Pastors who are violating restriction orders are possibly endangering the most vulnerable of their congregants. Do they really think that a loving God wants them to do something so foolish? You write about Jesus' healing ministry in your book. I wonder if some of the conservative resistance to medicine might be rooted in the idea that Jesus will heal them, too, so they don't need vaccinations or doctors? It's fascinating to me that people would think that seeking medical care is somehow disobedient to God.
Almost like it's blasphemous. It's bizarre. For Jews, one of the ways that God heals is by providing men and women of science who can help keep us well. I don't think there's anything implicit within Christianity to not seek medical care because of Jesus. I have heard during this outbreak some people say, "Jesus is my vaccine. Priest-in-Charge Angie Smith uses her smartphone to live-broadcast an Easter Sunday service to her congregation from the churchyard of Old St.
The Pew findings are provocative and ring true to me. I find them unsurprising, but as a religious believer I also find them troubling. In the study, most religious people said ventilators in short supply should go to patients who need them most in the moment; while most non-religious people said they should go to patients with the highest chance of recovery. In my opinion, utilitarian calculus doesn't have a place in this kind of decision-making.
We are morally beholden to respond to people in need when they present themselves to us, without attempting to parse which life is more or less valuable or worthy. There's a very slippery slope from there to the totalitarian impulse to value some lives over others for reasons of political calculation.
Who has a bigger role determining morality in the medical field right now, religion or science? I think it's the goal of many secular scientists and organizations to push religious considerations completely out of the picture when it comes to determining what is or isn't morally acceptable.
This is a dangerous gambit. Without a gold standard of behavior, in the end anything goes. Sanctity of life can give way to political expediency or some other fashion. This isn't a right-vs. This conflict especially presents itself to us now in bioethics, where harsh and impersonal technological advances are driving the bus and leaving humanity and compassion out of the doctor-patient relationship.
Religion can heal, as the studies in your book show. It seems equally evident, though, that religion can kill, too. Of course. Throughout history, personal faith and religious institutions have been a great force for good, motivating selfless behavior and compassion and magnificent works of service to others. At the same time, religious institutions and leaders have been sources of divisiveness and hate, and religious movements have existed throughout history which have targeted outsiders for destruction.
Thousands of studies by now have shown that expressions of religious faith or spirituality are associated, on average, with all kinds of benefits for our well-being — less depression, less anxiety, even longevity in some studies. The first three are related to god himself, establishing that one true god above other gods while warning against the idolatry of anything and any god as sinful.
Anyone who claimed another god as the true one would certainly fall into sin, so this is a rule established to validate the rightness of the belief and to justify punishment of any deviation — group control, to put it mildly, and succinctly.
Then we have a commandment for honoring the Sabbath, or the day in which god saw all his creations and saw that it was good, and then rested. The first four seem invaluable for any society to function, so the suggestion pushed by believers that people would not be moral without religion must inadvertently ignore any history that precedes their beliefs.
As a matter of fact, those values can be found throughout cultures across the world, mainly for the purpose of maintaining order and safety in the tribe. Finally, in regards to covetousness, is it not true that human desires often drive human action? If the socialist does not covet justice from others, whence do they fight for the rights and liberties.
Human desire obviously precedes action, and without action, there is no progress. If our species did not actively seek out to better itself, on either an individual or collective basis, then what progression of society do the believers expect? It is often the case that conservatives also happen to be religious, and therefore wish to conserve the traditions and values of the past, weary of new progressing traditions and values.
You see, the main problem religion has is that it makes extraordinary claims for itself, yet does not provide proof for them, nor does it answer any question that regards our objective reality.
Now, after millennia of religious indoctrination and control over truth and power, science burst into the collective consciousness of our species, answering questions that religion had claimed to have answered already. One can quickly understand why religion was so militant against science, to the point of prosecuting scientists like Galileo and Bruno, even if they admitted their devotion to god.
How would a group with an imagined reality with so much influence and power react to an imagined reality that challenged its claims and its authority? Definitely not well, as the Inquisition and Salem witch trials will no doubt show. I mean, look at all the charity religious people do. This is, again, begging the question.
Do the religious commit charity because they care about the poor and downtrodden, or because they care more about god, or is it because they are afraid of hell? Believers will pull out statistics showing that the religious will give to charity more often than the non-religious.
What they forget to mention is that religious charity mostly comes from missionary work, which is followed by proselytizing. The common cases are missionary work in poor countries like Uganda and Rwanda, two of the most Christian nations in the continent, but Haiti is also an excellent case that should not be ignored. After the earthquake hit an already struggling nation, missionaries of all denominations flocked into the island to help.
I will refer to the documentary film by Roger Ross Williams God Loves Uganda , as it takes a close look at the work of American religious missionary work in a country that suffers all the inhumanity of god in its splendor. Ignoring the morbid name, the cameraman had received a new Kodak film to test out, and with a lack of other films, they decided to use the new one.
When panning the camera toward the inside of the home, a particular light effect caused the room to seem lighter than it was. Muggeridge capitalized on this and claimed that the home was blessed and that he and his cameraman had, for the first time, captured a miracle on camera.
Ministers and bishops continually begged her not to speak of it publicly, prescribing prayer as the solution to her qualms — talk about irony from the unironic. If god were real, would he have allowed such false preachings to occur in his name from the mouths of his flock? Lastly, if there is no god, then is it not all permissible? This is the last attempt at deflection from the holy. This is a profound insult to human intelligence and solidarity. I say, and the many fields in psychology including moral psychology prove this to be the case, that morality is innate in us.
