Good, Evil, And Religion

There's been so much rhetoric lately on domestic terrorism, given the recent events in Paris and now San Bernadino, CA.  It seems there's no middle ground for people who think the answer is arming ourselves with more automatic weapons, or banning said weapons, or perhaps banning immigration altogether.

This week, it was taken to the extreme by the non-to-be-taken-seriously Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who suggested banning new Muslims from entering America.  It's an unconstitutional, certifiably insane idea, but he actually gets cheers from other extreme Republicans for saying it.

I plan to blog about the presidential candidates sometime before the Iowa caucuses.  In the meantime, to all who think like Donald Trump, I say in the famous words of Joseph Welsh to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who destroyed lives in the 1950s with false accusations of communism:  "Have you no sense of decency?"

The underlying current behind all of this rhetoric is religion.  We like to think religion reminds us to love our fellow man, but aren't there as many examples of religion making us hate?

I'm not just talking about radical Islam, either.  I know plenty of Christians who have no problem discriminating against gays (yes, that counts as hate), for no other reason than their religion tells them to do so.  Religion and religious differences have promulgated hate for centuries, from the Crusades to the Revolutionary War to the World Wars.

The other day, I came across a quote from more than a decade ago, attributed to Steven Weinberg.  He's an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions on the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.  (Whaaaaat?)  Let's just assume he's a very smart dude.  Oh, he's also an atheist.  His quote pretty much sums up how this deal works:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Tolerating Intolerance

In the past week, I've had a front row seat to witness what I consider to be two separate acts of religious intolerance.  It isn't the religious intolerance one might think of though.  Someone isn't putting down a religion - a religion is putting someone down.

Incident 1 - a pastor at a conservative church is requiring all employees to sign a document to agree to abide by a certain Christian lifestyles.  In other words, he is telling some existing (and all potential) employees they are no longer good enough to work there simply based on how they live their life away from work.  This type of discrimination may be quite legal for a religious organization, but it's also quite intolerant, not to mention unenforcable.

Incident 2 - a Catholic diocesan pastor vetoed a distinguished alumni award that a school was going to give to a well-regarded community volunteer.  The reason - for a short time some years ago, she was on the board of Planned Parenthood.  In other words, he is telling her (and everyone else) that all good deeds are usurped by helping an organization he and the church oppose.  Again, this type of discrimination may be quite acceptable for a religious organization, but it's also quite intolerant, not to mention stupid.

What do these incidents have in common?  That religious 'leaders' preach tolerance, but act differently.  They actually only tolerate those who agree with them.  In both cases, this is not the first time the pastor in question has said or done controversial things that are far more politically based than faith-based.  They are, in a word, hypocrites.

It sounds ironic, but I actually think the world would be a better place if people followed certain so-called Christian principles - if those principles are broadly defined.  Things like loving your neighbor as yourself, doing unto others as they have done to you, and showing compassion to those less fortunate.  What these pastors are doing, however, doesn't jibe with any of those.  They demand that people rigidly adhere to their specific, often politically-motivated agendas.  (By the way, Christianity doesn't own those broadly based principles.)

Basically, their religion screws up their faith.  It makes them tolerate intolerance.  It makes atheists look good.

For Atheists, There Is A God (Of Common Sense)

This week's big Des Moines area scandal involved ads on the sides of metro buses that questioned the existence of God, sponsored by an atheist group. Apparently some people (one? ten? fifty?) complained and succeeded in having the ads pulled. Even our intellectually-challenged, political-pandering governor weighed in to say he was disturbed by the ads.

(An aside here. This is the same governor standing in the way of allowing Iowans a referendum vote on whether to overturn the legalization of gay marriage. Now, I don't have a problem with gay marriage, but I have a huge problem with a governor who determines his morality based on whether it wins him support within his party. Like so many politicians, the guy doesn't stand for anything, he only stands for what wins him votes.)

In the end, the god of common sense rose up and defeated the small-minded fools who think their religious beliefs are the only ones protected by free speech. The ads were allowed again, the religious bigots crawled back under their rocks, and the sun came up in the east. Oh, and people were again reminded that while this country was founded on Christian principles, 200 years of evolution later we have a religiously diverse country where not everyone believes in the same thing.