Only religious privilege makes it "really hard"...

[cleanhippie]

And it's not just radical Islam that is terrible, it's just the one most likely to act. Islam overall is an incredibly bigoted and hateful belief system, right in its texts, as are all the Abrahamic faiths, and it's no surprise at all that the hate and bigotry of these religions lead to all sorts of negative outcomes for society, with the most extreme negative outcomes being the violence we see.

Saying "radical Islam" is the problem is ignoring the roots of the problem, a hateful and bigoted belief system. Pew polling has shown how most Muslims around the world feel on a lot of issues, and hate and bigotry is prevalent, and in line with their own religious texts.

The power and privilege of religion means that people pretend "mainstream" religions can NEVER be a problem, because they are ONLY good, even our own Democratic leaders defend religious privilege all the time.

But when you have holy texts condemning homosexuals, EVERYONE who identifies with said belief system is indirectly responsible for everything from homophobic remarks to homophobic laws to mass murders that are carried out based on said holy texts.

Those who ignore their own texts or "interpret" it away are NOT helping, they are only trying to maintain their own identity with a bigoted belief system. They are excusing the problem to preserve their own power and privilege.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1002&pid=7904465

[trotsky]

1. A post worthy of its own thread.

It is likely this will generate frothy anger from a few privileged religious individuals, which will only serve to prove the point.

Protecting religion and religious thinking from criticism protects the bigotry and hatred too.

[DetlefK]

2. The problem is: The gods do not choose us as followers. We choose the gods we follow.

Every believer has an individual, unique religion. Sure, they have their holy books and teachings. But believers incorporate other opinions and experiences as well in their world-view.

That's how you get Muslims who think it's okay to drink alcohol.
That's how you get Christians who don't hate gay people, who don't condone slavery and who think that women are not inherently inferior to men.
That's how you get believers who rather go by what science says than by what the Bible says.


There is not ONE religion.
Everybody modfies his/her religion to suit his/her will and needs.


If someone is looking for a religious excuse not to hate, they will find it.
If someone is looking for a religious excuse to hate, they will find it.


I recently saw a commercial for a fantasy-game and it struck me: "Choose your god."
That one sentence summarized the hypocrisy perfectly.
We are choosing which god to pray to, which commandments we obey, which rules are important and which are not... We are supposedly worshipping the most powerful and most perfect being there is, and yet we habitually bend his will to our's.


There is no God other than the one we make up to justify what we wanted all along.

[trotsky]

3. "We choose the gods we follow." ??

Not really. If you are the child of religious parents, you are likely indoctrinated in their religion. You had no choice in the matter.

I was a Christian for the first ~20 years of my life because that is what I was taught. I didn't "choose" which god I believed in.

[Iggo]

5. Yep.

I believed what my parents told me was true. All the way up until I didn't anymore.

[DetlefK]

8. So you left your old god because of an inner conflict and picked another one.

That's what I was saying: You decide who you worship.

You are more powerful than God, because you decide about your relationship with God. You decide how to modify the creed, you decide when to abandon him altogether.

If God is the supreme being, why are you able to put your needs above his will???

Because the God you worship isn't independent from you, but a mirror of what you already think.

[Iggo]

16. Well, no.

I admitted to myself that there are no gods.

At that point, there was nothing to leave.

No old god. No new god. Just life.

[DetlefK]

9. But you chose to leave your god for another one.

[trotsky]

10. But that's not what you said.

Why not just admit you misspoke?

[DetlefK]

12. To some degree, I did misspeak. But my point is largely unaffected.

My point stays the same:
The decision to stop praying to one god and to start praying to another god we like better...
The decision to modify our god and our religion so they fit our personal morals...

These actions are deeply at odds with the claim that God were making the rules that we live by.
It's us making the rules that he lives by.



The example with a child being indoctrinated doesn't really fit: The child doesn't even know there is an alternative. However, once the child matures and gains experience, knowledge and insight, it gains the choice to stick to what it was told or to pick the new thoughts.

Example: A child learns that "Gays are bad."
It's easy to hate gays if one doesn't know them. There is no alternative.
However, once you learn more about them, the picture becomes more complicated and then you suddenly have an alternative: To hate or not to hate.

[trotsky]

13. No, I think your large point is still damaged.

The god most people "choose" to continue following is the one they were taught about from early childhood. Even if they alter their personal theology a bit, the foundational beliefs are often still there.

Fred Phelps met lots of homosexual people, yet he still hated them.

[DetlefK]

14. Counter-point:

The Bible teaches that women are inherently inferior, that slavery is good, that homosexuals shall be put to death and all this hogwash about what the universe is like.

Yet a sizable group of self-described Christians opposes those biblical truths. How could they do so if they didn't have a choice to accept or reject those religious teachings?

[trotsky]

15. This isn't black-and-white.

Sure people CAN end up rejecting some of the theology they were indoctrinated with. But if your point were true, then each and every person would end up following a unique and custom god that has no relation to the one they were brought up to believe in, and that just isn't the case.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. "they have their holy books and teachings"; especially with Abrahamic religions, those dominate

Islam even has the term "People of the Book". "Bible" means book. Those books are seen as fundamental to the practice of those religions - Judaism reveres its scrolls and books, and they form the centre of its worship services, and are looked to as foundational wisdom; Christianity looks to its Bible as the basis of the religion, with many seeing it as something in which every word must be taken literally, and all agreeing that its interpretation is vital for the meaning of the religion; and Islam holds the Quran, and other books, central, insisting it is unchanging, and the word of Allah.

So all are stuck with books over a thousand years old, by a mix of authors who are more or less anonymous, that are treated as sacred, with almost no criticism possible. And those books are, above everything else, what defines those religions - the millions or billions of members of those faiths have, more than anything else, their definitions of what is a 'holy book' in common. People don't choose their holy books - no one gets to add to the Quran without being called an apostate, and Christians agree on over 90% of what is their Bible, and haven't tried to alter that for hundreds of years.

People don't "make up" a God "to justify what we wanted all along". That's just not what the world is like. Most people are told to believe in a god when they are children, and have no choice at all. A few change as they grow up, but hardly any make up their own version; they stick to one invented by someone hundreds of years ago, or give up. The number of Christians who don't base their Christianity on the 4 gospel books chosen about 1700 years ago is tiny, especially in comparison with over 2 billion who do follow the orthodoxy. To just dismiss the books that are central to these religions with "sure, they have their holy books" is incredibly glib.

[Fumesucker]

7. I invented my own theology at about fourteen or so

God created man because He was lonely and wanted someone to talk to..

Being praised and hosannaed all the time is bo-ring, if not immediately then after a split millennium or three.

Now God gets all the praise and hosannaing He wants from the Angels and Cherubim and Seraphim and so forth so He decided to create a filter to keep bo-ring people who just want to praise Him somewhere they can't bother him with their incessant prayers. The ingenious filter that God came up with was religion, if you're gullible enough to believe that stuff, God don't want you around, He wants to talk to people who have active minds and will engage Him intellectually, that's hard to do when you are prostrate in either fear or rapture and babbling nonsense.

It's the free thinkers that God really wants and He created religion in order that he could find them by their conspicuous absence from the houses of worship..

Hey, it's as logical and self-consistent as any theology and more than many if not most.

[trotsky]

11. Very well put, as usual. n/t

[Iggo]

4. But my hateful religion kills fewer people.