Saturday, May 23, 2015

Sacred or senseless.

Religion, does it do more harm than good?  Is that even a question that anyone can address without letting their biases overwhelm objectivity?

Watching a program titled The Third Rail on Aljazeera America this morning did little to dispel my suspicions.  Larry Taunton, an Evangelical spokesman, asserted that not all religions are equal in that respect, but Christianity "brings benevolence to the table." Perhaps it does, but it's hard for me to accept that it brings much benevolence to the world,  as the influence, at least in the US on public life is to restrict the rights and political power of certain people while putting a holy gloss on the supercilious condemnations and malevolence.  Democracy and human rights are usually only apparent relative to the rights of the faithful but even then, the rights of women, of unbelievers and the members of antagonistic religions would be rigorously suppressed given their ability to do so. Their god does not compromise or relent and neither do they.  His evidence of course is that Evangelicals give more, or so he says, although again, that they certainly don't give more than Muslims and Jews, but with faith, with arrogance and with dishonesty all things are possible.

"For we have been saved by grace through faith and this is not your own doing it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."(Ephesians 2:8-9)
Yet boast of it they do and most fulsomely. Wars, slavery, tyranny, executions and torture: that some justify them and others do not seems to have little to do with religiosity and more to do with some independent viewpoint that often runs afoul of doctrine and dogma and ecclesiastical authority. One has to ask what there is in Christian benevolence that is absent in Humanist benevolence, Muslim benevolence, Marxist benevolence and most of all, benevolence itself. The answer of course is that religion, at least Western religion, offers exceptions to everything but obedience.

Yes, some people benefit from Christianity says Atheist Dan Dennett, but what bothers him is what bothers me:  the "systematic hypocrisy that almost obliges them to lie."  Indeed it does as we see when Taunton claims that Evangelicals give more to charity that atheists.  The problem is that atheists are not a group and have nothing in common but the lack of credulity to a certain myth. Any statement that puts Karl Marx, Ayn Rand and John Lennon in the same envelope can't be taken to be honest.  And of course that "statistic" confuses donations to institutions that spend the contribution on airplanes for ministers and invest in African gold mines using slave labor with "charity."  Faith requires dishonesty, demands fallacy and ultimately is vanity.   The only one in this conversation acknowledging legitimacy to anyone else is the atheist. If God can't compromise, how can his followers?

 Did Christianity motivate Abolition and has Christianity been at the root of  civil rights reform? Well it certainly allows Christian booster Taunton to claim so and not to be embarrassed when forced to admit that he didn't consider gay marriage to be a civil right because of his Christianity.  Many Christians of course didn't and still don't consider slaves to have civil rights and there is much in the "scriptures" to back them up. His statement is only tautological: Christians support only the rights we support as Christians and no others.  And here's where the argument fails. Christian benevolence is offered to Christians as long as they don't offend Christian authority.  A poor sort of benevolence in my mind and of Daniel Dennett's.who points out the centuries of vicious persecution of those people who see benevolence as innately human and not god given.  We want to be your sole source of morality, say the religion vendors and damn you if you roll your own or buy another brand.

Since the religiously motivated horrors of history are hard to deny (not that people don't try) I have to ask whether religion isn't like nuclear power, gunpowder and sharp objects in general, things that can help us but contain no internal protection against misuse?  Is blind faith of any kind inherently dangerous and does that danger too often outweigh any benefit that is just as inherent in safer things?  One can believe in any god you can imagine, good or ugly, merciful or monstrous, and we always have, but gods are never dangerous.  They have no power, no characteristics not assigned by their believers and being human we create gods in our image, according to our own needs for self justification.  By faith we are oppressed. It's belief that creates gods and only doubt, only disbelief, only reason and honesty can save us from ourselves.

10 comments:

  1. Here's an example I wrote about on my blog on how a minority of Christians believe it has the right to impose its Biblical ideas on everyone:

    The state of Virginia is set to pass a law which would allow anti-LGBT business owners to bar gay people, purely on the basis of their sexuality.

