It’s been a while since I really delved into purely philosophical waters here on Radical Rationalist and when that happens I start to get very self-conscious about using the adjective ‘radical’. Today I feel like the best way to remedy the feeling is to set out one of the two most radical (I think) philosophical positions I hold: that religion, in any guise, is innately immoral.
There are several issues I want to deal with right at the start. The first is that in making this argument I refuse to use specific individuals or historical events. Too often, people in my position point to these kinds of specific examples in an effort to demonstrate the larger point. This approach is pointless and self-defeating. Pointless because specific examples are just that. They can easily be dismissed as the misapplication of whatever teaching that the event is being used to refute. Plus, under the best circumstances, it would only function to demonstrate the immorality of one specific doctrine, rather than the idea of religious faith as a whole. The tendency is self-defeating because any sufficiently large group of people or sufficiently long period of history will contain examples of people behaving badly. If I should point to the Crusades, my opponent could point to the French Revolution. If I point to Osama bin Laden, they can point to the Unabomber. That kind of back-and-forth bickering doesn’t move the debate at all, in any direction. Continue reading…