49 posts tagged “religion”

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
--Bertrand Russell

While trying to come up with something to write about today, I visited a quote site where I found the quote above.  The first thing that popped into my mind was that of religion.   Wars have been fought over differences of opinion about religion and evangelicals of different faiths, particularly Christianity, attempt to convert others to their faith, believing that uniformity of belief to be a worthy goal to strive for.  Not merely content to share their beliefs with those who ask, some attempt to enforce their beliefs by changing laws to conform to such beliefs, while more extreme members of various religions will use literal force to impose their beliefs on others in what they believe is service to their faith.

In contrast, I read an entry on Wilford Tibbetts' blog today about the Amish.  Unlike many religious people, whose faith is largely a matter of securing their ticket to heaven, for the Amish, their faith isn't merely a belief, it's a lifestyle.  The Amish do not proselytize or spend a lot of time talking about their faith; they quietly live it, while content to allow their neighbors to live according to whatever beliefs they have.  They are content to coexist peacefully with their neighbors with different beliefs and lifestyles and have no desire to impose their beliefs on others.

It's too bad that more religious people don't follow the example of the Amish.

I've often considered what attracts different people to religion and what purposes religion has served in society.  Recently, I've been thinking of the converse: what makes people reject religion and the different reasons why people are either atheists or agnostics.

I think there are several reasons, often depending on each particular person's personality and outlook on life.  A few types immediately came to mind:

First, are the scientific types, who reject religion because there is no proof as to its claims, because it defies reason and logic.

Second, are the "pull yourself up by your own boostraps" types, who view religion as a crutch and a haven for the weak who refuse to stand on their own two feet.

Third, are the hedonists and non-conformists who view religion as a series of lists with arbitrary and outmoded rules about moral behavior that are negative in nature.  To them, religion can be summed up as "Don't Do This" and see religion as a way to suck all the joy out of life.

These are the three types that most readily come to mind.  Personally, as an agnostic, I'm a mixture of reasons one and three.  I'm not so much the second reason, because I have no problem with whatever gets people through the night, as it doesn't affect my freedom to do differently.

Feel free to chime in with more types of skeptics and unbelievers.

It seems as if I have a homing device to attract the religious of all stripes.  I don't know what it is; perhaps it's my air of disrepute that attracts them like moths to a flame.

Recently, they hired a new guy at my place of employment, a squeaky-clean, straight arrow kind of person.  I didn't have a problem with him until he started peddling his religion on me.  He'd heard that I liked music and had some formal musical training, so he used that as a way to start preaching to me.  Starting out innocently enough, he told me that he was the "praise leader" at his church, in charge of providing the music for their services, blah, blah, blah.

After a few moments of this, he got to his point of the entire conversation -- he wanted to know where I went to church. All the fundies do this, as they believe it's their duty to sell their religion to one and all.

Not really caring to discuss my opinion about religion with him, I simply told him that I didn't go, hoping to leave it at that.

No such luck.

He invited me to attend his church, telling me that I could be an asset to their "praise team" with my musical training.

I nearly choked and laughed myself to death all at the same time.  Hell, talk about barking up the wrong tree!  I'd probably burst into flames if I ever set foot into his smarmy, fundamentalist church.

Still not wanting to discuss religion in a work setting, I merely declined, citing the fact that I'm scheduled to work every Sunday. 

Fortunately, at this moment, he had to get back to work, so I was spared being more blunt with him.  But I'm guessing that some time soon, I'll have to tell him to fuck off in no uncertain terms.

The other night I was changing stations while listening to the radio in the car.  I happened upon a station where they were talking about a survey of Americans who had been married at least once and it said that out of that groups, 76% had been married only once, 20% had been married twice, and only 5% had been married three or more times.  A spokesman for the religious right group, Focus on the Family, said that the results were proof positive that most Americans still believe in and supported "biblical marriage".

Feel free to roll your eyes now.

Before I comment I on the faulty logic surrounding this conclusion, I have to point out that Christians didn't invent marriage; that marriage existed well before the Abrahamic religions did.  One should also be aware that there's more than one kind of marriage mentioned in the Bible.  So one would have to ask "Which type of so-called 'biblical marriage' are you talking about?"

But let us return to the original faulty assumptions made here.

First of all, the 76% of people who had been married once in their lifetimes were not necessarily currently married -- they'd just been married only once in their lives.  This included widowed and divorced people, as well as the currently married.  

It's quite possible that many of those not currently married may have simply chosen to live with any subsequent romantic partners and decided not to involve the government or the church in any new relationships.  In other words, such people remaining legally single had nothing to do with any adherence to fundamentalist ideas about marriage.  Similarly, there are no doubt many others who hadn't found another partner yet at the time of the survey, but who are open to being married again.

