Tolerating Faith=Tolerating War and Hatred

Comment

Comment by warren pease on April 17, 2008 at 1:17pm

Hi Dogfish -- First, let me say that my walkin' catfish can kick your ass into next week and still have enough energy left to crawl back across the lawn and into the slough.

Now that's a hell of an introduction, and I use the word "hell" loosely, given the context of this discussion group.

In brief, here's what I think about humans, their various gawds, organized religion, and how it subverts our innate humanity and replaces it with some externalized overlord egomaniac who likes to get her ego stroked, has no patience with people who think their gawd is the real deal, and justifies the mass slaughter of probably billions of people through recorded history because religion seems to be the single most divisive system of social control ever imposed on otherwise free and independent people.

Imo, in the beginning, humans created gawd in an effort to give meaning to their short, brutish and physically painful lives.

Ruling class humans created organized religion -- with enough variants to foster large-scale exclusionary tribalism -- to legitimize racial and ethnic prejudices, creating in the process an "us vs. them" dynamic that could lead to everything from enslavement of various despised groups to war between city states in the name of some bogus variant on primitive iconography.

These same elites created religion as a means to extract money, goods and services from the peasants under the guise of somehow supporting that particular branch of faith-based idiocy, when the reality was/is ripping off the general public to amass sufficient funds and shanghai enough soldiers to launch whatever land grab, ethnic cleansing operation or voyage of discovery (a combination land grab, ethnic cleansing op and get rich quick scheme all in one) was on the table that year.

These days, religion remains the most effective mechanism for social control ever devised. When combined with naturally compatible nationalist and governmental ideologies -- prime examples being the American creation myth and the ongoing siege by the Bushies to obliterate the church-state dividing line -- gawd is used to justify just about anything, no matter how insane and contrary to the core religious doctrines common to all major religions, the so-called Golden Rule chief among them.

I'm a contributing op/ed writer for several online news and info sites -- Online Journal, OpEdNews and Politicsandcurrentaffairs.co.uk among them -- and I've yet to do a piece on religion and its impact on the current sick global state of affairs. However, here's some links to my posts on a forum regarding religion, American religiosity, toxic fundamentalism and a bit more. Enjoy reading, if enjoy is the right word for reading about organized religion and remembering that The Commander Guy is a raving fundie loon.


Links follow:

Re alleged bigotry directed against fundies:

Organized religion = social control and wealth redistribution (upward)

Re US levels of religiosity

More on the same topic

And more still (somewhat repetitive)

That's it for now.

Best,

wp