Grant humanity the right to freedom FROM religion and I won’t care.
If, for example, you were to average out the age of marriage age for girls in Sub Sahran Africa and South East Asia you’d probably get a number like 16. Most married to men much older than themselves. This fucks up those girls lives. It fucks up societies, nevertheless it is condoned by religious leaders.
The Catholic church has been running a scam that allowed boys to be abused by religious leaders for decades. That is the largest church in the world. And the religious leaders, including the Pope, “knew.” Yet the Pope is treated to a state reception in England?
There are people, lots of them, who would blast out the call to prayer in your neighbourhood. Bet you’d care then.
There are people, lots of them, who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible in the public school system.
Hindu’s maintain the caste system.
Buddhists ran a brutal theocracy in Tibet until the system was demolished by the communists.
At a point in history when, really, mankind needs to be focused on it’s common humanity, on it’s common problems we STILL have people maintaining divisions based very much on religion.
How long does the list need to get before we admit that religious belief and the authority based on that actually is a problem?
Really, I could pretty easiliy make it longer.
People derive a great deal of comfort from religion, obviously, and far be it from me to deprive anyone in this veil of tears access to comfort, until it actually starts becoming a huge problem. We have reached that point I would argue.
You guys will wonder what any of that has to do with you. You are really decent people (that is my impression). You in fact don’t cause any problem with your religous beliefs. In fact it probably helps you to be good people. I don’t doubt that. But what you don’t see is that in your refusal to be swayed by any form of logic you actually possess the dirty seed at the root of it all, imperviousness. Nomnom claims to be open to a change in philosophy but I haven’t seen any evidence of it here.
Personally, and for reasons I’d rather not go into, people who are impervious to logic scare the living shit out of me. They really do. Not you guys especially, but that tendancy is definitely really frightening to me.
Besides the whole thing is fascinating even without all the political crap and personal psychological fixations associated with it. As far as I can tell these issues go to the heart of everything.