Opinion regarding: Why can’t Christians get along, 500 years after the Reformation? (THE ATLANTIC) https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/luther-reformation-500-ecumenical-dialogue/543876
Reports of social conflict among believers in God seem considered by some to discredit believers' claim that belief in God eliminates social conflict.
To me, the criticism might be reasonable, but might warrant being levied at possible error in implementing the life approach rather than at the life approach itself.
To explain, the Bible's wealth of various anecdotes and guidelines seem to reflect many (if not most, or even all) social issues and circumstances, and address
both desirable and undesirable behaviors. An important issue apparently present in the attempt to use these writings to ascertain individual optimal path forward seems to be determination of which depictions and guidelines are to be adopted.
Some seem to reject the Bible as a guide to optimal human experience due to its apparent suggestions that God calls for human-to-human harm, such as slavery and misogyny. To me, this rejection might also seem reasonable except that it, too, seems likely misplaced, based upon my analysis of the Bible.
To me, the Bible seems more likely best considered a collection of perspectives regarding the proposed God/human relationship rather than a how-to-behave handbook. Further, per my assessment, some of these perspectives' value might not be delineation of optimal path forward, but rather, documentation of the path's having been travelled and the perceived result. When viewed thusly, per my experience, every life issue seems clearly and very simply resolved in a fashion that cooperative analysis (with apparent advocates of other lifeviews) seems to reveal as more thorough and consistent with my awareness of science's findings than any other lifeview.
This Biblical view seems to resolve the issue of social conflict among believers in God by highlighting the apparent extents to which human belief in God seems accompanied by acceptance of God as priority relationship and priority decision-maker, perhaps a fundamental, yet underemphasized (and perhaps therefore, under-implemented) Bible principle.
To me, this assessment seems reasonably reached because logic seems to suggest that acceptance of this principle would result in acceptance of the sovereinty of other individuals' God/human relationship. This acceptance seems to logically preclude social conflict since social conflict seems comprised of disagreement with another individual's path forward, and sovereign God/human relationship seems to render, by definitions, (a) the individual's path forward to be the exclusive purview of God and the individual, (b) the impact of another's path forward on one's quality of life to be the exclusive responsibility and purview of God, and (c) one's optimal response to perceived impact of another's path forward upon one's quality of life to be known solely by God and, due to human capability limitations, to be optimally ultumately entrusted to God to manifest.
This social construct seems to loically preclude social conflict and guarantee optimal outcomes. In practice, departure from that social structure seems to stem from human perception of humanly-envisioned benefit that may at times seem less forthcoming via human estimation of God's current path than via human action, and in which humanly-perceived comparative cost-benefit ratio seems to favor human action over waiting for less-humanly-perceived benefit suggested to be forthcoming via God's management.
Per personal experience, the stress resulting from forfeiture of humanly-perceived resolution in favor of non-humanly-perceived management by God might seem daunting. In other circumstance, God's management might seem (even humanly) the obvious and easier path forward.
The proposed value of this interpretation of the Bible's writings seems to be that it seems to demonstrate that the cause of social issues in general, and among believers in God, is not that God-managed human experience is ineffective, but that God-managed human experience seems to have been abandoned in order to avoid misperceived stress from a misperceived loss of net benefit.
