How religion has let society down

In 1977, a guy named Stewart Parnell founded a company called Peanut Corporation of America. Parnell built the company into an enormous supplier of peanut butter, primarily for candy makers, that eventually was responsible for about two and a half percent of the nation’s total production of peanut butter. He had a very simple strategy for business success: underbid everyone.

Peanut Corporation of America made tens of millions of dollars a year but ran on a shoestring budget. In fact, Parnell Was so cheap that some of his processing plants were unlicensed and unregistered; he ran a plant in Plainview, Texas, that the state government didn’t even know existed.

Which is an awesome money-saver, if you think about it. You can’t be forced to comply with inspection results if the facility is never inspected; you don’t have to worry about FDA regulations or compliance with OSHA mandates if the FDA and OSHA don’t know you exist.

This is actually a post about religion, and not, say, Libertarianism. Hang on, I’m getting there.

Anyway, as you might expect, this approach to business had a predictable result. In 2008, nearly 700 people had food poisoning from peanut butter produced by Peanut Corporation of America, and nine of them died. A massive recall was launched, the government started inspecting Peanut Corporation of America facilities and discovered a horror show (peanut butter that was shipped even though the company knew it was contaminated with salmonella, leaky plant roofs, air conditioning systems that sucked bird shit from the roofs and sprayed it over vats of peanuts, that sort of thing. The plants were closed by the government, the company went bankrupt, and there are still Federal investigations pending against our hero, Mr. Parnell.

All this did lead to one humorous moment, when he was called to testify before Congress and took the fifth when he was asked to eat some of his own peanut butter. Mad lulz aside, though, it seems Mr. Parnell is a very bad man.


He’s also a very bad man with an unimpeachable religious pedigree. He belongs to that particular school of Evangelical Christianity prominent in his home town of Lynchburg, VA. His sister was married to a relative of Jerry Falwell’s family, and he himself was a conservative Southern Baptist.

Now, one of the things we hear about religion is that religion serves a valuable social function by providing a framework of morality. Morals, the religious say, are codes of conduct created and sanctioned by God to direct human behavior toward one another, and indeed some religions claim some morals which are, in fact, good ways to behave.

The problem is that the moral values promoted by religions, especially conservative religions, tend not to focus very heavily on things like “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”–a value claimed by many religious tradition but not really advocated very strongly by most of them. Instead, the moral values are more often, it seems to me, promoted as arbitrary lists of things you’re supposed to do and things you’re not supposed to do, with no coherent underlying logic to them.

And it seems a lot of them are about sex.


When you look at the major organized religions in the United States, and examine their moral teachings closely, you can’t help but come away with the notion that God is nothing short of obsessed with what goes on with our crotches.

This obsession with sex extends to social ideas about morality. If someone tells you “I have strong morals” or “I believe in good moral values,” you can be pretty sure that what they’re talking about is sex.

And they’re probably not going to follow those statements up with “I believe that people should do unto others as they would have done unto them,” either. For all the fact that religion likes to give lip service to notions like that, I doubt many “moral values” folks actually say “That’s why I believe in people making their own choices about who they have sex with, because I want them to let me make my own choices about these things.”

There are all sorts of reasons why institutional power structures are obsessed with sex. It’s a great hook; control people’s basic drives and you control the people. It’s an inevitable outcome of the way our brains work; fMRI studies have suggested that people who hold socially conservative ideas are strongly motivated by feelings of disgust, and tend, by and large, to believe that if something makes them feel an emotion of disgust, their emotional response is proof that the thing itself must be inherently wrong. It’s a characteristic of the way we form social bonds; we are strongly driven, as part of our evolutionary heritage, to divide social groups into “in” groups and “out” groups, and to seek differences to delineate those groups.

And so on, and so on. None of those things is really all that interesting, I think; it’s all just part of the tedious and yucky parts of how social power structures flow, as disagreeable but inevitable in its operation as the flow of sewage through a city’s pipes, and often just as pungent.


