Another Anti-Religion Rant

Man, I’m wound up today.

The reply I got to my last rant was quite polite and pleasant. But this part I couldn’t let stand:

Why expend energy fighting against religion as a whole. As with most things in our society, 99% of its good, or at least harmless. Battle the creeps, the thieves, the molesters, and let the rest of them be happy in their beliefs.

This was my reponse:

Warning, this post is an 11 on the rant-o-meter.

I’m sorry, I have to take exception with this. This is wrong thinking. I don’t doubt that your church does good work. I don’t doubt that many churches do good work. Even the churches who do bad things do good work.

But religion, in general, has caused more problems than it has solved.

Christianity is based on a work of fiction penned over 2000 years ago. It is incoherent and contradicts itself. And yet people believe that it is the literial truth. They believe in these things with no proof.

This is the definition of irrationality.

However, it is not just Christianity that I have issues with. All religions are problematic.

Among the issues that mainstream religion (in the US) is against are:

  • Reproductive rights for women.
  • Civil rights for gays and lesbians.
  • The teaching of sex education in schools.
  • The teaching of good science in schools (can you say Intelligent Design – a re-badging of Creationism?)
  • Medical research that can save and enhance lives.

These are the things that religion has given us in the past:

  • The Crusades
  • The Spanish Inquistion
  • Pogroms
  • Fatwas against people for offending the religion (Salmon Rushdi)
  • Riots in the streets (with deaths) because of a series of cartoons!
  • The blowing up of abortion clinics (and clinics that don’t perform abortion, but the person thought they did)
  • The killing of Doctors that perform abortion

Many of the current problems in the world are caused by religion:

  • The fighting between Israel and Palestine
  • The fighting between India and Pakistan
  • The fighting between the Shiites and the Sunis in Iraq
  • Suicide Bombers

And in things that hit closer to home, religion gives us:

  • The non-alcohol-carrying taxi drivers
  • The non-pork-scanning checkout clerk
  • The non-birth control-dispensing pharmacist
  • The bus driver who doesn’t want to drive the bus with the ad for a magazine for gays on it
  • The people who protest against gays at funerals
  • Nut-bag politicians who proclaim that they are “a fool for Jeebus” (Michelle Bachman) I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any kind of a fool representing me.
  • A President of this country who believes that he talks to God and God tells him what to do. (No, I am not making this up – Google it.)

I am not advocating that we vanish all religion instantly. But people who go out and do things (good or bad) just because their preacher, mullah, bishop, bible, etc. told them to, without weighing what they are told against what they can see with their own eyes, cause much of the conflict in this world.

Faith is irrational. Faith is the belief in things that you can not prove. The belief in things for which there is no evidence. Faith causes people to do irrational things.

The Sucide Bomber is driven by a faith that he will end up in a better world when he dies. Is this a rational belief?

Catholics believe that confession absolves them of all sins. That all will be okay as long as they tell their priest the bad things they have done and they perform their absolutions. They can sin, that’s okay, as long as they do pennance. But if they don’t do the pennance, they will burn in hell for eternity. Is this a rational belief?

The bible tells us that the earth was created in 7 days. Yet science indicates that the earth is millions of years old. So religious people take many different tacks to try and explain this:

  • There are the people who whole-heartedly believe that the earth was created in 7 days. They also believe that the earth is only around 6000 years old and that science is a lie. Fossils were planted by God as a test of our faith. Is this a rational belief?
  • There are the people who try and explain it away by saying that each day is millions of years. This is a more rational belief, but still.
  • There are people who try and say that Genesis is just a creation myth story, but the rest of the bible is literial truth. As a matter of fact, many religions ‘cherry pick’ the bible for what they feel is ‘Gods Law’. Is this a rational belief?

Almost all religions believe that there is a big, invisible Sky Daddy who watches everything you do and judges you. Most also believe that he controls everything that happens on earth. You can pray to him to try and influence what he does, and he might listen, but mostly not. Is this a rational belief?

The Jews don’t eat pork. They keep Kosher (different pans for meat and dairy.) These actions are all based on religious laws. Yet non-Jews eat pork and don’t die. We eat dairy and meat together and don’t die. Are these rational beliefs?

