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…
If anything, doesn’t invoking the supernatural weaken an argument? Setting aside the fact that doing so alienates many of the people you might be trying to convince, either because they subscribe to different beliefs or, like myself, none at all, an appeal to a supernatural entity, whether God, Allah, elves or ghosts, suggests to me that the person speaking has little confidence in the real-world components of their own arguments. [...]
After rereading some of the material that informed my earlier post, I really don’t feel like everything that needed to be said made it in.
First of all, critics of the event have been quick to point out that Jesus would probably not be down with bringing weapons to a place of worship. Sure, his entreaties to turn the other cheek don’t quite jibe with the spirit of this event, but what is often forgotten is that Jesus is also supposed to have said, in Matthew 10:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.
Continue reading…
