Once in a while, my atheism takes on a rather militant hue. The trigger could be anything - a news item, an argument with my dear husband, the colour of the sky on a particular day. The trigger that week was that excrescence of a movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Ugh. I wish I could smack the scum who made it.
But that is neither here nor there. Upon watching TEoER I was afire with a militant energy. I wanted to kill, tear, destroy, blow up... So I decided to read some religious books.
It just fed my fire and gave me ammunition.
Now, Naveen tells me that what I've done is 'obvious', that all religions give you mixed messages anyway, and the real issue is how to balance religion with the rest of our lives. An excellent perspective. Yet I wonder if he's thought about what he's saying.
Most of the mixed messages that religions give are factual in nature - one book of the Bible says that David was directed by God to go do some slaughtering and another book says it was actually Satan who directed him (and God punished David for listening to Satan by... slaughtering more people). Every time someone asks Jesus how we can be saved, the answer is different: it varies from "Just have faith that I am your Saviour" (I don't care if you kill people) to "Follow the 4th, 6th and 10th commandments" (I just threw in the others for fun) to "You gotta be poor, no rich people ever get into heaven" (I don't care if you're a lazy fart... who kills people). And so on. Contradictory facts are everywhere, contradictory principles are very rare.
When it comes to unbelievers, though, there are no mixed messages, and that's my point: the "Jealous God" religions - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - are inherently intolerant of infidels. The extent to which people of these religions tolerate people of other religions, therefore, is the extent to which they choose to ignore their religion.
What does a person mean when he says, "balancing religion with real life"? It means, "check religious principles against your own common sense, use those that work and discard the others" - doesn't it? Sounds to me as if religion is obsolete.
Speech Is Golden points me to the similarities between religions:
[D]oes it not sound very familiar when Allah says it is my hand that slews (Doesn't Krishna say something very very similar to Arjuna)
Actually, in this particular case, the two religions aren't saying the same thing: Allah commands Muslims to kill all the infidels (for no other reason than not believing in Allah), and absolves them of the responsibility for the killing by saying "it is my hand that slew the infidel; you get 72 virgins as a reward". Krishna's message to Arjuna is, "you were born a Kshatriya, it's your duty to fight against injustice. If you kill your idiotic cousins, you're going to have to pay the price for it, sure; but if you don't kill them, you're going to have to pay the price for not doing your duty. So you might as well do your damn job, because it serves the greater good (the greater good being God)." Both messages are flawed, but to different degrees; and the two messages are very different.
However, the point that there are similarities between religions is a good one. But, see, all that tells me is that there is such a thing as a universal moral code - and once again, that makes religion absolutely irrelevant. We're smart enough to recognise universal moral principles. Why do we need to invent religious dogma and fictitious supercreatures to enforce them?
Naveen, Vikram and Speech is Golden are right: a long time ago, these religions had evolutionary (social) value. They served a purpose; they are still useful as the history of philosophy. Moral codes are essential to our society, but not religion. Moving on from our archaic religions is of evolutionary value today.
It's high time we killed God off.
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