This is a bit lengthy, but I think this brings up some very good points. I particularly like the comments in the interview with Sam Harris.
These are two separate articles:
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Prime examples of the dangerous costs of religion:
Quote: Sharon Gove
U.S. pastors are exporting bigotry to Uganda, with brutal results.
This is an issue close to my heart, because I've spent over a decade working for equality as a lay leader in my own church, and now, as acting director of HRC's Religion and Faith program – which helps religious leaders of all stripes speak out for equality and fight back when hatred is promoted in the name of religion.
On Thursday, that perversion of faith cost Ugandan gay rights advocate David Kato his life. He was bludgeoned to death in his home after his name was among those listed in an anti-gay magazine, under the headline "Hang them!"
Since at least 2009, radical U.S. Christian missionaries have added anti-gay conferences and workshops in Uganda to their anti-gay efforts in the U.S. – and now they're beginning to ordain ministers and build churches across East Africa focused almost entirely on preaching against homosexuality.
These American extremists didn't call for David's death. But they created a climate of hate that breeds violence – and they must stop and acknowledge they were wrong.
- Scott Lively of Massachusetts held an anti-gay conference in Uganda with two other U.S. pastors. A few months later, a bill was introduced in Uganda that would make homosexuality punishable by death.
- Lou Engle, a Missouri preacher whose rallies draw tens of thousands in the U.S., spoke at a rally in Uganda this year that focused on praying for the bill's passage. (Engle claims not to support some parts of the bill, but internal documents show he came to speak about "the threat of homosexuality," and defend the Ugandan government's efforts to "curb the growth of the vice using the law.")
- And Carl Ellis Jenkins of Georgia is presiding over a group that's opening 50 new churches in Uganda to "help clean up bad morals, including homosexuality" according to his staff.
They have been stirring up hostility in a country where homosexuality is already illegal, violent attacks are common, rape is used to 'cure' people of their sexual orientation – and a shocking law has been proposed that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or even death.
And they're in lockstep with some of the largest and wealthiest right-wing groups in the U.S. When the U.S. Congress considered a resolution denouncing the grotesque Ugandan death-penalty-for-gays bill, the extreme-right Family Research Council – now classified as a hate group by the Southern PovertyLawCenter – spent $25,000 lobbying to stop the resolution from passing.
Religion should never be used to spread hate. These men do not speak for me or the millions of diverse religious people who support equality not in spite of our faith, but because of it
That's what our Religion and Faith program is all about: helping people of faith from all different traditions speak out so we can reclaim the core religious values we hold dear in America.
At the heart of every religious tradition is love of humanity and love of creator – not hatred for our neighbors. Creating a climate of hate runs contrary to the very idea of faith – but that's exactly what the right wing in America is doing.
Interview with Sam Harris, "Why Religion Must End";
Sam Harris is not your grandfather's
atheist. The award-winning writer practices Zen meditation and believes in the value of mystical experiences. But he's adamant in his belief that religion does more harm than good in the world, and has sparked controversy by suggesting that when it comes to faith-based violence, religious moderates are part of the problem, not the solution.
Beliefnet editor Laura Sheahen spoke with him about his provocative book "The End of Faith" and his comments at the
World Congress of Secular Humanism , where this interview was conducted.
You've said that nonbelievers must try to convince religious people "of the illegitimacy of their core beliefs." Why are these beliefs dangerous?
On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them. Propositions like "Jesus is going to come back in the next fifty years and rectify every problem that human beings create"--or, in the
Muslim world, "death in the right circumstances leads directly to Paradise." These beliefs are not very contaminated with good evidence.
There are beliefs--like kids believing in the tooth fairy--that I wouldn't say are dangerous.
Right. Those are not as consequential. But this whole style of believing and talking about beliefs leaves us powerless to overcome our differences from one another. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
You're saying we should be part of the human race, not part of any particular religious or national group?
Yeah. It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we're not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.
To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about
Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is
Islam.
If 9/11 hadn't happened, what would be the example atheists would point to--another egregious, contemporary misuse of religion?
There are so many. Let's take the extreme case, honor killing in the Muslim world. Imagine the psychology of a man who, upon hearing that his daughter was raped, is inspired not to console her, not to seek immediate medical and psychological treatment for her, but to kill her. This is an honor-based, shame-based psychology. You cannot name a Muslim country to my knowledge where it doesn't happen. It even happens in the suburbs of Paris. It falls right out of the theology of Islam.
What are some problems with Judaism and Christianity?
There is no text more barbaric than the Old Testament of the
Bible--books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Exodus. The Qur'an pales in comparison.
Richard Dawkins, a vocal atheist, has said the Old Testament God is a "psychotic monster."
Not only is the character of God diabolical in those books, but there are explicit prescriptions for how to live that are not metaphors; they are not open to theological judo. God just comes right out and says "stone people" for a list of offenses so preposterous and all-encompassing that the killing never stops. You have to kill people for working on the Sabbath. You kill people for fornication.
Doesn't the evidence show that people take their sacred texts with a grain of salt?
