Respect for other people's religion is a fine notion...

[beam me up scottie]

Respect for other people’s religion is a fine notion … but what do you do when they believe you deserve to die?
Ian Bell
Sunday Herald, UK



How do we respond to hatred of that order? How do we manage a world in which there are people, perhaps billions of people, who believe there are laws higher than anything devised by man, but who – just to make life interesting for the rest of us – cannot agree on a common definition or interpretation of divine legislation? This is not, as some would wish us to believe, simply a question of Muslim fundamentalism. When the White House is occupied by a man capable of starting a $2 trillion war because, so he says, God told him it was a good idea, we should be careful who we lecture.

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Tolerance is a fine notion. Live and let live seems, to many of us, the least complicated way to proceed. Let people practise their faiths as they please, even if the beliefs involved strike you or me as entirely irrational. Yet how sturdy is that ambition if women in Iran are being brutalised on “religious” grounds, if children across the world are being claimed by HIV because a Catholic church run by celibate men doesn’t approve of condoms? The question has been raised more than once by this column: how do you tolerate the intolerant?

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Believers can perhaps explain why so much mutual, sometimes violent loathing is involved. The fashion among some of them is to arraign the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, for the world’s woes. You cannot blame religion for Stalin, they will tell you, or Hitler, or Mao, or Pol Pot. This is true, of course, but you equally cannot blame these maniacs for the things that have been done, and are still being done, in the name of faith. Nor do the writings of David Hume, the French philosophers, nor Karl Marx explain why believers in the divine defy the tenets of their creed quite so often. Why so unforgiving, so vindictive, so murderous?

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Compromise, if any, comes with the rule of law. You can deplore my godlessness, but you can’t blow me up. You can preach the virtues of fidelity within marriage, but you cannot risk public health by lying about the need for condoms among the ignorant and poor. You can have my tolerance, but only if I can have yours. Somehow, though, I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath.

http://www.sundayherald.com/53533

[file83]

1. This sounds a lot like Richard Dawkins' point of view in....

...his latest series on the BBC channel 4:
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/index.html

Good article.

[China_cat]

2. But you CAN blame religion for Stalin.

He was studying to be an orthodox priest. When he realized he didn't have the money or the family connections to rise to power in the church, he left.

Hitler's 'religion' had a lot to do with his views, too. A mix of Catholicism and Nordic cults shaped his beliefs in the 'master race' and how to get there.

And Pol Pot was educated by the Catholic church that he learned to loathe. (Pedophile priest, maybe?)

That makes 3 out of 4 that have a paper trail to christianity in part if not in whole.

[funflower]

3. "Religions" or "faiths" are not confined to the Big Three. Any ideology

that rules out questioning and contradictory evidence has the potential to drive otherwise good people to do evil. Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot used ideologies, traditionally religious and otherwise, to gain power by controlling followers, as did Muhammed, Joseph Smith, many Popes and many protestant leaders.... The list goes on and on. It's not necessary to find a "paper trail" to traditional religion (which, historically speaking, probably 99.9% of people have had touch their lives in some way) to see that these leaders used an unassailable "belief system" as a tool in their quests for personal and political power.

[Inland]

5. *spittake* Well, that didn't take long.

The author spoke of religion when it is "trying to kill you", and spoke of preventing violence and not allowing religious belief to interfere with the truth or with justice.

You expand religion to include an avowed atheists adhering to an ideology that was expressly atheistic, and who you admit hated a church. With that sort of attenuated causation, I don't expect much in the way of tolerance, either in or out of government.

[funflower]

4. Sanity comes with the rule of law, but the law must be based on rational

ideals, not ancient writ.