Empathy, which is the neurochemical process of placing oneself in the shoes of another, for lack of a better metaphor, can be seen in multiple animals, including pigs, chimps, dolphins, and elephants. This makes the suggestion that religion is the source of morality a wildly inaccurate, and self-centered claim — as all sapiens inevitably are.
Consider, now, what teaching these things to a child might be like. Claus visited, and on a particularly bad year for the family, you received some socks, some shirts and a pair of shoes, instead of the console, toys, and bicycle you asked for on the letter you sent to the North Pole. When you arrived at school, you saw all the games and toys Santa gave all the other boys and girls, including the one kid that incessantly bullies you.
Either Santa is messing with me even though I behaved better, or something is wrong here. Is Santa real? With the exception of the last part of the Christmas deal, this is precisely the sort of idea that a child would believe, exactly because they are ignorant.
Now, change this all into the existence of an old, white-bearded, white-robbed, magical man from the heavens, and change the rules of engagement into obliged prayer, mandatory congregation, divine supervision, and ecclesiastic injunction. Whether portrayed or not, the same argument can be and has been, made about god.
He is omniscient, omnipresent and all-powerful, meaning he sees it all, is everywhere at all times, and can, and has as believers like to claim, create the universe just like that. Talk about raising the bar for old St Nick.
With a more acute sense of disappointment, your parents scold you, or mock you, or dismiss you as ignorant of the world and unprepared to make such a life-altering not really decision. Afterward, some parents take their children more often to Church and ask for help from the minister — out of all the people a child would need help from. Other parents disown their children.
Depending on the religion, an admittance to apostasy would be resolved by death. Rest assured, in the mind of your parents, believing in Santa Claus is definitely not the same as believing in god?
But why is that? In the past, several hundred years before the scientific and industrial revolutions unshackled us from priestly servitude, if a person were to question god, or even make the implication or allusion, even in metaphor, they would certainly be put to death by hanging or burning in the public square, as was customary and widely celebrated by the fatuous and pious mass.
This seems a bit over-the-top just for questioning how the universe works, so you can imagine how they treated unbelievers. Aside from that, unlike disbelief in Santa Clause, which might net you a piece of coal on your sock, the disbelief in god will grant you an eternity in a pit of fire to suffer, a fate often accelerated by the devout.
Why teach a child that, if they were to act immorally, they would suffer an eternity in a pit of fire? I would very much prefer the piece of coal, thank you very much. Children are innately curious, and science answers those inquiries.
Another term often used is agnostic, however, the term itself applies to knowledge and not faith. The same applies to Gnosticism, although the religious are more in the habit of knowing their convictions to be true, the nonbeliever can be just as certain in their belief in the nonexistence of a deity. The problem with religion, mainly, though not exclusively, lies in the certainty of its adherents and in their willingness to impose it.
If people want an example of an imagined reality that exerts force in the world, then religion is the sure-fire answer. To this day, we have priests and mullahs dehumanizing others because of biological sex, sexual orientation, and faith. It imposes an imagined reality based on believing in things without evidence and then sets up a narrative that validates its claims and the group identity. And like any ideology, it suffers from the human conditions, of being servile while seeking power, of having a puerile view of sex and desire, of seeking to answer too much with too little, and of making itself out to be the answer to all problems — in life as in death.
On to the first part of the title. For religion, faith is redundant. More than this, however, is the sly conformism that faith lays upon its adherents, that they can be easily satisfied with whatever statement made by a preacher that reassures them of the conviction without for one second considering what exactly they believe in. I lay my faith in humanity, in something that I know to be real, I know to be imperfect, I know its potential for good and wickedness, and I know more about than some desert god from the mind of illiterate peoples.
Well, the world has done enough of that. More than that, it seems to me to be woefully irresponsible to leave an ideology, an idea, unquestioned just because a lot of people believe in it or because it happens to make people happy. I can take the insult on the cheek, as any good Christian would, but what I will not let go is the implication that religion is something for people to enjoy.
The corollary is; name a wicked action or statement made that could only be made by a believer. And that should tell you enough about religion. See author's posts. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content. Faith, Superstition And Ignorance Before I address the main problems I have with religion and numinous beliefs, some terms need to be defined and bars need to be set.
Orthodox Jews spend money on wigs for women and double dishwashers. Evangelical parents, forced to choose between righteousness and love, kick queer teens out onto the street. Catholic bishops impose righteous rules on operating rooms. Religion teaches helplessness. Que sera, sera—what will be will be. Let go and let God. In the most conservative sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, women are seen as more virtuous if they let God manage their family planning.
Droughts, poverty and cancer get attributed to the will of God rather than bad decisions or bad systems; believers wait for God to solve problems they could solve themselves. This attitude harms society at large as well as individuals.
Living well and doing good were largely personal matters. When this mentality persists, religion inspires personal piety without social responsibility. Structural problems can be ignored as long as the believer is kind to friends and family and generous to the tribal community of believers.
Religions seek power. Think corporate personhood. Religions are man-made institutions, just like for-profit corporations are. And like any corporation, to survive and grow a religion must find a way to build power and wealth and compete for market share. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity—any large enduring religious institution is as expert at this as Coca-cola or Chevron. And just like for-profit behemoths, they are willing to wield their power and wealth in the service of self-perpetuation, even it harms society at large.
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