That's the point: in the West, we have delivered the salt. Obviously, people are no longer burning heretics alive in our public squares and that's a good thing. We in the West have suffered a sufficient confrontation with modernity, secular politics, and scientific culture so that even fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews can't really live by the letter of their religious texts.
We now cherry-pick the good parts. That's easier to do with the Bible because the Bible is such a big book and it's so self-contradictory; you can use parts of it to repudiate other parts of it. Unfortunately, the Qur'an is a much shorter and more unified
message.
But you ask me what the scariest things are in
Christianity: this infatuation with biblical prophecy and this notion that Jesus is going to come back as an avenging savior to kill all the bad people.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Christians believe that Jesus is going to come back, period? They don't necessarily believe that he's going to come back as an avenging person to kill people.
One of the things that is overlooked by many Christians is that there is a wrathful Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus comes out and condemns whole towns to fates worse than Sodom and Gomorrah for not liking his preaching. You can find Jesus in some very foul moods.
Look at the theology of the "Left Behind" series of novels and all the religious extremists in our culture who describe a Jesus coming back with a sword and punishing those who haven't lived in his name.
Cherry-picking is a good thing and it's to be hoped that Muslims will eventually cherry-pick as well. But the Qur'an, virtually on every page, is a manifesto for religious intolerance. I invite readers of your website who haven't read the Qur'an to simply read the book. Take out a highlighter and highlight those lines that counsel the believer to despise infidels, and you will find a book that is just covered with highlighter.
Let's return to your idea that people must be convinced of the "danger and illegitimacy" of their core beliefs. How can they be convinced?
It's a difficult problem because people are highly indisposed to having their core beliefs challenged. But we need to lift the taboos that currently prevent us from criticizing religious irrationality.
How do you bring it up, and in what context? At a party?
I'm not advocating that people challenge everyone's religious beliefs wherever they appear. In a crowded elevator, if someone mentions Jesus and you start barking at them, that's not really the front line of discourse.
Whenever you're standing at a podium or publishing a book or article or an op-ed, that's when it's time to be really rigorous about the standards of evidence.
Interpersonally, we don't challenge everyone's crazy beliefs about
medical therapies or alien abduction or
astrology or anything else. Yet if the president of the U.S. started
talking about how Saturn was coming into the wrong quadrant and is therefore not a good time to launch a war, one would hope that the whole White House press corps would descend on him with a straitjacket. This would be terrifying--to hear somebody with so much power basing any part of his decision-making process on something as disreputable as astrology. Yet we don't have the same response when he's clearly basing some part of his deliberation on faith.
Many people consider America to have been founded as a Christian nation. They think many of the Founding Fathers were specifically Christian and very religious, whereas many secularists argue they weren't. You've said the issue is a dead end.
I just think that it's the wrong battle to fight. Even if the [Founding Fathers] were as religious or deranged by their religiosity as the Taliban, their beliefs now are illegitimate. Secularists are on the right side of the debate and fundamentalists in our culture are distorting history. The Founding Fathers--many believed that slavery was a justifiable practice; we now agree that it's an abomination. Anyone trying to resurrect slavery because Thomas Jefferson, that brilliant man, didn't free the slaves--that's an argument that would be so appalling to us now, in terms of 20th-century morality.
You've said the First Amendment is insufficient to protect against encroachments of religion. What would you do to supplement what the First Amendment does?
I'm not eager to monkey with the Constitution. It has to happen at the level of popular, grassroots expectations of what it means to be a rational, well-educated human being.
You've said that people perceive the word "atheist" as along the lines of "child molester." How should atheists present themselves?
I'm very distrustful of finding the right label because labels are ultimately sloganeering. You had the label the "brights," which is stillborn. I think atheism and secularism are also names that ultimately we don't need. We don't need a name for disbelief in astrology. I don't think we need anything other that rationality and reason and intellectual honesty.
In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. You cannot have presidential aspirations without being willing to pretend to be certain that God exists. You have to pander to the similar convictions of 90% of the American population. 70% of Americans claim to feel that it is important that their president be strongly religious. No aspiring politician can fly in the face of those numbers now, so we are rewarding people for false certainty, false conviction.
Clearly, anyone who claims to be certain that Jesus was literally born of a virgin is lying. He's either lying to himself or he's lying to others. There's no experience you have praying in church that can deliver certainty on that specific point.
You're saying it's not verifiable.
It's just not the kind of thing that spiritual experience validates. You can pray in a room to Jesus and even have an experience of Jesus being bodily present. Jesus shows up with a whole halo and the beard and the robes and it's the best experience of your life. What does that prove? You wouldn't even be in the position to know whether the historical Jesus actually had a beard on the basis of that experience.
Yet one thing I argue in my book is that experiences like that are very interesting and worth exploring. There's no doubt that people have visionary experiences. There's no doubt that praying to Jesus for 18 hours a day will transform your psychology--and in many ways, transform it for the better.
I just think that we don't have to believe anything preposterous in order to understand that. [We can] value the example of Jesus, at least in half his moods, and we should want to discover if there's a way to love your neighbor as yourself and generate the kind of moral psychology that Jesus was talking about.
To read the rest of this interview click here:
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Secu...arris.aspx?p=3
Prime examples of the dangerous costs of religion:
