Religious Fanaticism

The best and only correct definition of religious fanaticism is when religious doctrine is put before people. This may involve encouraging them to ignore or oppose truth. Or it may involve urging them to be intolerant on religious grounds.

The Catholic fanatic for example will not start a jihad and a Muslim one probably will but the fact remains that both are equally fanatics but in different ways. Even if they were not equal, the difference would be one of degree rather than kind.

The Catholic who teaches that God uses evil and lets people commit immense atrocities for it is his wise plan and the Muslim who thinks it is God's will to blow yourself up to take innocent people to death have the exact same kind of faith. They just act it out differently. Both say yes to suffering for they want to please God or want to feel they please God. Not all members are violent but the membership that lives within the law is making the violence possible and must take some responsibility. Without Catholicism for example, there cannot be Catholic motivated violence.

When you believe in a God who uses evil to do good or if you think that evil is necessary for real good to take place then you are saying it is reasonable to believe that God can command you to go to war for him. Even if you are not violent, you are still to blame for the believers that are for you and they both cut the key to open the door of violence. If there is a God it is reasonable that you may have to do harm for him but you will deny the harm is really evil in the scheme of things. If there is no God and you believe in him, you are making it reasonable for you to believe you may have to harm for him. Do not enable damaging beliefs and behaviour - you could promote healthy beliefs and behaviours instead.

Fanaticism in your attitude is enough to make you a crank. You are a crank even if you never hurt or kill in the name of your faith.

You may not feel you are a fanatic or feel crazed but you can still be a fanatic. If you would lightly risk saying that the terrible things that happen to people are not as bad as they seem for they are in God's loving hands then you are a fanatic. Suffering is too serious and nasty to be lightly condoned even a bit. And it is worse coming from a human being who is selective in her or his compassion just like everybody else is!

In principle, if aliens came to destroy all books in the world, the Christians would urge them to spare the Bible if nothing else. Religious people are extremist in principle even if not in practice. And all problems start at the principle level.

Fanaticism in your attitude is necessary before you can progress to killing and persecuting others over their beliefs. It is a gradual process. Not all who would like to murder people for belonging to another religion actually get bad enough to put their desires into practice. Often they die before they reach that stage or their faith weakens and they end up reasonably harmless.

Think about how religion tells you to believe that God alone matters and whether you get better from illness without a doctor or with one, it is God who is healing. That is saying that going to the doctor is not important in itself and is only important because the Lord uses the doctor as a means of curing you. In other words, if God says you must stay away from the doctor then you must not go even if it means dying in agony. God knows best! Even if Christians use doctors they only do so because they think God wants them to. They regard the doctor as useless except as God's instrument. In attitude and principle, they are the same as disturbed people who think going to the doctor is a sin. In fact, if they object to these disturbed people, it is not because they are refusing to go to the doctors but because they fail to see that God has chosen to use doctors to heal.

Faith is shown in action for action speaks louder than words and you don't want to be imagining you believe enough when you actually do not. Perhaps you only imagine you believe it at all! Thus it is better to err and think it is God's will for you to suffer and die and keep the doctor out of the house than it is to use the doctor. At least you are endorsing the principle that God alone matters and proving you endorse it. You need the test.

The atheist and the Christian both follow a flawed way of life. Both eat usually meat and all do nothing about the cruelty against animals in plants. There are many other problems. The atheist like the Christian should be proving they have to be God to others by being where they are needed most and giving their lives for others. So why be atheist? At least the atheist is not bringing God into it. The atheist claims no divine sanction or divine tolerance for her filthy morality. The believer however claims to be pleasing enough to God though imperfect. The believer praises God and boasts what God has done to make him a better person.

Religion abuses people by encouraging them to think they have needs they do not in fact have. To be led to believe you have needs that you don't really need is cruel. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, would say that people need the Roman Catholic faith. They need no other religion even if they think they do. So the Catholic believes she needs baptism to get connected to God and to eat his body and blood to overcome sin. The Muslim regards this as nonsense. The fact that religious needs are not really needs at all is proven by how members of one religion have needs that other religions say are not needs at all. Religious people confuse desire and needs and sometimes deliberately mislead others to confuse them. Wanting something is not the same as needing it. You may want a curry but you need food - it essential to keep you alive. It is selfish and harmful to make needs where there should be no needs. There is enough to need without all that.

Romanism says it does not put people before doctrine. It argues that the Roman faith and religion is needed by the people. So by giving them the Roman faith you are not putting faith before people. The Catholic supposedly has the balance right. All religions say something similar about themselves. They cannot admit their violations of human rights. Even religions that stone people to death tell their followers they need those religions too. They are guessing. All that guessing and lying about needs proves that religion is manipulative and is a danger to the vulnerable.

It is simple fact that it is only bad religion that accuses people of doing wrong without proof. People must never be hurt or accused over religious faith. The atheist can have far more respect for the person than the believer can.

Any faith should not create unnecessary suffering or inconvenience for people matter more than faith. It should not imply that such treatment is valid.

