Hatred of religion

Judge a religion by its adherents, not by those who betray its principles.

The Invention of Lying.

Religulous.

Hatred of "institutions"

"I hate organized religion."

"I hate organized medicine. Who is to say what medications and surgeries are safe and effective? Anybody should be allowed to do anything to anyone at any time. We don't need doctors, nurses, or certified technicians."

"I hate having an organized body that can detect and cure its own illnesses, recover from injury, and metabolize food. Life should be spontaneous and unlimited."

Jesus without the Church

"I hate the Church but love Jesus."

What would we not know about Jesus if there were no Church?

• No gospels.
• No parables.
• No sayings.
• No "good news" of His saving death and Resurrection.
• No Baptism or Eucharist.
• No apostolic authority to sort out conflicting interpretations (e.g., Acts 15).

What would be the history of Jesus of Nazareth?

Roman history: We executed a man who claimed to be "King of the Jews." His followers promptly disbanded and were never heard from again.

Jewish history: The Romans executed a man who claimed to be God. That was the end of that.

"Kill Them All"

Needs a good name. Something derived from "Lump Them All Together"?

This is a logical fallacy. Hasty generalization?

• Tiger Woods is a golfer.
• Tiger Woods has been unfaithful to his wife.
• Golf destroys marriages.

"Some atheist readers were offended…"

One of them does the standard sleight-of-hand trick of saying, in essence, “The murderers were Muslim, and by Muslim, I mean Christian.” This is magicked by the expedient of reducing all acts of Islamic violence to the work of “religion” and then declaring “religion” to refer to Christianity. He writes:

To imply that organized religious has furnished these people with the mental, physical courage to perform these acts of kindness to a fellow human being, seems a bit big; under the circumstances. The countless acts of barbarity and cruelty perpetrated worldwide every day, in the name of god, does not support this theory. Furthermore, was this very act of inhuman depravity not also committed under the cries of ‘God is great,’ even if uttered in Arabic?

In short, if you’ve seen one religion, you’ve seen ‘em all.

Anatagonism toward Religious Certitude

"Why Believe?"

One such book is The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, which repeatedly—mantra-like—uses words such as "ignorant" and "irrational" in making the case that religious faith is not only outdated, but overtly evil. Every religion, Harris muses, "preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This puts the ‘leap’ in Kierkegaard’s leap of faith" (Harris, The End of Faith, 23). He adds: "Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible" (Harris, The End of Faith, 25).

"Will the Government Tell Christians to Shut Up?"

In 2004, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) met in Paris to examine how governments could fight the harmful effects of hate speech on the Internet. Anti-black, anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti-women, anti-American, and every kind of hate in between can be found on the Internet. Moreover, hate groups are not limited to written messages. Hate music, interactive video games, and streaming audio broadcasts can be found on many of the estimated 4,000 hate-oriented Web pages.

With all of that true hate to be concerned about, one non-governmental representative at the Paris meeting argued that evangelical Christian sites that reach out to Jews in an effort to bring them to Christ were anti-Semitic and should be banned from the Internet under hate speech restrictions. More incredibly, when the Russian delegation had its turn to speak, it identified only two Web pages as promoting hate: those run by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Hare Krishnas. The argument was that both of these groups purported to set forth "the truth." According to the Russians, anyone who claimed to know and set forth the truth was necessarily engaged in hate speech.

Links

• John Lennonism
• "The Atrocities of Theism and Atheism Compared."
• Power Kills, "20th Century Democide."