Man, this is turning into another long-winded rant, but this is obviously something that I feel strongly about.

An Anti-Religion Rant

On one of my mailing lists, a member was posting about the fact that he felt powerless to change the way the world was going.

Someone else replied with this:

Many people to turn to religion because of the conflict they feel, teh same conflict you write about here. Can’t deal with all of the questions and find it more comforting to turn to faith in a higher power, or worship the “effin bee’s” or mother earth or whatever. And in spite of the evil done in the name of some deity or other, the faithful still seem to be on the winning side in the good vs. evil battle. I know, it’s not for everyone, I’m just sayin’.

I let go.

Rant Mode On

Ah, but this is a problem. People turn to religion so that they can say that all the bad stuff in the world is ‘God’s plan’ and then they don’t have to do anything about it. They can just accept it and go on about thier business. They take no responsibilty for their actions: ‘God told me to.’ ‘I prayed about it and felt it was the right thing to do.’

And then they tell everyone that is not a member of their particular branch of religion that they are bad people and are going to hell.

And most religions (including christianity – read the bible) tell their followers to kill the infidels that don’t believe in their particular God.

Thus adding to the bad stuff in the world.

This helps how?

Using your faith in a higher power to put the blinders on so you don’t have to deal with reality is a cop-out.

Religion forces you to believe things for which there is no proof. It causes you to use fuzzy thinking. This fuzzy thinking then bleeds into the non-religious part of your life (although for the truly religious, there is no non-religious part of your life.)

Do you believe in Zeus? Why not? The ancient Greeks did. Why were they wrong and ‘modern’ religions are right? Is there more ‘proof’ that your Great Sky Daddy exists then they had about Zeus?

When politicians start basing public policy on their religion and religious law, and then force these decisions on Americans that are not of their religion (or are atheists, like me), this is bad politics. And it’s contrary to the Constitution and what our founders intended. And it’s what the Republicans have been doing more and more. (Quite a few Democrats have done so also, but in the last four years it has escalated quite a bit.)

And the people who truly believe in the Rapture? They scare the shit out of me. They WANT nuclear war, they think it’s Armageddon.

And then you said “the faithful still seem to be on the winning side in the good vs. evil battle”

I have news for you. The Islamics fighting us and each other are all ‘faithful’. I’d be very interested in your definition of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Personally, I feel that Bush and Cheney and many others in our government fall much closer to the ‘evil’ side than the ‘good’ side. They are ripping the shit out of our Rights and the Constitution and they are pushing this un-winnable war on the nebulous concept of ‘terrorism’ down our throats as an excuse.

I am far more fearful of my government and what it can now do to me then I have ever been of the ‘terrorists’.

Rant Mode Off

You really don’t want to get me going on this. (Or maybe you do, I don’t know.) Oh, I guess it’s too late. But I could keep ranting on and on..

We will have to see how he responds to this.

The Pledge

Alonzo Fyfe over at The Atheist Ethicist has a very interesting post up about the Pledge of Allegiance.

In this post, he illustrates the problem created by the phrase “under gawd” that was added to the pledge in 1954.

In Alonzo’s story, a student is protesting the recitation of the pledge because Congress has changed the wording to add “white nation”.

It makes a rather good point, I feel.

Much like Jane Elliott, the teacher who taught about racism by having the blue eyed kids treat the brown eyed kids as second class citizens.

Scientists and God

Following a link from a new (to me) science blog (Cosmic Variance) that I found by following a link from Pharyngula, I came across this very good article (My God Problem By Natalie Angier) that takes scientists to task for pushing evolution (which I think they should do with all possible force) yet allowing the virgin birth and the resurrection (and other biblical miracles) to stand unchallenged.

Some quoting is in order:

In other words, the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent polls, about 82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent think they’re headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only 28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.

Scientists think this is terrible—the public’s bizarre underappreciation of one of science’s great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they’re right. Yet I can’t help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America’s religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

The whole article is well worth a read.

Charles Darwin’s Complete Works Online!

Cambridge University (UK) has performed a sterling task for both the public and researchers around the world by placing on the Internet the complete works of one of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin. They have digitized some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications, and all of it is searchable. Those with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files.

Go check it out at http://darwin-online.org.uk/