re: #62 Obdicut

But that’s just demonstrably untrue. Listen, I’m a hardcore atheist. I don’t even think the idea of god has any coherence to it. But there are tons and tons of religious people and things religion has ‘touched’ which aren’t poisoned. Religion is just another piece of culture. It tends to be an archaic carrier of cultural mores, but it has at times been an agent of progressive change, too.

Why isn’t it enough to condemn excesses of religion: why is it necessary to paint all religion as inherently corruptive?

But I’m not! I’m painting humans as fundamentally corrupt in their desire to assert control over each other. And I’m saying that when you take away the divine mumbo-jumbo around it, religions are just another human institution that’s subject to the same human flaws and patterns of power abuse as the rest of us.

And that a common pattern in institutionalized human power structures throughout history has been control of sexuality — particularly women’s sexuality — because it’s such a convenient point of universal leverage.

I quite specifically tried to clarify that I am not of the “religion poisons everything” brand of atheism. I’m the “human power poisons everything and religion is just another construction of human power” camp.

And then attempting to argue why, with these inherently conflicting but suspicious consistent directives that come from it, you can end up in a seemingly incomprehensible situation where any organization (in this case the Catholic church, but insert terrible group of your choice) would be willing to let a mother die to save a fetus that could never have survived.