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We have not featured Betty Bowers for awhile, thus, enter her definitely non-satirical take on the topic of religious freedom.
Imagine if you would a salt shaker on your dinner table. Now imagine another shaker on your table, only filled with bullshit. Most of organized religion is this shaker filled with shit that people add (voluntary or not) to the various dishes and activities in their lives. Our happy thought experiment plays on the funny human expectations surrounding how we perceive concepts like ‘purity’ and ‘contamination’; the takeaway for our purposes is that it only takes a little bit of shit to ruin your meal or experience; if you still happen to be following the larger meta-thought that I’m artlessly crafting.
We can boil our fruitful thought experiment down even further and generalize. Take any situation, add shit religion to it, and surprisingly(?) it becomes markedly worse. Take for instance the phenomena in American society known as “Black Friday”. The mythological notion that come the last Friday in November businesses are finally out of the red and into the black ink in their ledgers and to celebrate their profitability they are going to sell stuff at wildly discounted prices to demonstrate their thanks to the public for purchasing their stuff.
Orgies of consumerism are nothing new in the purposefully designed consumer society, but if we take the shit-shaker of christian religion and add it to the mix we get this:
“Onward, Christian soldiers: Research shows the majority of states where shoppers are most likely to experience violence while shopping on Black Friday are located in the Bible Belt.
According to research recently released by Estately management the top ten states where people are most likely to get into fights over discounted deals on Black Friday are 1) Arkansas, 2) Tennessee, 3) Alabama, 4) Louisiana, 5) Missouri, 6) West Virginia, 7) Oklahoma, 8) Indiana, 9) Kansas, and 10) South Carolina.”
So in the home of the great Moral Majority you’re more likely to get into a fight for that last plasma screen TV at your local retailer. Now we shouldn’t read too too much into this unscientific poll, but the results hint at the notion that endorsing religious thought (aka delusional shit) makes you a more aggressive, more selfish, let’s just say it; less Christ-like, than people who don’t partake in magical beliefs.
Apparently, the religious table shakers come pre-loaded with a generous portion of irony as well.
[Source:Progressive Secular Humanist]
How could a set of rules, ostensibly designed to threaten people with eternal and damnation ever cause them to be less empathic and more judgemental toward others? I just don’t see that happening – commonsense tells me that people with religious dogma pounded into their skulls, if anything, should be more caring and compassionate toward the damned others.
“Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.
They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.
“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.
“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”
Well knock me over with a full pallet of pickled asparagus. Atheists like myself have committed untold legions of electrons into thoughtful rhetoric decrying the trauma ‘religious moral teachings’ inflicts on children and adults. And now this:
“The findings “robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households”.
Older children, usually those with a longer exposure to religion, “exhibit[ed] the greatest negative relations”.
The study also found that “religiosity affects children’s punitive tendencies”. Children from religious households “frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, it said.”
Let this study be the sweet grape jelly of victory I smear over my body while running through the streets extolling the masses to witness the glory and the power of atheist prognostications that are (becoming more) empirically sound.
*thinks while raiding the larder for said righteous grape-jelly…*
On sombre reflection, perhaps I should temper my glorious revellings; take a more grandisonant, more contemplative, stance. *ahem*… I am most pleasantly pleased that scurrilous religious evocations on morality and moral behaviour are, in-fact, antithetical to moral behaviour and actions.
Or: You pious motherfuckers have just had your shit rolled up – what now Jebus and friends, what now?!?!?!?
“The report was “a welcome antidote to the presumption that religion is a prerequisite of morality”, said Keith Porteus Wood of the UK National Secular Society.
“It would be interesting to see further research in this area, but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently depending on their worldview.”
Amen to that Keith.
I wouldn’t buy the house either. :>
Good Sunday Morning to my fair readership here at DWR. Yes, you heard me right, the loophole in my militant atheism has been exposed! If becoming religious came along with the Star Wars movie force like powers – I’d be in like Flynn.
Because honestly, who wouldn’t want to do this? 
