THE BAFFLING SUPPORT FROM CRITICS THAT DANGEROUS RELIGION GETS

The view that if somebody has harmful religious beliefs or giving money and support to a bad religion or a tricky one that it is none of our business as long as they are sincere is wrong. If it would be our business if they were insincere then the fact that they are sincere makes them more dangerous. It is even more our business then! At least if they are insincere they know they are wrong and on the side of wrong. The whole point of it being our business is stopping the harm. It is not about interfering with their intentions as intentions for we can't change anybody's intentions for them. Belief in God endangers morality. If you suppose that the belief has no relevance to morality then it follows that emphasising God like religionists do is bad. The more you emphasise, the worse it is.

If you believe in the occult, you might agree with the concept of occult obsession. Evil spirits could be influencing you to keep attached to what you understand to be your fallible and fictitious religion.
 
Walk away from religion and if people ask you why you did it then tell them. Letting people be deceived in religion, ruins your credibility and shows you have no courage and cannot handle tricky things diplomatically. It ruins the peace of the other person who needs to be able to trust others. The deception or being complicit in it by silence deprives the person of the chance to find a religion and religious relationship that she values and that suits her better if not best. The notion that what she does not know will not harm her patronises her. It is unresponsive to what she cares about and needs. What is important is that she has a meaningful relationship with a religion or community not that she should have pleasant beliefs about that relationship. Walking away is not walking away from the problem when the teaching is seriously evil. Would you say you should stay in the Nazi Party if you abhor racism?

If you err even with the best of intentions you still do harm. You harm your power to perceive the truth every time you err. You harm yourself though you feel no pain. You harm others by giving an example of error to them. To err is to take the side of error even if you never get the chance to express and live out your error. If somebody is wrong but sincere we can praise them for the sincerity but not for being wrong.

Catholicism should believe that birth control is evil - it is part of its identity as a religion.

Catholicism can't be the true religion if it is wrong about how sinful birth control is. But people should separate from it so that there will be no Catholicism left to believe it. If you belong to or claim to belong to a religion that should believe evil things, then even if it doesn't, you are being evil and supporting evil. A religion that doesn't understand or admit or see how evil it is meant to be is a religion that is being praised for going against itself. It is no compliment to praise it for you are praising ignorance and disobedience. Separate from it.

It is baffling how people can give money to and support and keep their names in the membership records of a faith that sternly or seriously opposes their freedoms even though they equally sternly disapprove of the faith doing that. Take an example. What about the nurse who performs abortions in the name of women's rights? What about the writer who wants the religion to stop peddling archaic myths and who writes in the hope of helping it to make sense? What about the charity worker who wants to go to communion in her Catholic Church but who is barred because the Church considers her to be married to her abusive ex-husband whom she divorced and not to the kindly man she has married? What about the scientist who feels that religion is dangerous as it is anti-science and it only pretends to be pro-science? What about the abuse victim who is told to throw away her birth-control pills even though she needs them to avoid her attacker impregnating her? What about how religion seeks to use social pressure to limit people's freedom and accuses liberals of being intolerant for giving people more freedom than it would?

What about how religion's hold over society makes strict separation between Church and state impossible for its politician members cannot keep faith and politics separate? Countless examples could be presented. The message the enablers are giving is, "We consider this religion to be seriously in error and thus to be doing great damage to people and their heads. Yet we support it." What kind of example is that to give people? It is terrible to do that if you think the religion is wrong. It is more terrible to do that if you are very sure that it is wrong.

Cardinal Newman converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. We know by instinct he wanted to follow the religion he believed in and in doing so did the right thing. He did the right thing by standing for the principle of integrity but the wrong thing in the sense that Catholicism is nonsense. Do not make excuses for keeping up a false or dangerous religion when you are the one keeping it up and do not make excuses for anybody else.