantically with quadrupeds and keep face; nor can you let something so inherently identified with you as your god have his covered-up-parts alluded to in so salacious a manner.

In the first kind of honor, taking revenge is usually a betrayal of honor. I call it "personal honor."

In the second kind of honor, failing to take revenge means that you are willing to allow people to speak of you as being without honor or dignity, and since all honor is just what people say about you, it means you have no honor. The only way to restore honor is, precisely, to take revenge. I call it "external honor." (There is another out: The insulter, the offender, can be so powerful or so evil that no reasonable person could hold you responsible for not taking revenge or being able to defend yourself. There's no dishonor in losing if winning is simply not possible and if sacrificing yourself for your family's honor would only disgrace them the more. The problem is that words like "reasonable" and "not possible" always leave doubt, so the impulse to revenge is always lurking, should the power levels between the offender and offended become more equal.)

Western society has only moved in large part from external to personal honor. In the early 1800s you still had duels. In the late 1800s and into the 1900s "hypocrisy" of powerful men having adulterous affairs was tolerated, even if a lot of people knew about them, as long as nobody said anything out loud--to do so would be gauche on the part of the person doing the mentioning and would seriously diminish the adulterer's honor.

I watched a fight in the street in front of my house with two guys fighting. One insulted the other, and the insulted guy couldn't let the insult slide. He had to restore his honor among his friends by fighting. If he hadn't, he'd have been called a wuss, a pussy. His friends might have eventually forgiven him, but the guy fought with wouldn't have for a long time.

[Aerows]

2. So you advocate random violence

"
I watched a fight in the street in front of my house with two guys fighting. One insulted the other, and the insulted guy couldn't let the insult slide. He had to restore his honor among his friends by fighting. If he hadn't, he'd have been called a wuss, a pussy. His friends might have eventually forgiven him, but the guy fought with wouldn't have for a long time."

That seems to be what you are saying, rather than calling the police to break it up.