That’s not the bit I think is important. The drab banality of institutionalized power isn’t, for me, the most disappointing thing thing about organized religion. The most disappointing thing, to me, is the way that such organizations have seized the mantle of moral authority and then utterly fumbled it, to the detriment of society as a whole.

So many religions have made such vigorous claim to the throne of moral arbitration that there are actually people who believe that without religion, a person can not be moral. People ask ridiculous questions like “Can atheists be sexually moral?” Commentators claim that without a god, a person can not have “morality in his heart;” and some people even point to the fact that the non-religious are less obsessed with sex than the religious as proof that those without religion are less moral.

But having successfully made the argument to a great many people that they and they alone can protect and promote morality, what do they do with it? That’s the part that disappoints me.

You can argue, of course, that men like Stewart Parnell are driven by greed, and would not behave in moral ways regardless of the teachings of their adopted religions. And that might be true. But the fact is, the major religious organizations tend to focus so heavily on sex as the beginning and end of morality that other lessons are let slip by the wayside.

When a person adopts the idea that morality is primarily about the goings-on in his crotch, a dangerous thing happens. That person can very easily say to himself “I m a good person; I don’t cheat on my wife, have premarital sex,lie with other men as I lie with women, or do her up the poop chute. I am a moral person; immorality is about my sexual behavior, and I keep my sexual behavior confined within the proper parameters.” And once a person says “I am a moral person,” he may stop watchdogging his decisions. He doesn’t question the moral nature of his own actions, because, after all, morality is about sex, right?

I’m not saying that religions don’t talk about the moral dimension of things besides sex. But I am saying that, by and large, so much emphasis is placed on sex that they don’t make the case for an overarching, coherent foundation or morality; they don’t argue that morality is ultimately founded on the notion that you should treat others with compassion and respect, and not make decisions which adversely affect the lives of others.

By, for example, selling them contaminated peanut butter.

And they can’t. They can’t make this case, because if they do, many of the constraints they place on sex begin to look like anomalies, arbitrary rules not founded in any sort of notion of treating others with compassion and respect.


Looked at through the lens of treating others the way they want to be treated, there is nothing immoral about, say, oral sex. Or sex with two partners, if all the people involved are on board with that. Or masturbation. These things don’t fit the notion of morality as a framework that prevents people from doing harmful things to one another; they aren’t harmful.

In fact, if you assume that framework for moral choices, prohibitions on masturbation begin to look downright stupid, and a god who would send someone to an eternity of suffering simpy for touching herself begins to look vicious and petty.

Especially if you accept that it was that very same god who put our wibbly bits within arm’s reach in the first place.


Morality is not about memorizing a set of rules. It is, when it is most properly applied, an entire system of ethical decision-making, one that places a watchdog within us which examines our choices in light of the way those choices affect others. It is an internally consistent set of checks and balances, which reminds us to place ourselves and our actions within a larger context and take responsibility for the effects of those actions on other people.

Masturbating isn’t immoral. Poisoning seven hundred people with products that you know to be contaminated because you can make money by doing it, is. By creating the perception that morality is first and foremost about sex, the large religious institutions have consolidated social power and, in the act, destroyed their own moral credibility. They have failed to teach morality as more than a list of rules about who to fuck, when to fuck, and in what position to fuck, and in so doing they have exerted a harmful influence on society as a whole. The Catholic church, for instances, focuses so heavily on ideas of sex that they condemn the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa, a moral teaching which helps promote the very human misery and suffering they then spend millions to try to relieve. Conservative Islamic teachings on sex are so repressive that to a Fundamentalist Muslim, paradise is a seedy gang bang out of a 70s porn flick, where the pious can look forward to the awkward ministrations of 72 sexually inexperienced women.

This weird, obsessive-compulsive fixation on sex will have to end before any religious institution can really become the moral authority they all claim to be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some peanut butter eggs to eat. I hope the company that made them isn’t owned by a conservative Christian.