Religion says that we must let evil people away with it at times - e.g. don’t murder the dictator even to save those who are trapped in his concentration camps. Instead we must entrust it all to God and let him administer justice. The Bible talks of a God of vengeance, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay!” So religion says the evil person must be punished but it denies that we should be agents of such justice. This is a case where vengeance is seen to be right but we leave it to God. That is actually refusing to do the right thing on the basis of dogma.

Such teachings encourage the doubter and the unbeliever to take justice into their own hands. They cannot be expected to leave it to a God they doubt or don’t believe in. If they do that they intend to do wrong. Paul himself expressed this teaching when he wrote that whatever does not proceed from real faith is sinful.

Religion is not to blame for every war. It is undeniable from the teaching of the Old Testament where God specifically says he ordains wars and putting, for example, homosexuals and adulterers to death by stoning that it teaches that God can command war. Jesus said that no word of the Old Testament could be done away or declared not to be of divine authorship.

Christians may say that God does not allow these things now but they have no right to call themselves Christians and say he couldn’t. The Bible is the statute book of the Church. If the Christians want to pretend that God never approved of capital punishment or war then why don’t they feel at liberty to drop the verses that say he does from the Bible? They suspect the verses are not truly God’s word after all. They are deceiving themselves. If it is right to deceive yourself at all, then how could it be wrong to deceive your self that your political leader is right to declare war when he is motivated by greed?

The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, has God and Moses his prophet commanding that certain sinners such as homosexuals and heretics be put to death by stoning. The Christians say that God made these commands under the pressing circumstances of those days. For example, perhaps tolerance of homosexuality would tear the nation apart for the homophobes would go berserk. The Bible never says that such killings are to be performed under strict legal conditions. It commands lynching these sinners. No pressing circumstances could lead to laws like that. In reality, God viewed the sins as so horrible that the sinners had to be destroyed for it was degrading them to let them live. In other words, the killings were an act of kindness to the victims. The intention then was to eradicate the abominable sin. Is that euthanasia? Had Israel been forced to destroy practicing homosexuals, the Bible would clarify that. It would need to say when the killings must stop. It does not.

Religion incites anger and hatred against sinful actions but denies this is the same as urging anger and hatred against the perpetrators. Anger and hatred are about nurturing feelings that will make you carried away. The angry person does not care for example who he lashes out as long as he does it.

If you are trapped with a friend in a burning house and he won’t leave, it is acceptable to get aggressive and abusive to him to try and force him to leave. Christians are supposed to hate sin. It is hated for it is against the will of a God of endless perfection and goodness and also because it deserves everlasting torment in Hell. The Christians are to snatch people back from the fire (Jude 1:23). Now if Christians really hate sin or the alleged spiritual harm people do to themselves by sin they will aggressively promote their faith and exercise "righteous indignation" in the face of sin and scandal.

The dentist has to hurt the patient to help the patient. The atheist dentist believes there is nothing he can do about it. The religious dentist believes there is a power, God, that can prevent this. The religious dentist has the intention, "If I were God I would not bother helping either for it must be the right thing to do." He is no better in his heart than a miracle-worker who won't use his powers.

It is occultism or magic to try and turn a pumpkin into a carriage. Thus it is far more occult and far more magical to turn nothing into something. So God is the biggest witch there is. People worry about the occult and consider it intrinsically bad while their religions are occult.

We deceive ourselves only so that we can deceive others. Our love is set up to border on a transformation into rabid hate.

Any religion such as Catholicism that puts bias and irrational thinking habits into people is advocating violence. Violence and irrationality go together. The violent person rationalises or makes excuses for violence. It is governments and dictators being unreasonable that draws them to persecute and foment wars. You don't need religion to train them in irrationality but religion does give them that dubious and dangerous training.

If a Communist nation threatened to attack your Christian nation unless you refused to indoctrinate children, the Church would say that we must not do it. Reason says it is better to betray religion and do it. If it was an atheist nation being asked to burn all atheist books and eradiate atheism from the schools we would do it. We value our lives more than our worldviews.

A Law that does not punish is not a law at all. It is only a law in name only. The Law of the Land cannot forbid every evil or it would be unable to function and it would lead to society being strangled by fear all the time. So it has to be selective. If something is considered wrong or harmful, then it can be made illegal. For example, the Law has the right to forbid the sale of cigarettes. Some legal systems do that. Other systems settle for keeping the price of cigarettes high to dissuade people from buying them. On the worldly level, we consider actions good or bad. Religion comes along with reasons to go further than that. If nobody believed in God we would have no problem blaspheming and mocking God in theatres or television etc. But the Christian religion insists God should be respected. This can lead to the law forbidding blasphemy and punishing it. So religion gives rise to more laws.

Conclusion

Religion must never ever put us at a disadvantage. If religion makes life slightly harder for us it must be dropped. Faith must be approached as if it was made for us and not a case of us made for faith.

Blaise Pascal correctly said that there is nothing better at getting good people to do evil than religious conviction. The belief that God is with you and behind you and supporting your cause can lead you to harm people, especially those of a different religious persuasion. I would add that God and Christianity have sinister and dangerous implications and are corrupting. They are subliminal poison. They are essential fanaticism. The only thing stopping this fanaticism from bearing fruit in violence is the cowardice and laziness and doubts of the believers.