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DM2525 hits on some of the similarities between radical christian and radical islamic goals and thinking. I think that a believer from either side would reflexively call this video a gross mischaracterization of their faith and the positions that they hold.
Perhaps, but from an atheistic point of view it really is same poo, different pile – just applied in the differing constituencies to varying degrees. Are US christians pining for a formal theocracy? It may certainly seem like it but I think they are just responding to societal pressures in a way that makes sense to them.
The social pressures (mostly due to the plundering of society by the elite) are then analyzed through the looking glass of christian religion and the set of solutions that dogmatic christian thought offers.
Given that the base of christian though is well, based on fear and magic we can deduce why so many religious solutions to societal problems are ineffective and often counter-productive.
Consider the example of given in the video of the Woman and her role. Is the reasonable answer to the problem of women in society(?) their isolation and cloistering to the domestic sphere? The answer of course is a resounding “No”, but consider what the religious have to work with as their moral and philosophical grounding with regards to women.
The Koran and the Bible are based on the musings of dudes in a society that treated women as inferior by nature – there is nothing in either text that allows for the progress women have made toward them being regarded as full human beings and thus neither source should be considered when it comes to women and their place in society.
Yet, this exactly the case, that is that people are using religious texts to try to understand the society that they are living in *now* and it just doesn’t work out very well.
I’m not sure if all religious dogma has an logical endpoint in theocratic rule, but the stuff that we are dealing with here (radical islam and christianity) is certainly in love with theocracy and is doing its best to bring those conditions to fruition.
Who knew we would need 10 segments to properly dismember Geocentric theory. I’m still sorta shocked that people would believe in Geocentrism in 2014.
Aron Ra begins his series with a nice set up about how the extreme religious tend to frame evolution as being exclusively atheistic. I suppose anything that can be used to flog/frighten people to the cause is fair game for the radically religious.
One of the basic objections to religion laid out nicely by Darkmatter2525.
Cool Hard Logic takes a tour of the afterlife and distressingly enough postulates that they must have queues there as well. Bloody hell.
Christianity and its various sects harm women.
In the early 1960’s, in response to the call of many millions of Catholic women, especially in the US, who wanted to limit the size of their families through the use of contraception, a papal commission was set up to look at Catholic teaching on birth control in light of the current scientific knowledge. If found that there was no scriptural, theological, philosophical reason, or basis in natural law for the Church’s prohibition on birth control.
[…]
However, in 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encyclical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical reaffirmed the Church’s rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God’s law. Ten years later, Pope John Paul declared that Humanae Vitae was ‘a matter of fundamental Catholic belief’.
In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban. For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue. Unfortunately for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is. There, the right to choose weather or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman’s prospectsfor freeing herself and her family from poverty. It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women. Pope John Paul II spent a considerable port of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells poor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ’s sacrifice on the cross ‘in vain’. He said:’No personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.
Underlying this attitude is the assumption that when it comes to having a baby, a woman’s consent is not necessary and that once made pregnant, accidentally or not, her own will is rendered irrelevant. The moral implications of this are interesting when compared with those governing our attitudes to rape. All civilized societies accept that a woman’s consent is necessary in order to have intercourse with her. Not to seek that consent and to coerce her into intercourse is to commit rape, which is a serious crime. But yet according to the Church, in the vital matter of pregnancy, a woman’s consent is beside the point.
She can be made pregnant against her wishes, and without her consent. The inexorable law of God overrides her will and the fact that she is pregnant determines her fate. Her personal autonomy is denied to her.
To deny the need for her consent in this the most important aspect of a woman’s life is surely the moral equivalent of justifying rape. It reminds us once more of the profound contempt that has underpinned Catholic attitudes towards women and that has been responsible for so much suffering down through the centuries.
– Jack Holland. A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. p. 241 – 243
Religion, centuries of practice keeping women in their place…
Christianity has never been good for women.
Historically speaking though it takes a new invention coupled with the preexisting corrosive doctrine of religious misogyny to achieve that next tier of gynocidal malevolence.
“Accusations of witchcraft and demonic sex began to occur more frequently in the fifteenth century. They were a feature of the first wide-ranging witch-hunt in the Rhone Valley in southern France in 1428, during which between one and two hundred witches were burned. Less than sixty years later, a land mark text in the the history of misogyny appeared to explain why it was that more and more women were apparently leaving the Church and throwing themselves into the arms of Satan and his demons. It is not that Malleus Maleficarum, or ‘Hammer of the Witches'(1487), has anything original to say about misogyny – it has not; it merely repeats all the abuse heaped upon women in the Bible and the Classical authors. But what it does do for the first time is explicitly link the supposed weakness of women’s nature to their propensity to fall for the Devil, and thus become Witches. Its influence was hugely augmented by a new invention – the printing press. There is more than a little irony in the fact that the invention that would revolutionize people’s access to information should be so instrumental in spreading one of the most lethal forms of ignorance, fear and prejudice ever to manifest itself.”
-A Brief History of Misogyny:The World’s Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland p.116-117
Just a brief snippet from the chapter titled: “From Queen of Heaven to Devil Woman”. Sadly, there is much, much more, to discuss when it comes for the Christian hatred of women.
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