It would be awesome. The prevention of cat-hi-jinks for afar would be completely worth having to listen to some grammatically challenged Muppet ramble on about how awesome the Force is.
Having force abilities as a religion sounds nice until one imagines someone who doesn’t like you having the same sort of powers available to them. Then the whole lightside/darkside dance begins, I suppose. It seems to me that the context in which the ‘Force’ as a religion is set in lacks much of the moral ambiguity that pervades much of the current human experience.
Our current crop of religious bally-hoo doesn’t do much better though. To justify being a dick in christianity there are just so many hoops to jump through – cherry picking and misinterpreting biblical verses to justify your dickishness, ostracizing heathens, spreading your credulous bullshit, all of this takes time and a goodly amount of effort. Also, depending on how big a dick you need to be (Witch-hunts, Inquisitions), one needs many people baffled on and doing the same bullshit you are to get the ball rolling.
Being a darksider or Sith just seems a heckuva lot more straightforward. Set sail on the good ship Narcissism and let the “Force” be the wind at your back. Zero organizing (don’t be in way of the good ship Narcissism), zero need for justification, zero need for a movement other than fomenting a “Fuck Ya!”X” sure is a Badass” cult of minions to be cannonfodder/housekeepers. Going Sith is no fuss, no muss.
The starwars canon has the current religious poop-bricks beat hands down when it comes to the afterlife though. Your reward for living the pious life? Living for eternity with the abominable prats that come and bother you early on Saturday and Sunday morning. My sanity would have the life expectancy of a potato chip wedged in a pro-wrestlers ass crack.
But with the force, you get to come back and all chrome-blue and shiny and give ambiguous advice to the unlucky sods you choose to haunt aaaaaand then wave away your tosser-like behaviour by dropping lines like, “Well what I said was true, from a certain point of view…“.
No contest really. :)
The mounting Neo-liberal oligarchy couldn’t exists if American christians actually followed the teachings of Jesus, thus Supply Side Jesus was born to fill the gap. Bill Mahr paints the funny, yet troubling, picture of what much of mainstream religious discourse has become in the United States.
Marx said in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”
So rather than plucking the flowers from the chain, much of the US seems to have upgraded the flowers instead… :/
So I was perusing a Christian’s blog, as I am sometimes wont to do, and she was discussing the Biblical creation story (version 2, which contradicts version 1 from a few verses earlier, but anyway…) In this creation account, Yahweh creates everything else, then places one man (Adam) in the Garden of Eden. He sends all the animals to Adam to be named, and to see if any of them will make a worthy companion for him, and Adam names all the animals and likes some of them but none are quite right.
And God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (and creates Eve from Adam’s rib).
No shit, Sherlock. Humans are social animals. We need one another, deeply and desperately, both for physical and psychological survival. And here, God goes and creates a man, and puts him in a (very large and very beautiful) solitary confinement cell.
Now, when you confront Christians with the fact that the world today is full of needless suffering, and God, being omnipotent, could alleviate all that suffering with a word, but he never does, Christians will tend to respond with some bafflegab about this being a fallen, sinful world and/or God working in mysterious ways. Here’s the thing: in the above story, Eve hasn’t even been created yet, let alone been tempted by the devil/snake to eat the apple and feed it to Adam.
Adam is perfectly innocent; sin has not yet entered this shiny, new, perfect world that God has declared good. And here is Adam, suffering for no reason except that God did creation this way and not some other way. (Hey God, when you declared your creation good, was Adam’s suffering part of that good?) What would it have cost God to create Adam and Eve at the same time, or better yet, breathe on enough dust to create a whole tribe? Being omniscient, God knew before he put Adam all alone in that garden, that it would not be good for him to be alone. And the God who is Love went ahead and did it anyway.
It’s also interesting to note, in the most famous story of gratuitous suffering in the Bible, the Book of Job, God doesn’t actually directly cause Job’s suffering. He agrees to let the devil do whatever he wants to Job – who is not innocent like Adam, but still a very good and devout man. In the creation account, God sticks it to Man directly. Either way, what a dick this Supreme Arbiter of Morality seems to be.
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