thread: 2005-08-09 : The New Open House 2: Religion
On 2005-08-10, La Ludisto wrote:
Religion is to Belief as Corporations are to Entrepreneurship. Some guy cooking hamburgers and selling them to feed people is great; somewhere in the process of turning the one guy into McDonalds, something (usually) goes wrong.
I went to a little Christian college by the name of Westmont, full of nice white upper-middle-class Christians who were so full of their faith that there wasn't any room for anything else. Anything they attempted was inevitably twisted up and destroyed by that faith. Rational arguments turned into apologisms (explaining why dogma is actually correct and all other opinions are wrong). Charity turned into self-serving feel-good exercises. My favorite example is an event where students go to Mexico over spring break and build houses and give dental exams and suchlike; backed by the considerable weight of the Alumni, the program would take multiple semi trucks of supplies down there. They didn't bother registering the medical supplies with customs, however, and so when they were stopped at the border, they waited until nightfall and crossed the border illegally. Later they praised eachother for 'going the distance' and I was just generally disgusted.
Organized Religion severely traumatized my wife as a child, and the effects of that abuse still linger today. Her grandparents were Molocon (which isn't spelled right), her mother married outside of the church, and so my wife and her sister were shunned, had to sit in the back of the church, were told to do things in Russian (which they did not speak) and blamed for not minding their elders, and the like. She wants nothing to do with religion, and it's difficult to generate any interest of my own seeing her still dealing with the fallout of her experiences.
Technically speaking, my big beef with Christianity is the Problem of Evil, which I cannot resolve to my personal satisfaction. That's the one where a omnipotent, omnibenevolant God created a world in which suffering exists. If I can conceive of something better, and God is unable or unwilling to explain how I'm mistaken in terms that I can understand, then I really don't see any basis for worship in such a god.
It only gets worse once people rally around the notion and start telling eachother what to do and arguing over it. Religion has killed more people throughout history than just about anything. I wouldn't be surprised if Religion beat out Hunger and Cancer for leading cause of death. For those it did not kill, it has made their lives into excessive suffering. And yet it must appeal to some corner of our monkey-brains, because religion never has a lack of adherents.
I know I'm trailing along the line of criticizing other posters and their beliefs by portraying any religious belief as untenable, but in all truth, I envy the lot of you a great deal. It would be very nice to believe in something big and noble and pure—I just can't bring myself to believe in such a thing, given what I've seen and experienced.
This makes MH go "Burgers!"
Loved the first paragraph.
This makes BT go "Customs"
A related charity story--my Quaker meeting was sending dolls and clothes to impoverished kids in southern Mexico, and they went through Hell to get the the forms all in order and filled out. It took them months of back and forth and tons of red tape. When they got to the border, the guard was so suspicious because they had the proper paperwork (he knew it was impossible to get) that they had to bribe him anyway to take the stuff in.
This makes JB go "Evil!"
The Problem of Evil is the universal solvent of religion. I don't think any religious doctrine can survive it. If you're invested in the moral consistency of the God or Law that you hold dear, theodicy will shatter your faith.
This makes BT go "Awesome, BT"
I love irony. :)
This makes NInJ go "Christian concepts do not define religious concepts."
There are a lot of ways to look at the issues of God and Evil (not to mention lots of other metaphyisical concepts) where those with a Christian background see only one. La Lud, this is one such place. Your concept of God is formed by your Christian schooling, which is fine. But when you say that your concept of God - where God has to care for each and every human like a shepherd cares for sheep - is incompatible with the existence of evil, that means that one of those concepts is flawed (or, of course, that God doesn't exist). I don't believe - and I don't know any Jews who do - that God has any humanoid stake in human affairs; evil is something that humans do to each other, and it's out of the realm of the divine to do anything about it.
Also, blaming religion for wars is absurd. Religion is used to frame us-vs.-them fights that are consistently economic and material at their cores. Muslims used Islam to unite warring tribes. Christians did the same during the Crusades. Jews do it to fight over water in Israel, and Buddhists (yep, they too) did it to win the ear of the Emperor of China. The Branch Davidians used their thing to fight for economic and cultural self-determination.
Religion is tribal symbology. No one fights for something that won't help the survival of their children.
