Letters to the Editor
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Well, anon
Your challenge is based on the false premise that anyone who accepts a belief system has anything to prove to you.
Maybe you don't have anything to prove to me, but many others do. Otherwise there would be no missionaries. I think I'm responsible for many an LDS member questioning their faith, and I think that's a good thing. I'm one of the few who answer the door and talk to them, though generally once they figure out I'm an evil scientist devil, they don't come back.
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dickginnold
The trouble with do unto others is...
Those Republicans are kinky bastards.
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What it's all about, and Islam
I remember moving back home after about 20 years and my sister who had stayed home to keep the faith asked me what church I was going to join. I said I was not religious and not planning on a church.
She looked at me, puzzled, and said "But don't you want to make any friends?"
That's what it's all about. If God were conclusively proven to not exist, many people would still go to church. That's their social life.
It's also a way to select what people they will help out and associate with. A religious filter is an easy way to justify your prejudices.
Having been born fundie Christian and a Muslim for a time, I can easily say that fundie Christians scare me a lot more than Muslims do.
Fundie Christians don't believe in taking care of the environment because Jesus is coming any minute and the world is going to end anyway. They don't believe the war in Iraq matters because Jesus is coming any minute, and they believe an Israeli attack on Iran is foretold and sanctioned by the Bible.
Scary stuff.
Even scarier is the fact that Muslims, having cribbed Evangelical literature for their own nascent missionary efforts for years, now have an End Times movement of their own, even featuring the return of Christ in the clouds. It's borrowed wholesale from Christian apocolyptic thought, but it doesn't seem to matter. It's very attractive to them.
Now try pairing Muslim street anger with a sincere belief in Armageddon, with Christians on the other side just as anxious to "get it on" so Jesus will come back. We are screwed.
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Human folly
If there was no money to be made from the business of religion, it would be a much more rational world.
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Oh, hell
The concept of hell is the most pernicious to be found in monotheistic religion. It was primarily what caused me to give up my Catholic faith as a teenager. I simply could not accept that such an extreme punishment could be levied for such trivial offenses (missing Mass on Sunday, eating meat on Friday, having sex fantasies, masturbating, etc.).
Think of the concept of eternal, i.e. infinite, torment. It's overwhelming and beyond our imagining. It exceeds any torture or cruelty imposed by any of the worst villains in history. And we are supposed to believe that a just and loving god would impose such an atrocity?
And consider this: Christ's suffering on the cross, as excruciating, and as cinematic, as it must have been, was temporary, lasting only a few hours. We know of many worse sufferings in human history. But hell would be worse than all of them put together, because it would never end. If Christ's suffering was supposed to be so great that it redeemed all the sins of mankind, than why is an infinitely worse torment needed to expunge our sins?
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nice change?
I'd like to congratulate the posters today. Whether or not you agree with the author's premise, your posts are well thought-out and calm, for the most part.
It's interesting to me, as a relatively new reader of this site, that the posts for an article which takes a position that the majority of you agree with (that organized religion is wrong) are very cordial and address the topic at hand, and when Salon is reviewing a book that you don't agree with, like the "Liberals are Nazis" book or the "Sissy Nation" book, the majority of the posts declare Salon.com to be a waste of web space, or advocate the banning of the "offensive" material.
Since I haven't read anyone (yet) who's outraged that the author could suggest that organized religion is wrong, or who's advocating the banning of discussions like these or calling Salon.com "journalistic hacks", it makes me wonder if there are people here who are only "open-minded" and "tolerant" toward things they already agree with.
But then again, I'm new here.
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Bird94
The articles on Salon vary in quality as we have seen. The quality could be uniformly much better. There's nothing wrong with pointing that out. And saying that an article is a waste of bandwidth is not the same thing as saying it should be banned. And I'm sure reviewing any book with a title like "Liberals are Nazis" falls into that category.
Anybody should have the freedom to write it, and the rest of us should have the freedom to mock it and laugh it out of the room. Loudly, rudely, and noisily. Some things do not deserve polite discussion.
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Christianity is not magic
Mr. Marks questions "our right to believe in a God that has so unevenly distributed the good things in life." Well, no, that would be us. Assuming that we believe in God only when God intervenes in a magical way in human suffering would indeed mean that religious faith is absurd (a point made definitively by Hume a while back).
Leaving aside the larger question of why the innocent suffer for no reason--admitting that is a very large question to set aside--Mr. Marks's perspective on what it means to believe in Jesus is muddled at best. Where the evangelicals have it right is their rock-solid understanding that to follow Jesus means to be in a relationship with a person. Where they are often wrong is thinking that that relationship somehow raises us above our humanity, our sinfulness, our desire to be with Jesus but not actually follow him (the disciples had a good deal of trouble with this, too).
Mr. Marks is right when he says that Scripture is used to verify a lot of what we bring to it--thoughts pro or con homosexuality, abortion, and so for. He is quite wrong when he says that the Gospels are a "political manual"--at least, he is wrong in the sense that I think he is meaning this. It is just as easy and just as foolish to think the "answer" of the Gospels supports the radical Left as it is to think it supports the radical Right.
And finally, Mr. Bayard seems to conflate all of Christianity into evangelical Christianity and all of believers into those whose faith is expressed in evangelical theology, one that he clear disdains. He also seems to have a few unexamined biases about where "truth" lies, i.e., in what has been called the great American liberal project.
It's my belief that the true religious crisis in America is a crisis of religious education--and that indeed is the fault and the problem of every Christian denomination and congregation.