92 thoughts on “How religion has let society down

  1. This seems to be a post about Christianity and Islam, not religion?

    Or do I just never hear about the Buddhists / Hindu / etc. sexual obsession because they’re a minority here in the US? (The disadvantage of them being a minority is they seem enlightened; after all, I’m comparing vague statements of principle to the actual practice of other religions)

    —-

    I do also have to argue that the Unitarian Universalists are the coolest religion I have ever run in to, and sex is a large part of that. As part of our youth group we were forced to go to a sex shop and buy condoms, etc. 🙂

    • It’s a post about how the dominant religious traditions in the US have failed to equip people to make educated moral choices. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Unitarianism have, overall, only a very minor impact on American society.

      Though to be fair, fundamentalist Hinduism is so sex-obsessed that it makes Southern Baptists look downright permissive. Conservative Hindus condemn across the board any pre-marital sexual contact at all (which includes kissing or holding hands), any nontraditional family structures, and any homosexuality, and regards masturbation as an “impure act.” Indian society has prohibited sex education, and conservative Hindu countries like Nepal have restrictions on women leaving the house that are nearly as prescriptive as those of Muslin societies. The days when Hindu societies produced the Kama Sutra and celebrated sexuality with engravings on temple walls are pretty much over.

    • My best friend in high school was beaten and sexually molested her entire adolescence. She and her family were Hindu and claimed ultimate morality based on their religion, which was all about justifying the subjugation of women & that men were not responsible for their sexual actions because it was women who led them astray.

      When I found out, I convinced her to go to the authorities. They investigated, warned him not to leave the area, and he promptly booked passage to Canada where his brothers lived and where he held dual citizenship. His brothers held the same “values” as he and had contributed to the protection and abuse of my friend in the past.

      He was eventually convicted, and her mom spent the next year screaming at her (I could hear her in the background every time we spoke on the phone) about how it was my friend who “broke up the family” and how she was a slut and a harlot for tempting her father in the first place. It was so bad, she opted for foster care rather than continue to live with her own mother while her father was in jail.

      This is another example of ‘s general point, which is the religion is so obsessed about rules about sex that they seem to have forgotten to teach their followers about any methods or reasons for being a “moral” person. His religion didn’t “make him do it”, his religion gave him a free pass to do it. Most people have a sense of empathy, and have “moral values”, and merely cherry pick those passages in their religious texts that support their sense of ethics. So when someone is *actually* ethical, it’s *in spite* of their religion, not because of it. But the religious framework of obsession with sex, coupled with belief in the authority figure and unquestioning obedience, gives the unethical among us a place to flourish.

      • “Most people have a sense of empathy, and have “moral values”, and merely cherry pick those passages in their religious texts that support their sense of ethics. So when someone is *actually* ethical, it’s *in spite* of their religion, not because of it. “

        I’ve been meaning to say a big fat “THIS!!!” to this since I read it. Thanks!

    • Thanks for you post – every time I see someone argue that because this or that flavor of organized, power-structured, dominant religion in the U.S. has done something despicable, “religion” is bad, I feel an urge to stand up and say, “What did we Wiccans ever do to you?”

      I see tacit’s response being “it’s about dominant religious traditions letting us down”… well, I really, really wish atheists as a whole would stop using “religion” as a short-hand for “dominant religious traditions.”

      I say this with much love for tacit’s posts and all genuine respect.

  2. This seems to be a post about Christianity and Islam, not religion?

    Or do I just never hear about the Buddhists / Hindu / etc. sexual obsession because they’re a minority here in the US? (The disadvantage of them being a minority is they seem enlightened; after all, I’m comparing vague statements of principle to the actual practice of other religions)

    —-

    I do also have to argue that the Unitarian Universalists are the coolest religion I have ever run in to, and sex is a large part of that. As part of our youth group we were forced to go to a sex shop and buy condoms, etc. 🙂

  3. It’s a post about how the dominant religious traditions in the US have failed to equip people to make educated moral choices. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Unitarianism have, overall, only a very minor impact on American society.

