Do you respect Muslims?

Response Part 2: (I recall when I started to write my Bar-Mitzvah speech, my rabbi sat down with me, and the first thing he said was, "Look, let's be honest. The Adam and Eve story was made up as an excuse to justify men's dominance over women.") That’s nice. Glad to hear it. (Think of a hypothetical dead religion, devoid entirely of followers. It's not a religion. It's just a book. A book is just a book. Without anyone following it, you can't really condone the effects of the religion. None exist. ) Indeed, and it is my hope that someday we will see all religions as various mythologies that mark the passage of humanity through various phases of understanding. I hope that people will put aside the superstition and “belief” in mythology books. For me, Greek mythology, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bible are all in the same category. It’s all mythology; it’s all just books. And, each mythology has some measure of truth and morality. A broad perusal of sacred (or even classic) text will reveal that there are a few good ideas in the human collective consciousness. There are some principles that appear universally, and most religions have hit on at least two or three. Religion documents, therefore, contain a record of the evolution of human morality. Religion is our first attempt at understanding our place in the universe. We fail today when we accept these ancient conjectures without question, and apply them selectively or inappropriately to today’s problems. (Religion is made up of people, and you can only judge a religion by the actions of those people.) No, I reserve the right to judge a religion based on its text, its tenants, its dogma, rules, and ideology. For it is the ideology that is the most dangerous part. An excellent quote on this from Stephen Fry: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -Steven Weinberg Some of the worst atrocity in human history was committed in the names of gods, or religion. People are easily manipulated by words/books/ideology/religion. There is an excellent book called “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond. In one chapter he compares the different mindsets of the indigenous natives and the Spaniards. He teases out the enormous divergence in each group’s orientation towards war. The natives understood war for control over local resources, food, hunting areas, slaves, or tribal powers. They sacrificed humans to their gods, ceremonially, and for food – but they could in no way conceive of the power that Catholicism held over the world, what a ‘crusade’ meant, and what it would mean for the future of their civilization. When people are willing to die, by the thousands, in the name of their god or religion, we have something far more insidious than a simple battle over resources or husbandry. The power of religion to compel people to commit atrocity is as real today as it ever was. Examples abound. In fact, I would say that religious Reformation is a surgery on the ideas themselves, an attempt to ‘fix’ broken ideology. Philosophy is the tool best applied when religious scholars decide to deconstruct the more archaic and barbaric parts of their sacred texts. Reformations are great examples of an attempt to fish ‘the baby out of the proverbial bathwater.’ So surely, you cannot claim that a religion may only be judged by the actions of its people. Why them would reform of the foundational texts be necessary? (Furthermore, you can only judge by the actions of the people in the status quo; looking to past events as justification lacks relevance in the modern day, considering the vastly different role religion has come to play in every day life over the past century or so.) No, again I must disagree. I will not abdicate my right to morally evaluate people and ideas throughout the course of history. I absolutely claim the moral ground to stand in my present moment and judge human endeavor thus far. I do not accept “moral relativism” – this obnoxious idea each culture is moral or right ‘in its own way or time.’ The Spaniards slaughtered, raped and destroyed two continents of people in the name of their god and religion. I blame the Spaniards, but even more I blame the religion for giving them the ability to justify their actions, and assuage their guilt with a bunch of religiosity. No amount of ritual, architecture, art or other forms of pomp and circumstance can make their actions excusable. By succumbing to moral relativism we give up our right to say that some acts are wrong, all the time, for all people. We give up our right to be moral agents with an understanding of right and wrong. The enslavement of Africans by white landowners in America was wrong, as was the extermination of Jews by Germans. Wrongs committed in the past, currently, or in the future, are all still wrongs. No one gets a pass for having done it before we officially declared it wrong. The judges at the Nuremburg trials rejected this defense, when the Nazis claimed that they had not broken any written, existing law by the systematic extermination of their Jewish population, they weren’t lying. There was no Declaration of Universal Human Rights; there was no Hague Court for crimes of their scale. Yet the judges did not accept this defense, because even without a written, ratified, global law, everyone agreed – They should have known better. History is very relevant to the modern day, and while the role of religion in everyday life has changed somewhat; the aim of most religions remains the same: to thrive, to spread, to grow the congregation, and promote their ideology. Additionally, some congregations try to claim special rights for their members, and in some of the worst cases they actively proselytize and convert. This kind of metaphysical poaching is widespread. (Because if no-one follows the rule that "touching a chameleon makes one unclean (a legitimate excerpt from Leviticus)" anyway, then you can''t possibly use it to weigh against the religion. You have no impact, so who cares?) It matters little if the document is seen as a mythology, a book of old stories; however, if people treat it as a divinely created, infallible document – one which an be interpreted in almost any way – then the killing can begin in earnest. This is why there are holy wars. (Obviously this does not apply universally to these outdated rules. You still hear about someone in some third-world nation being stoned for adultery every once in a while.) “someone in some third-world nation” – Are you implying that third-world nations don’t count? A few women getting stoned to death here and there isn’t enough to indict religion as a whole. Okay – but then how many is? When does the tally begin? When do we start counting the deaths by religion? And when do religions start to take responsibility for the violence they engender? The Crusades, The Inquisition, the burning of witches…..no religion ever wants to accept their role in these atrocities. Iit’s always the ‘other’ guy who does these horrific things for religion: the radical, the crazy, the unreformed, misunderstood, corrupted, outdated, wrong version of the ‘true divine’ teachings. This denial is unbecoming when repeated by each and every religion about the others, ad nausea. The amount of contrivance required to prop up these burgeoning religious claims begin to look ridiculous to a free thinker. (But generally, you have the right target, but the wrong arrows. Fire at a religion using tangible negative impacts, not by throwing around rules that no-one adheres to anyway.) For me, the negative impacts of religion outweigh the positives. Any amount of war, killing or torture in the name of religion is enough to ruin it for me. No amount of pretending to be good can dissolve the centuries of wrong perpetrated on human beings in the name of religion. It is a dangerous tool for war, in that it endows its believers with a mechanism for discharging guilt, it offer vicarious redemption. If you have a means for discharging guilt then you can more easily carry out unforgivable acts. If you have a rationale to justify killing, then doing so will become that much easier. Religion is a perfect tool for war. If you believe that your religion sets you apart or above others who are different, then you are already engaging in the first step. You are buying into the “us v. them” mentality that is bred by religious ideology. You are already making the necessary excuses. Israel, for all its money and intelligentsia cannot stop the violence. Killing for god continues on both sides, every minute of every day, and not just there, in places all over the world. The fact that religious war happens less in more affluent, secular societies says more about the benefits of secularism than the inherent goodness of religion.