Preach Atheism

A guest blogger wrote of Religious Freedom Day in yesterday’s Washington Post. I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting the opening paragraph to reflect reality.

The original:

Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions of human beings.

The reality:

Across the globe, religion and belief continue to worm themselves dangerously into the lives of people and their cultures. From self-abasement to talking to oneself instead of taking action, physically deforming male and female children without their consent to delusional thoughts of deceased loved ones being in a better place, from fighting to allow only a man and a woman to commit to a life together to strange ceremonies concocted by imaginative goatherds of old, giving huge sums of money to support the very system that seeks to control their lives to giving credit to superstition instead of science, religion is a central source of pain, suffering and misery for billions of human beings.

You’re welcome!

I’m first on the wagon to keep #sharia from being used here in the US and everywhere. But it seems to me to be a tricky strategy to go exclusively after sharia. 

When I think of sharia I think of it in terms of not just the worst options like beheadings, stonings, honor killings and loss of limb but the more insidious things like all the subjection of women to second class status. 

But what this all boils down to is that, by participation in the religion, voluntarily or less than voluntarily, a person subjects themselves to this secondary law, to which, in some countries, like the UK, civil courts defer. The “voluntary” nature of religion is a subject until itself as many are participants of a religion due strictly to the “inherited” nature of having been indoctrinated into the cult from the earliest days of childhood by the very parents whose job it is to prepare your mind for the big world.

Here in the US (and presumably elsewhere) a couple married in the eyes of civil and Jewish religious law and who want to divorce have to be granted divorce by both bodies if either party wants to be granted a new marriage under Jewish law. 

To me it seems that the most practical thing is to abolish ALL religious law in the US. It’s silly to have, or even condone, a secondary unelected, potentially coercively adopted, “legal” system for religions. Count me in the camp for abolition of ALL religious “law” in the U.S. at least. 

@State_We_re_In Yes, oppression does stem from Islam, as it does from all the Abrahamic faiths. You are making a common error in assessment in which you conclude that those who don’t practice the complete set of instructions in any given “holy” book are somehow a great example of how a religion can be expressed. This error is seen in assessing the practice of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

The Taliban, al Qaeda, Ultra Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians are all examples of those who try to follow most closely to their scriptures. The larger world — the non-religious, those looking at another faith from the perspective of adherence to a different religion, and the more moderate practitioners of each faith — rightly look askance at the “purists” of a faith. They rightly note that strict adherence to any of a long list of instructions in these scriptures would land a modern person in prison for a long time. 

Those who follow any faith more loosely allow themselves to say “hey, I’m not crazy like those extremists!” Yet by their very participation and perpetuation of the faith they make it easier for the extremists to find sanctuary.

These girls, and Muslim women generally, are subject to various levels of subjugation and degradation based on the chauvinistic, misogynistic texts written by ancient goat herds. 

To the extent that the girls in the story, or any Afghan girls are getting better schooling than their mother is strictly by dint of the U.S. occupation of their country, and, if I were Mitt Romney, I’d lay a $10,000 bet that this doesn’t hold long after we’ve drawn down our troops.

As it is they have to worry about threats to themselves, their father and their coach, based on the practice of Islamic teachings relevant to their desires for the same freedoms enjoyed by girls in Western cultures.

The decision to say it is anything other than religious oppression can only be called cultural relativism, which is just as odious. Thinking that somehow persons of a different culture do not have the same desire for, or rights to, freedom of thought and from threats based on gender that we wish for for our own daughters is truly twisted logic.

I welcome your thoughts.