March 15, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

RELIGION IS LIKE AN ONION

This commentary makes me think of religion being like an onion. You peel away layers to get to different degrees of belief. When you get to the very center you arrive at the fundamentalist fanatics who believe they and they alone know God's will, and that they are authorized to do anything to do his will. That includes starting wars, torturing people, bombing abortion clinics, subjugating women, persecuting gays, and ignoring global climate change. I don't know how anyone could so something as simple as watch Inherit the Wind and not have profound doubts about the Bible and other religious texts. This article by Sam Harris is at www.latimes.com:

The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.

Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.

Outside this sphere of maniacs, one finds millions more who share their views but lack their zeal. Beyond them, one encounters pious multitudes who respect the beliefs of their more deranged brethren but who disagree with them on small points of doctrine — of course the world is going to end in glory and Jesus will appear in the sky like a superhero, but we can't be sure it will happen in our lifetime.