re: #9 CuriousLurker

I know you’re right, but sometimes I get sick & tired of the atheists who seem to feel the need to snipe at religion and/or religious people at every opportunity (like my Thanksgiving story) and this was one of those times.

Every day, many people are hurt and killed in the name of religion. It appears as a perversion of religion to you, but to many of these people it is an honest, if terrible, expression of their faith. This story is not some story where religion had to be crowbarred in.

I’ve consistently spoken out against intolerance & violence countless times; anyone who’s been here any length of time knows that, and Jolo has been here longer than I.

However, you’re a rarity among devout people. Sadly, the majority of Muslims in many countries are extremely intolerant of homosexuality. So are the majority of Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, etc. etc. I respect your right to follow your religion, and especially your desire to liberalize it, but in identifying with a larger group you have to, in some way, shoulder responsibility for the dominant attitudes of that group. I know of very few LBGT-friendly Muslim groups in the US. Far more are intolerant of homosexuality.

then I saw Jolo’s comment and I *twitched* because he made it sound like only religious people could produce such “sick bastards”. That’s simply not true. That was my point, albeit perhaps not made at the most opportune time.

See, I thought he was saying that only the religious bastards do this sort of crime— beat a woman because she is something that according to their religion is an abomination. Certainly, gay women get assaulted by homophobes for other reasons, and you can make an argument that it wasn’t really religion in this case if you stretch it, but there are religious assholes who beat women, throw acid in their face, etc. for all sorts of things.

There are vanishingly few crimes inspired by atheism— none of the people you mentioned count. There was a lot of anti-clericalism during the Terror. There have been other cases. But in general, crimes committed in the name of God by people who, if we’re honest, actually are religiously devout, vastly outweighs those committed by atheists in the name of atheism, even taking the respective proportions of the population into account. This is because it is far, far easier to have a radicalized form of religion than a radicalized view of skeptical philosophy.

I prolly shouldn’t comment before I’ve had my 2nd cup of coffee in the morning as that’s when I tend to be at my twitchiest and let people who I’d otherwise ignore get under my skin.

I want to make sure you understand what I’m saying. I think I’m among the most tolerant of atheists, and I know that change must come slow to trees as old as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but god damn it it some days burns me up to hell that in the twenty-first century, in the US, we still have people being murdered because someone’s ‘god’ told them to. The concept of god, of revealed truth, of ineffability, is a dangerous one. It is far too easy, I feel, for the moderate religious to say “Well, my religion is nothing like that” and look away from the problem. The vast majority of the world’s religions remain bigoted, and actively work to impede human rights for gay people.

And in no case is this even something that’s stressed in the texts. It is a very chosen, and often, it seems to me, a very cynical approach.