All entries for Saturday 06 November 2004

Scriptural References

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Just been to the All Nighter. Slept now till 4pm. Interesting experience. Blah, blah.

Hurrah for trackbacks.

Actually, I just want to debunk some religious stuff. That would be the tendency of certain theocrats to argue from scriptural writ. Ie. Leviticus say foo, so, hey, guess what! God hates fags! So let's have a good old fashioned lynching! Yeehaw, go get those pitchforks! Etc.

My argument/highly rhetoric question is this.

Let us suppose they interpretation of the scripture is the correct one. Let us suppose there are no translation errors and so on, which really we know there are. Let us suppose Jesus, and all the prophets really said that God hates black people, loves slavery, enjoys repressing women (NB: I hope I sidestep any comments on cases where the women do not feel repressed. Then we aren't talking about the same thing.), despises homosexuals, is anti-choice, and so on.

Why do people believe that this is sufficient justification to actually carry out a policy of oppression and repression?

All this does is to lump together one idea with another. From my perspective, this isn't a reason to believe in oppression. This is a reason not to believe in this particular god, because the image presented of this particular god is morally debased.

What this argument does is to pass the responsibility back to the belief itself. It does not lessen the responsibility to justify the moral consequences of the belief in a secular way. In the end, it is an argument which sheds more light on the arguer, than on the facts in question.

Did this person then believe in this religion because he already believed in hatred, and simply wanted justification for his actions? Or was he an innocent suckered into this culture of hatred, and slowly corrupted?

And if the moderate christians/muslims/etc do not really believe their religion is evil, do not believe that it does stand for hatred and discrimination, then why on Earth aren't most of them defending it, whilst the extremists make grand, sweeping assertions about the nature of their belief, about their possession of the absolute truth, about infallibility and so on? Why do they insist on this false unity between the churches, fouling their religion in the process? Why aren't they up in arms?

: 06 Nov 2004 17:05 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem