Religion Is The Best Accountability Laundering
I’m reading the latest book by Christopher Hitchens in which he tells the world how religion poisons everything. It’s hard to disagree when you look around you.
Just last month a girl was stoned to death by her own family. Her offense was to fall in love with the wrong man and betray the beliefs of her people by accepting her lover’s faith.
This isn’t the first account of hurtful behavior from family members towards someone of their own family who “chose” to love someone of a different religion. This radio show prank has a girl tell her Jewish parents that she’s now going out with a Italian of Christian faith. The parents treathen to pull her out of school and kill themselves if she doesn’t stop that relationship immediately. If this wasn’t a joke it would be construed as abusive guilt tripping by anyone. As the joke escalates the father says that he’ll go to jail for killing him.
We call ourselves civilized yet we are unable in our modern societies to point the finger at this xenophobic behavior. We just sit quietly saying nothing like that policeman did in the videos of the stoning (I’d link to it but youtube had to remove the content due to it’s graphic nature).
As accountability is waived because no one dares say that religion itself is the problem I can’t help but hope that the new enlightenment is near. Religion is the problem, not the solution.
on August 28th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Interesting insights. There is no doubt that much pain and suffering in our world has been caused by misguided religious fanatics (the early crusades and the Salem witch trials come to mind). However, to say that religion is the problem seems to be a little off-base. If that were true, how would you explain the atrocities committed AGAINST those who are religious by those who are not where there was no previous aggression (the persecution of Christians in an atheistic China comes to mind)? Or how would you explain the atrocities, pain and suffering that accompanies war? Or natural disasters? These can not all be attributed to religion. HOWEVER, they do all have a common denominator and all stem from one thing–mankind’s sin. God created a beautiful world for us to live in, but the sin (disobedience to God) introduced by Adam and Eve corrupted man and God’s creation. As a result of this corruption we now have natural disasters and man-made atrocities. So, religion is not the problem–sin is. Fortunately for us, there is a solution and the solution is found not in religion or enlightenment, but rather in the person of Jesus Christ.
If you haven’t deleted this response already, I’d welcome further discussion and would be glad to further explain why Jesus is the solution.
on August 28th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Hey Kyle,
I won’t delete anyone for disagreeing with me. I do filter comments as they come however so keep in mind that they take a while before they are approved. The only thing I won’t post is spam.
I agree with you that religion isn’t the only problem and that in many cases atrocities are made without the interference of religion. Atrocities in the name of capitalism, communism, patriotism or any other ideology is seen everywhere.
Of all ideologies I believe that religion is the worst. Quite often religion is a very useful tool to promote other idologies such as patriotism or capitalism as we see nowadays in the USA. What we never see is religion be the tool to promote skepticism and education. There is a distinction between religious education that indoctrinates and education that help you to understand who has power and how abuses can occur.
If you believe that Jesus is the solution perhaps you should learn a few facts about the guy. If you think your faith is so strong perhaps you should learn about what the scholars say about him. A good starting point is Karen Armstrong’s book A History of God.
The first question I ask you is wether or not he existed. Out of roughly 40 historians who recorded numerous self proclaimed “messiahs” in the area none of them recorded anyone by the name of Jesus. The first account of the guy happened in 70CE more than 40 years after his alleged death on the cross and missed a lot of the events we portray as important in Jesus’s life. The next books offer some contradictions which suggests that the account of Jesus is an allegory meant to promote morals, not a true historic account.
The second question is wether or not his teachings were original or if they just happened to have incorporated common knowledge from the era. If you look at Egyptian beliefs that predate Judaism the idea of your deeds determining your eternal faith are already present. Ma’at would weigh the deceased heart against a feather of his to determine righteousness.
The idea of original sin is one I don’t ascribe to and I’m not sure if it’s important to understand the problems we’re having in the world today. What can perhaps enlighen us is to question the motives of our politicians. Most of them, like was recently shown with Karl Rove, aren’t even believers in God but constantly use religion to do their bidding. Despite weapons being inadequate in Iraq there were serious talks about tax payer’s money being used to send Bibles to the men in uniform. Why would politicians even consider sending a bible to them?
My answer is that religion allows to put the populace in a state of indifference in regards to the real answers. It makes the people apply more importance in ideologies rather than facts. Patriotism and God are more important than other people’s life after all.
I’m sorry if I sound insulting but anyone who’s read a Bible thinks they have all the answers for the world. The truth is that most religious people are the most ignorant about current affairs.
I had a talk recently with a religious person who thought that religion should be more present in the government because that’s what the fathers wanted. I told them that most of them were deists and that the pledge of allegiance was corrupted in the 50s with the addition of “under God”. They thought the pledge of allegance was intact since the first writing. What further irked me was that I had to explain to him what Deist even meant. He thought it meant someone who believed in a personal God.
Now I’d be willing to listen to why you think Jesus is the solution but understand that I don’t take the Bible as anything more than allegory. If you want to discuss historic evidence such as factual data from known historians of the time please feel free to point me to one who wrote about Jesus in the time he was said to have lived. Others like him were recorded. Why not him?