This may offend some viewers, but...

[lunadelcorvo]

I love this: Religious Intolerance, or 'What I Want to Say When Asked Why I Have a Problem with Religion.'

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(You don't HAVE to read the post before this, but it will make a bit more sense of you do...)

I know this may really make some folks mad, particularly if you happen to be a religious literalist of any stripe. But I just can't keep forgiving the constant harm done by the childish refusal of my species to give up its fear of the dark and its need for a fairy-tale... (I have stated my position on that previously here*.) And I know what the argument in response tot he post linked above will be: people like this aren't 'real Christians (or Muslims, or jews or whatever).'

Sorry, nuh-uh. For one thing, that's a very basic fallacy of argument, known as the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. You don't get to say that someone who does something awful in the name of Christianity isn't a Christian because you don't like what they did, or the way they understand your good book. You don't get to sneak out from under the atrocities done in the name of religion (like Crusades and Jihad and Hitler and misogyny) by saying those examples don't count.

There is a (terrifically important) difference between placing responsibility on religion as a social/cultural institution and placing responsibility on every religious person. The Catholic Church carries the blame for an ongoing pattern of child molestation, but that doesn't make every Catholic a child molester. That fact does not absolve the Church as an institution for those harms however. (Nor, incidentally, does whatever good it may have done absolve it from responsibility for harm it has done.)

Which beings me to the second point. The people in every one of the examples above did what they did based on their belief in the same god, the same book, the same basic doctrine. Their actions, however abhorrent**, can be and are grounded, defended, and supported from their source texts and doctrines. Regardless of the text in question, for every verse anyone cites showing that dreadful things are not to be done, there is one that says they should. So I submit that the problem is not with the interpretations of the doctrine after all. The problem is with the doctrine itself.

Why? Because it's ALL interpretation. Because it's all a bunch of archaic, vague, contradictory folklore gathered over centuries that can be used to justify pretty much any damned thing anyone wants it to. And because no one has the slightest whiff of evidence that *this* way of interpreting it is 'The Right Way.' But inherent in the very core of the idea is that 'my way' MUST be right, because if it's not, I lose. And at the end of the day, if one way *has* to be right...you see where I'm going here, don't you? So the very doctrine at it's core is predisposed to allow, justify, reify, and even mandate every one of the examples in the post referenced above. And THAT is why I have a problem with religion.

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*It's not often one can really say they stand behind a post made on a rant 5 years previous!
**This means their direct actions and/or their defense of their actions (e.g. the Church vis a vis child molestation, for example).

Comments

[girlspell.livejournal.com]

When I was reading this, I suddenly thought of the Republican Party. They desperately need the religious right to gain any kind of strength. In a way that party has become (since Ronald Reagen anyway) a theocracy. It's platform is designed by the religious right. In that way the US can become a theocracy (the way Ireland is for example, or for that matter, the state of Utah) In the past they got away with it by having the winning Republican president ignore the that platform. Yet they never give up. Who knows, it might actually happen.

All religions believe that they are the only truth. But if there were not any belief in that truth, there would not be any religion. It is faith after all, including blind faith. All religions, including the political ones.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Yes, to all of this.

I get really annoyed by people who expect people outside their religion to deal with the horrible theocrat Christians but also want us to distinguish between "real" Christians and "false" Christians.

These are people who identify themselves as Christians, are identified as Christians by others, and place just as much importance on specifically-Christian values and cultural norms. As an atheist Wiccan, when exactly did it become my job to decide what constitutes "Christian enough?" When exactly did it become my job to clean up Christianity's image for them?

[ohhhlife.livejournal.com]

YES.

[toll-booth.livejournal.com]

That link to all those news story images was terrifying. And very damning. I agree, this whole "isolated incident" crap needs to stop. There is a systematic pattern of abuse that is clearly associated with fundamentalism of just about any faith.

God damn fundamentalism.

[primitivepeople.livejournal.com]

Interesting, as per usual. :)

I think there's a lot here that's very tricky and certainly not black and white. As a moderate Christian who questions everything and tries very hard to make the world a better and more tolerant place, all this stuff troubles me greatly. My own rather intolerant youth troubles me greatly as well.

I often wonder how much of this is a chicken and egg situation. Are these people intolerant because they're fundamentalist Christians, or are they fundamentalist Christians because they're intolerant? I suspect it may be more of the latter than the former. In my own case, a lot of what I was taught in my early Christian days in my mid-teens always sat rather uncomfortably with me, and as I got older, I realised I didn't like the intolerant bits and revised a hell of a lot of my opinions. I'm now a pretty liberal Christian, which has the power to shock more traditional ones (something I confess I love doing ;) ).

So...I think that if it wasn't in the name of God, these people would still find reasons to hate in the name of something else.

A lot of what you've observed is also a purely American phenomenon. OK, we've got a few nutters like that here, but the sort of gruesome fundamentalism on display within Christianity that you point to at the top just generally doesn't happen in Europe. I think that might be down to a particular form of American patriotism and isolationism, that mixed with unthinking religious belief is a pretty lethal combination.

I would suggest that religious belief has actually done more good than harm, and that people of religious belief or none are capable of both amazingly good and amazingly bad things. The causes of horrific behaviour and intolerance are many and varied and there are no simple answers at all.

Unfortunately. :(

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

'If I do all these things and have not love, I am as a sounding brass or a clashing cymbal.'

'Faith, hope and love these three together, but the greatest of these is love.'

The words, I think of a prophet, one Yeshu Bar Joseph.

Fwiw, I'm a Quaker.

[lucretiasheart.livejournal.com]

I wish I had a stadium full of people to offer you a standing ovation at this point. Excellent.

May I quote you? I posted the link on facebook, and I'd like to share a little more of what you said.

Because-- yes.