    The Virginia Bill states that anyone seeking or holding a business license from the state of Virginia in the state can refuse service or entry to gay people, on the grounds it “would violate the religious or moral convictions of such person with respect to same-sex “marriage” or homosexual behavior.”

    This would make it lawful for LGBT people to be barred from hotels, restaurants, schools, hospitals, and any other premise where a good or service is exchanged by someone who dislikes their sexual orientation:

    Want to buy a bed? Prove you’re not sharing it with a member of the same sex.


    Want to buy diapers but show up with your same-sex partner? No diapers for you, and don’t darken the door of this store again.

    We aren’t going to enroll your kid in our school district because she has two moms. All these scenarios would be entirely legal under the new law.

    The toxic bill has been spearheaded by Virginia’s virulently anti-gay lawmaker Bob Marshall. You might remember him for his fruitless effort to exclude gay people from the state’s National Guard, or his 2012 attempt to block the appointment of a judge on the grounds that the nominee was gay, saying that “sodomy is not a civil right.”


    Of course this stupid law will never pass, but I believe we'll see more and more of this sort of stupid attempts as these radical sects lose more and more influence in this country.

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  2. I'd like to think such things are done out of panic or can be seen as the rage of a dying beast, but I think it's too soon to tell. But my real point is that over the thousands of years of history, religion has played an ugly part as much or more as it has played a "beneficent" part, therefore faith itself, belief, religious doctrine isn't intrinsicly, isn't ipso facto good. People do the same things whether they believe in god or not and god is, as always silent and impotent to oppose them.

    The claim that human goodness, compassion and altruism stem from the fear of God is grotesque and untrue. Buddhist teach compassion far, far more strictly than Christians and with no strings attached. Buddhism isn't about gods. Humanists were about democracy and the right to select leaders, not Christians and that has not changed and it's all so apparent when they tell us that they are for civil rights as long as it doesn't offend them. Funny how such rights sound like tyranny.

    I'm not painting all religious people with the same brush and I'm taking a long view and am happy to admit that this congregation or that church may be a fine group of good people, but really, religion didn't invent civilization, didn't invent law, didn't invent or do much to foster good in the world and in fact it's so often stood in the way of human values.

    It's the arrogant, egotistical, hypocritical and dishonest power play that's going on in our country disgusts me for the dishonesty behind it, the lust for power and the enmity it shows for anything good unless they can claim it, unless they think it fits with their bronze age mythology and their perverse obsession with sex.

    As the man said, you're not saved because you're good, but you're damned for your innate evil unless you do the ritual, say the words and obey the rules we tell you god has set for us. You can't be good unless your join the tribe. The tribe is the source of all that is good the arbiter of morality and so has the right to damn, to execrate, to persecute and claim their being mistreated when we try to restrain them. As Dennet says, this kind of assertion requires hypocrisy and dishonesty and as I say, anyone pretending to speak for God is a damn liar.

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  3. Mankind created god in their own image and saw that it was "good":

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  4. This article in the Washington Post caught my attention, The Duggar Cult of Purity, which gives an account of parables taught by father Jim Bob to the Duggar brood. A new bicycle, stolen and later returned in damaged condition, becomes a metaphor for ‘unhealthy influences’ that turn you into ‘defective merchandise.’ In another example (Jim Bob’s own words):

    What if we were at a meeting with about one hundred other people and the speaker asked that a large cup be passed around and that everyone spit in the cup? What if you happened to be all the way in the back – the last person on the last row – and when the cup finally came to you the speaker asked you to drink out of the cup? What would you do?

    The Duggar family brand is built upon self-aggrandizing exceptionalism -- aphorisms that set them apart as superior to the rest of humanity. In short, if you are not one of them or like them, you are merely “spit” in their eyes; cultural spit; moral spit, religious spit, or political spit.

    The Duggar family is by no means alone in their insular, self-appointed, self-righteous sense of superiority. Many fundamentalists, social conservatives, and rabid rightwing rabble think this way.

