No One Cares About Your Damn Religion

[doggie]

Kind of says it all really.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-wom ... 64865.html

Have you ever noticed how God always agrees with you? Not as often with your neighbor, your congressman, your family or even the pope. But he (or she, or it,) definitely agrees with you. Other people just aren't enlightened enough to realize that. Yet.

Funny how that works.

Was the Christian God cool with slavery? Slave owners sure thought so -- and had plenty of Biblical canon to support it. Abolitionists disagreed. Did God want women to vote? Not according to anti-suffragists. Suffragists were convinced otherwise. If society continues this descent into level-headed compassion, fifty years from now people will be claiming that God is pro-fur and factory farming. When one cannot defend a belief in the current context, moving the framework back a few thousand years and putting the blame on God is a pretty good fallback strategy.

I know, I know. There's only one God and he is not at all ambiguous: he agrees with you. It's all right there in the Bible or whatever holy book you believe in, as you have decided to interpret it. It's perfectly clear, right?

Except to all the people it isn't. Assume that you are a member of (depending on your definition) the largest religious denomination in the world, the Latin Catholic Church. Around 1.15 of the world's 7 billion people share your belief system, if we assume (very wrongly) that local churches are uniform throughout the system. The rest of the world thinks that you're crazy -- or at least misguided on some pretty key points.

And even among that portion of the population that does think that you and God are on the same verse, individual political beliefs are still divided. George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton are both Methodists, and both will tell you with complete sincerity that their religious beliefs reaffirm their political ones. Bush was raised in his more-liberal father's more-conservative Episcopalian church, but converted when he married Laura.

[keen23]

Religion is a crutch. Always has been, always will be. People use this imaginary thing to reaffirm that they are RIGHT and that they are the only ones who are RIGHT because God told them so/God agrees with their specific translation/extrapolation from a book written over 1600 years ago, based on an oral tradition/fragmentary writings going back an additional 400+ years.

[August]

It turns out that when they do fMRI on people who've been asked to describe what a third person thinks about abortion, what they think about abortion and what god thinks about abortion, the same part of the brain lights up for god and yourself. In other words, they are lying through their teeth when they say they believe there's a god with an opinion. It's just a front for their own opinions.

[Loveday]

Religion is a crutch. Always has been, always will be. People use this imaginary thing to reaffirm that they are RIGHT and that they are the only ones who are RIGHT because God told them so/God agrees with their specific translation/extrapolation from a book written over 1600 years ago, based on an oral tradition/fragmentary writings going back an additional 400+ years.

Not for everyone. For some of us, it's a comfort rather than a means to proving we're right and everyone else is wrong (in fact, the older I get, the less right about anything I seem to find myself! :lol: )

[doggie]

Not for everyone. For some of us, it's a comfort rather than a means to proving we're right and everyone else is wrong (in fact, the older I get, the less right about anything I seem to find myself! :lol: )

thats what it should be comfort not a weapon of mass control.

[Cleopatra7]

The fact that people in the same religion can reach different conclusions on important moral and ethical issues used to confuse me a lot, until I read "The Essence of Christianity" by Ludwig Feuerbach. Basically, he says that "God" is a psychological projection, which would explain why MLK's god was against segregation but Jerry Falwell's god was for segregation, even though both men were Baptists from the South.

[realist51]

Author Don Cupitt makes the argument that religion has acted as a kind of totem. By totem, he means it's a concrete manifestation of a goal the group was striving for. So, early hunters would have totems that depicted the animal they were hunting. This helped keep the focus of the GROUP on that goal. "God," at whatever time in history and for whatever society, has been the name for how we want things to be/what we, as a group, are moving toward. He also argues that the totem of "Jesus" was a means of moving morals from rules that were imposed from above in a hierarchical way to morals that were internalized in the individual. These are descriptions of God and Jesus that I found rational and that I can live with. They also allow for our concept of "God" to change as the needs of the group change. I think some of the confusion and conflict we are experiencing around religion stems from some people being ready to move on to a different concept of what the groups needs while others are resisting that change. When I think of people like the Duggars as being simply afraid of change, I feel a bit more compassion for them. I still worry about the fate of their kids, though.

Otherwise, I thought this article was brilliant and right on target.

[realist51]

AND I put "The Essence of Christianity" on my wish list.

[Black Aliss]

To quote Anne Lamott, "'You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."