Secondly, out of the 25% who have been married more than once, this includes widowed people who have married again.  Are these FotF fundamentalists saying that it's "unChristian" to be married more than once regardless of circumstances?  I'm guessing that quite a number of religious people would beg to differ on this point.

Third, it would seem to me that many people who have a string of failed marriages and have several divorces under their belts have a misplaced belief in the institution of marriage and would do better not involving the legal system in their personal, intimate relationships in the first place.  Marriage doesn't fit everyone and there's no shame in that. 

Using myself as an example, I've only been legally married once, but they're definitely barking up the wrong tree if they think I'm a supporter of "biblical marriage".   I'm one of those people in the third category who is better off remaining legally unencumbered, as marriage as it is currently understood is a bad fit for my non-monogamous, libertine lifestyle.  Unlike those who have several marriages and divorces under their belts, I learned my lesson the first time.

Thoughts? 

While idly browsing the net today, I came upon a most interesting post that expressed similar ideas to my own about the recent flurry of public moral hypocrisy we’ve seen lately on the news.  What caught my interest about this post was that it came from the other side of the aisle from my own thoughts; that of the social conservative.

What follows below are my comments on this post.  To better understand my comments, ead the original article first:

With all the recent outings of politicians engaged in extramarital sex, my favorite liberal news site, Alternet, has been doing a flurry of articles relating to this subject.   In a recent article, Relax: Adultery Is Not That Big Of a Deal by Samara O'Shea, she explores the idea:

As my regular readers know, I often listen to radio broadcasts of those with whom I disagree, searching for ranty blogging fodder.  The other night, while monitoring a Focus on the Family broadcast, they had a couple on the show who had recently lost one of their young children.

The mother went on about she railed against God for taking her child, wondering why a loving God would allow such a thing because she couldn't see a loving God being indifferent to her suffering.  She couldn't what purpose, what good could come from the death of a child.

She then went on to say that she eventually realized that her child's death did serve a purpose, as it served to "glorify God".  I'm not quite sure what she meant by this; perhaps by how she and her husband as Christians handled their grief served as an example to others and how others in their faith community responded.to their tragedy.  I don't know, as she didn't make it all that clear.

I nearly choked when I heard her serenely assert that God allowed her child to die in order that He/She/It could be glorified.  I don't know about her, but I couldn't worship a God whose ego was so big that it required the occasional sacrifice of little children for the purpose of being "glorified".   Just how shaky is the Big Guy's self-esteem, anyway?

Maybe the idea of an attention whore deity allowing a child to die for the purposes of "glorification" comforted this woman, but I find the idea completely appalling and offensive.

There is no happy reason for the death of a child, but I'd rather live with that uncertainty than to think my child died to stroke the ego of God.  If I were a religious person, such a thing would destroy my faith rather than make it stronger.

Thoughts?

In my book, there’s something seriously wrong with a church that would protect priests who molest children, but would immediately seek to excommunicate a priest who supports the ordination of female priests.

Nearly 5,000 Catholic priests in the U.S. have sexually abused over 12,000 Catholic children.  The usual response from the Catholic heirarchy is not to excommunicate such priests, but rather their parishes or dioceses are taken away or they are simply transferred to another one.  Essentially, such problems are swept under the rug, even if the priest in question has a long history of  such behavior.

Father Roy Bourgeois, however, who helped celebrate the  ordination mass in August 2008 for a female priest, Janice Sevre-Duszynska, was swiftly informed by the Vatican that he had 30 days to renounce his actions or face excommunication.  The case is currently still up in the air, according to my search on Google.

The Catholic Church has had a 30 percent decline in priests between 1965 and 2000.  Good.  A church with such a twisted sense of morality deserves to wither away and die.

Many people who oppose same-sex marriage base their opposition on their belief that the purpose of marriage is to provide a legal structure in which to raise children, preferably of their own biological origin. 

But I believe that issues concerning children and those concerning marriage should be viewed as separately for a couple of reasons.

One is the fact that people marry for a wide variety of reasons these days with almost no one marrying for the single purpose of raising children.  People most often marry now for love and because they want to share their lives as a legally and socially recognized unit. And though some people would be happy to just live together to achieve those goals, they enter into legal marriage in order to gain the myriad legal benefits that come with making their union official. 

Though most people do have children, it's almost never their sole reason for getting married in the first place. It's not as if couples who love one another but who don't want to or can't have children decide to simply remain friends because of that fact.

People who have no intention of having children, along with infertile people and people past reproductive age get married all the time, and no one is clamoring to remove their legal rights to do so -- as long as they are heterosexual, of course.

Secondly, the law no longer distinguishes between children born to married parents and those born to unmarried parents. "Illegitimacy" has not been a legal status for non-marital children since the late 60s. The law now focuses on how children relate to their parents, rather than so much on how their parents relate to each other.

Hence, this makes opposition to same sex marriage for the "marriage is for having children" reason moot and invalid.