    You might say there is a lesson in original sin here, a kind of payback for arrogant, self-aggrandizing exceptionalism: Despite their insularity and purity, we learn that Josh Duggar was a closet sexual predator. How ironic!

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  5. Der christliche Entschluß, die Welt häßlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt häßlich und schlecht gemacht. Said Nietzsche: The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

    It certainly seems true that so many evangelicals do their fishing for men amongst the miserable: prisoners, addicts, the seriously ill, the misfits and losers and outcasts because the self-loathing fear they share with them can be assuaged by offering the love, forgiveness and understanding of a deity designed for the purpose and administered by men in black (or sometimes in blue polyester) with appetites of their own.. .

    Having created the repressive attitude toward sex and the self hatred that emerges when faced with our sexual nature, this religion actually creates the need for itself and for the unscrupulous, the duplicitous and the predatory, it offers a screen behind which to hide. I don't know if it's statistically valid, but it certainly seems that the category of sexual predator seems to contain a suspiciously high proportion of priests and preachers hiding in institutions obsessed with denouncing such things. Are they there to hide from themselves or from the rest of us? Perhaps both, but once again, religion has so little ability to prevent it's own misuse as the people who administer it and the people who preach it are often selected for the very attributes the religion condemns.

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  6. With their show cancelled, it's past tense for the Clam Duggars.

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    Replies
    1. On second thought, The Learning Channel should run a sequel called Nineteen Kids and Counseling.

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    2. I think that being fed up and disgusted with the abuses of religion had much to do with Ireland's slap in the face to Church repression. There's only so long one can be expected to look the other way while our sons are buggered and our daughters sold into involuntary servitude while the perpetrators grant themselves absolution and damn the heretics who oppose them.

      Churches are not democratic institutions and do not tolerate contrary opinions or the right to have them. As faith increases so does tyranny and the tyrant has no morality beyond increasing his power.

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  7. In the morning newspaper, I found this letter to the editor from one Louis C. Forget of Fort Pierce, FL, who writes:

    History will show that the Obama administration is the most anti-Christian administration” [citing abortion, gay rights, and same-sex marriage as examples of “non-Christian practices”]. His letter concludes with this sentence: “Where has separation of church and state gone?

    This simple thought experiment is not rocket science: In this community, there are religious denominations that support LGBT rights; and there are denominations that do not. So my question is this: Does Mr. Forget remember the Protestant Reformation? He believes his version of Christianity is more “pure” than another. He thinks his Church has the right to determine public policy, write the laws of the land, and appoint government as enforcer of his beliefs. How about other denominations in town? Do they have the same rights under law, or does his Church receive special privileges?

    Mr. Forget seems to be advocating a return to a pre-Reformation world order whereupon the teachings and taboos of one denomination prevail over all others. Is this what Mr. Forget means by separation of church and state!

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  8. Since Newton didn't mention that every belief requires an equal and opposite denial, I'll have to do it, because it's true. Separation ind union mean the same thing and it's a law of nature. Love is hate, etc, etc.

    But Don't we remember when Clinton was Anti-Christian, communist and a murderer? "the most liberal president ever" who was going to throw us into a recession? Faith creates its own reality and can change it at any time to suit the needs of the moment.

    People seem to have a weaker grasp on reality the more they grasp at faith and the weaker their grasp on reality the stronger the ability to lie, invent, blaspheme, cheat, molest, cheat and invent a reality where they're somehow not guilty and others are.

    Maybe there's no distinct line between sanity and insanity, between hyperbole and hysterical fugue, but that doesn't mean bats don't shit in the belfry or that Mr. Forget can tell the truth from a steaming pile of guano.

    But look at Ireland - the thumbprint of Rome still visible on their law books -- even the Irish have had enough of these sick child molesting and woman hating bastards for whom Jesus was all about abortion and gay rights and promoting the rule of Rome. When Ireland becomes less repressive and more liberal then the US -- excuse me, than Jesustan, it's a sad and mad world.

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