God is a licence to interfere in business of others
You can want a licence just because you can have it or because you
are going to act on it. Either way the God-licence says
something about you.
Sin is an offence against God or to put it another way, it is breaking the law
of God. It is a crime not against the civil law of the land but the civil law of
God. Crime is that which cannot be tolerated. Thus Christians worthy of the name
will not tolerate sin. They will vote so that the law of the land does not
tolerate it either.
If God exists then his people on earth have to do the speaking and acting for
him. That makes it their business what everybody else does and thinks. The
religionist is free to stick her or his nose wherever it is not wanted. God is
strict because love is strict so he wants his Church and its members to be as
strict as him and let anybody who does wrong know about it. If God is strict
then he wants us to exercise strict discipline. If I want to see you in Heaven
it is my business what you do for I should want to see you there.
The Roman Church says that our most secret sins somehow supernaturally harm
other people. This makes your sins everybody else’s business. This is why it
teaches about penance and indulgences, blessings that the saints have earned for
you and which take away all or some of the punishment due to your sin. It thinks
you can do good in another's place and they get the credit for it.
You can ask the woman next door if she uses contraception or if she has
committed adultery or if her husband was a fornicator and she is obliged to tell
you. People then have a duty to expose themselves warts and all to you when
their actions affect you.
If a person won’t tell you that they harmed you, then is that a sin? You have a
right to know and if you take it too badly that is your problem so it is a sin
for them not to tell. When you believe it is good to be able to decide who to
trust it follows that people have to tell you.
People should tell you what they believe in religion so that you might correct
them.
If people should interfere in our business, then religion gives them loads more
to interfere about. Consider the following Catholic sins - sin not to love God
with all your being. Sin to miss Mass on a Holyday of Obligation. Sin to dissent
from the pope. Sin to believe that the Virgin Mary may have committed sins. Sin
to masturbate. Sin to break canon law. The list is as long as wet century.
What ought to concern you is not what others think of you but how they treat
you. The fact that what everybody thinks and does and feels is their own
business only proves that religion deserves to collapse in humiliation. It tells
them that it is God’s business and since religion represents God it must be
religion’s business too for religion is the tool of God.
Religion worries more about what is in the heart than in your actions which is
completely deranged in a world that could perish in a nuclear war.
Even if religion does not interfere much, it in principle stands for the notion
that it should. If principle matters and it does religion can still be condemned
for legitimising interference.
Religion is meant to be a spy-network that is determined to condition all to be
slaves to its ogre that has been made a Santa Claus for adults. It might not do
it but it is meant to.
A religion should be judged on what it means to do even
if it never does it. A religion with evil theology which does loads of good is
still to be condemned.
Religion and Gossip
Religion forbids gossip except when it is for the good of someone else that
makes it worth it. But if it gives immense pleasure it must be justified. What
would be the difference between telling somebody to watch a person who is a
secret thief and spreading gossip that gives that person much pleasure? The
pleasure amounts to the same. And if you should not gossip because we all have
faults then we should not tell even if we can bring a lot of good from it. We
did not warn others about ourselves when we did wrong. If gossip is bad for we
do not want others to talk about our own misdeeds then we should make gossip
good by willing that we be talked about and dealing with it. Christianity says
that sin is the worst evil then it lets us force people to sin in talking about
us. People should not hate us for doing wrong if all do wrong. There should be
no shame.
Imagine you have to report somebody's fault to all and sundry to warn them if
there is a big enough risk that the person will hurt them. That is reasonable
enough. But religion has a bizarre understanding of hurt that it adds to the
mix. For Catholics, you hurt yourself if you believe the wrong thing about
Catholic doctrine. It harms you to think that Mary was not assumed body and soul
into Heaven. It is harmful to do a harmless act of masturbation. So for
religion, something harmless is harmful just because it says so. Such an
attitude allows detraction and wrecking the reputation of another far more than
an unbeliever could accept it. It gives us extra things to pick on others about.
It is good for the unbeliever to say we must not damage the reputation of
another except for the good of persons. But religion will go further with it for
it has a strange concept of the good of persons. Religion is just a cover for
gossip and scandal.
The Humanist attitude to gossip is that it is wrong for we cannot help our
wrongdoing and should be ashamed of it to stop us going wrong again. Religion
says that the love of God and not shame should be our motive for amending our
lives. Again, we see the supremacy of rational Atheism over religion. Shame is
needed for social control.