Dangerous and untestable beliefs lead to
oppression
Dangerous beliefs can lead to death. For example, a Muslim terrorist or a
Christian fundamentalist can believe that evil must be destroyed and this can
lead to her or him planning to destroy a whole area thought to be populate with
infidels and profligates with a small bomb.
Religion is said to motivate people to do good. Some sycophants say that real
religion does this so any community that claims to be a religion and doesn't is
not really a religion. The sycophants say that real Muslims do not wage war or
kill or do bad things. This ignores the fact that the Muslim God commands
Muslims to do bad things. Those sycophants are really in fact lying about how
good religion is because they want the religion to exclude its obedient
followers who will hurt and maim in obedience to it. They want to encourage and
empower the liberals who pretend to believe all the scriptures while
rationalising or ignoring the violent commands in them.
Some speak of religion and contrast it with perverted religion. So bad religion
is not religion but a perversion of religion. The interesting thing about this
train of thought is that if a religion claims to be authorised by God and
inspired by him and in fact is merely man-made then it is perverted religion.
Maybe bad religion is not a perversion for religion just is a perversion.
Religious leaders and religious people strongly frown upon any criticism of
their dogmas – beliefs they are committed to stand by. They make religion very
important. But it is precisely because it is that important that it must be
criticised or people must look to see if there is any faults in it.
Should we give tolerance to religious beliefs? We all agree that in minor things
intolerance is to be tolerated. For example, we tolerate the mild rudeness of a
cranky neighbour.
Religious believers themselves would not tolerate who says that God lives in the
river and we should drink the water to be saved. Indeed they would turn against
that person. To them that person would be a fool and a lunatic. They look for a
tolerance for their beliefs that they won’t extend to others. Yet it is clear
that some beliefs are so foolish that those who profess and/or promote them
should be treated as fools. Consider the Catholic doctrine that the bread and
wine physically become the body and blood of Jesus Christ despite no physical
change being detectable. Religious belief should be shameful.
Commanding is bad. God should not say, "You shall not murder." He should say,
"Murder is wrong". Commanding suggests that you must suffer if you don't obey.
It is an implied threat. Islam and Christianity are intrinsically vicious for
they are concerned with what God commands and make commands of their own.
Commanding implies that you must do good because you want to be obedient and not
because the good is good. Priests and mullahs find the commanding side of their
religion and their God very very attractive and it makes them feel powerful. God
is massaging their egos.
Religion can command dangerous things. So can any teacher of ethics. There is a
lot of disagreement about right and wrong. So it is simply stupid to say that
religion necessarily has to be good or should be good. Liberal and moderate
believers in religion are assisting the so-called “extremists” in their
religions. How? They defend violent religious texts. The Catholic Bible has God
commanding that parents be permitted to stone their wayward children to death. A
theologian will come up with some excuse to avoid the implications of such a
teaching but it is only his opinion. He still says the text is the word of God
and people must believe it meaning that those who take a different view are
being encouraged to obey it to the letter if they wish. The liberals and
moderates create a need and a taste for the religion in people. These people can
discover that the scriptures advocate violence and upon realising that they may
feel they have to be violent too to be consistent with their faith.
The liberals are really saying, “We don’t advocate violence. Our scriptures
appear to advocate violence but there must be explanations and these scriptures
should be honoured as God’s word”. They are encouraging and helping to implement
the conditioning of people to get them to feel and want to believe in these
scriptures. This amounts to advocating the violence in those scriptures. Some
say that Jesus did away with the laws of God in the Old Testament that ordered
the people to kill homosexuals, apostates and adulterers in the name of God. God
threatened Israel with destruction if it did not obey his law. If Jesus did
abrogate the laws, the believers today are still admiring what God did and how
obedient the people were in carrying out his laws. They are saying that God
commanding killing is not intrinsically wrong and if God wanted us to do it we
should do it. Belief in God who has the right to take life automatically implies
that God as the right to order his Church to kill for him. It's a bad belief and
some humanity is lost if we assent to belief in God. That is why there is no
such thing as harmless religion or faith in God.
It is commonly thought that as a society we need religion, we need politics and
we need science. Religion is form of politics dealing with other levels of
existence. If we have politics on earth we don't need the politics of Heaven!
Politics can go wrong and has led to so many wars and injustices and so much
corruption. Science has given us the knowledge of how to make Hell on earth and
destroy ourselves forever. Religion, politics and science can go bad. So many
argue then that just because religion can go bad does not mean that we should
discard it.
Some religionists make out that religion is not a political entity. But religion
acts the same way as politics. Leaders are appointed and lies are told to defy
the facts that the religion does not like. The same fake charm is displayed.
Attempts to seem better than other religions are made. Religion is a form of
spiritual politics. Religion is politics in that it claims to give us morality
and moral principles. Politics always appeals to moral people to participate in
it and support it. Politics bases itself on morality and appeals to it. For
example, you cannot be a socialist if you think it does not matter if people
have access to healthcare or not.
We may need faith but not religion. Despite the threats the Roman Catholic
Church for example against those Catholics who decide to cherry pick from its
teaching that they will be punished for this sin and are heretics in the eyes of
God, most Catholics simply pick what they like out of what the Church teaches.
It is the same even with most Muslims. Most members of religion are not true
members. They want to act like members and do what they want. So the evidence is
against the view that people need religion. If they needed it they would believe
in it properly and obey it better. What they want is to fit in and to have
beliefs that suit them. If they need anything it is faith not religion.
Liberals have many doctrines that fuel the extremists.
Religion undermines what is best for people by judging actions wrong because a
God forbids them and not because of the suffering the actions cause. They
believe in a God who uses suffering and lets it happen.
Religious believers put their views beyond falsification. Nothing however evil
disproves the love of God. The contradiction between Jesus dying and being with
his disciples afterward is solved by the explanation that he miraculously rose
from the dead. A person who gets into this non-falsification habit will end up
perhaps thinking that God can want him to kill unbelievers. If you have one
irrational belief then why can't you have another?
Fundamentalism refuses to listen to critics and seeks to demonise them and is
irrational and often violent. Religion tends to be fundamentalist.
Even sweet religious ideas such as that we must love the sinner and not love the
sin are fundamentalist. They seek to blind people to the fact that the
difference between a sinner and a sin is linguistic only. We are never against
any sin. We are against the bad character of the person. The sin is only a
communication of what is inside the sinner - of what kind of person the sinner
is.
Can an atheist be a fundamentalist? There has to be such a thing as a
non-fundamentalist. Belief in God urges that God be treated as important. Belief
in naturalism (the denial that there is any God or supernatural power) says
people are important and gods are not. Which one is not fundamentalist? Which
one is not putting belief before people?
Atheist fundamentalists are thought to be those atheists who want to debunk
religion and leave old people without the comfort of God and faith. They are
thought to be those atheists who force secular ways on believers. They are
thought to be those atheists who have a bad opinion of religion.
Many people die happily without belief in God or an afterlife. The belief in
these causes addictive behaviour in some people who suffer without them. Many
old people would be glad to be rid of their belief. It is better to believe
death is the end than to fear that death may be the door to everlasting torment
in Hell.
An irrational or stupid faith is a dangerous thing for a person to depend on. It
seems uncharitable to take their faith away from them. But would it not be worse
if the whole house of straw came falling down with the death of a loved one or
some other disaster? What if we had a better alternative for them to believe in?
If it is right to force a bully to stop it is right. If it is right to fix a
dangerous bridge then to fix it is right. If the state should be secular, then
religion should not be complaining. It should not be moaning that it has secular
ideas forced on its members. What can it expect? What else can we do?
And if religion deserves to be thought badly of it should not be objecting when
naturalists say it is harmful.
Religion shows its true potential for harm and violence when these take place in
its name. The actual harm done is the best proof of the harmful potential of
religion. You may object that there are good people in it too. But it is human
to be good. They are good as people not as religionists. Good must never be
attributed to a religion but to how a person responds to it.
Some Christian and Muslim groups are fond of bloodletting. If they are behaving
contrary to the Christian or Muslim religion, the fact remains that the God
speaking in the Old Testament and the Koran and Muslim tradition authorises
violence. That leads to the sects thinking, "Okay let us endorse and dish out
this violence. If we are wrong, it is not that big of a deal for violence is
endorsed by God in the scriptures anyway." And it does not matter if the sect
is authentically Christian/Muslim or not. What matters is that it claims to be
a religion and we should take it at its word. Is the religious attitude the
problem? Is religion the problem? Is the sect merely a symptom of what
religion does to people's heads? Does "good" religion pose a risk? Is it luck
or forces external to the religion that we have to thank when nothing has
happened?
Religion should not try to influence politics. For example, if Catholics have to
legislate for or against abortion, they must think of the pros and cons without
letting themselves be influenced by their religious feelings about abortion or
by the teaching of the Church. It is hard enough to legislate fairly, without
religion coming along to make things even more complicated. And if the Catholic
religion really trusts it's God, then why does it try to influence and control
the law and stop divorce and abortion? If somebody wants to sin by wishing they
could have an abortion, the law banning abortion or allowing it is going to make
no difference. And surely God can fight abortion and divorce by grace and not by
law?
What we need is more therapy and education faculties everywhere to normalise and
encourage people to defect from religions that have violent gods and scriptures.
The Koran God, the God of Jesus, even the Book of Mormon God directs people to
murder Laban. Such books are a bad example to believers and feed the belief that
as God uses evil to work out his good plan he could command us to kill. Murder
is not a sin when God tells you to do it for God supposedly owns life.
Racism is the irrational tendency to hate and discriminate against people who do not share your skin colour. As racism is irrational and it expresses how tribalistic we are as a species, anything that creates and us and them mentality such as religion is to be suspected of passive aggression at best. If you want to discriminate against a class one way to do it is to have a religion that is not theirs. The members of another religion are seen as composing a class of their own. Christianity claims to be a race - a chosen race. Religion then is racism without the skin colour issues. If it is not racism's sister it is very like her. The two monsters spring from the same noxious well.
Religion be it a force for good or bad is based on some
level of loyalty to a group. You identify with the group. You and God become the
group. That is where the problem lies.
Conclusion: Religion is dangerous. If you do not oppose religion you
oppose atheism for religion thrives if it is not questioned or gently
challenged. Not taking a stand is taking a stand itself. If you say nothing you
invite disrespect for yourself and your right to be seen as not encouraging
religion and your right to discourage it. Gently promote atheism with
sensitivity. Leave religion because if you stay in it, you make your case
against its violations of human rights and truth contradictory and hypocritical
and therefore redundant. Do you want to be the one whose religious friend wastes
hours in the chapel or Temple, gives his hard earned cash to religion, risks a
worse disappointment and faith crisis the deeper she gets involved in her false
religion and who gives up marriage and family to waste his life on religion all
because you couldn't be a real friend and discuss the matter?