    Though to be fair, fundamentalist Hinduism is so sex-obsessed that it makes Southern Baptists look downright permissive. Conservative Hindus condemn across the board any pre-marital sexual contact at all (which includes kissing or holding hands), any nontraditional family structures, and any homosexuality, and regards masturbation as an “impure act.” Indian society has prohibited sex education, and conservative Hindu countries like Nepal have restrictions on women leaving the house that are nearly as prescriptive as those of Muslin societies. The days when Hindu societies produced the Kama Sutra and celebrated sexuality with engravings on temple walls are pretty much over.

  4. Spread Christianity throughout the world…..

    I have been telling people the following, “I may be Born Again but I’m not [too] crazy. Jesus can perform miracles but he won’t pay your bills, go to work for you, or raise your kids for you. When He can do that then that means He’s pretty good at what he does.”

    If I could spread Jesus throughout the land, I would– except I know that most of my friends don’t care and I think that finding Jesus has to happen in its own time natually– it took me surviving a sex ritual cult, flipping back from agnotism to paganism and then finding out that the cult I was apart of was full of shit and brainwashing me to realize that my spiritual outlet needed to come from elsewhere. Finding Jesus happened on a fall day and it was completely unexpected. The positive changes that have happened in my life have been directly in part because of my faith in the Lord.

    Is Christianity for everyone? No, not at all. It works for me, but I understand it does not float everyone’s boat. And that is fine.

    I too am struggling with a lot things. I am Christian but I also struggle with parts of my sexuality (kink, leather, etc.) that would def. be considered ironic with the messages that Christianity teaches. I asked my pastor, “So,I can still be a boot licking sado masochist and Jesus will still love me?” and she paused and said, “yes, He will still love you.” So I have to believe that His love is unconditional no matter what and that with unconditional love anything is possible.

  5. Spread Christianity throughout the world…..

    I have been telling people the following, “I may be Born Again but I’m not [too] crazy. Jesus can perform miracles but he won’t pay your bills, go to work for you, or raise your kids for you. When He can do that then that means He’s pretty good at what he does.”

    If I could spread Jesus throughout the land, I would– except I know that most of my friends don’t care and I think that finding Jesus has to happen in its own time natually– it took me surviving a sex ritual cult, flipping back from agnotism to paganism and then finding out that the cult I was apart of was full of shit and brainwashing me to realize that my spiritual outlet needed to come from elsewhere. Finding Jesus happened on a fall day and it was completely unexpected. The positive changes that have happened in my life have been directly in part because of my faith in the Lord.

    Is Christianity for everyone? No, not at all. It works for me, but I understand it does not float everyone’s boat. And that is fine.

    I too am struggling with a lot things. I am Christian but I also struggle with parts of my sexuality (kink, leather, etc.) that would def. be considered ironic with the messages that Christianity teaches. I asked my pastor, “So,I can still be a boot licking sado masochist and Jesus will still love me?” and she paused and said, “yes, He will still love you.” So I have to believe that His love is unconditional no matter what and that with unconditional love anything is possible.

  6. I really enjoyed this post. It sums up a lot of how I look at religion. The obsession with sexuality is a big part of why I left in the first place, although it isn’t why I’m not religious now (now it’s because I understand more science).

    I think “don’t poison people” is a pretty basic moral concept – one this atheist can get behind!

  7. I really enjoyed this post. It sums up a lot of how I look at religion. The obsession with sexuality is a big part of why I left in the first place, although it isn’t why I’m not religious now (now it’s because I understand more science).

    I think “don’t poison people” is a pretty basic moral concept – one this atheist can get behind!

  8. The Tanach, the “Old Testament”, is where most of the anti-sex laws originate. They were probably devised to: a) keep the ancient Israelites from imitating neighboring Pagans and b) make sure there were lots and lots of offspring so the tribe would survive. Both reasons are out of date. And I find it ironic that all the anti-sex-obsessed fundies ignore almost all the other prohibitions that are in the text, and parts of the ten commandments. I grew up Jewish, and honoring the Sabbath was very important. Almost all of these sex-obsessed idiots ignore the Sabbath rules, whether they chose Sunday or Saturday, not to mention ignoring many of the other prohibitions, like ones about not mixing two kinds of fiber in cloth.

    • The Catholics consider having lots and lots of babies a moral duty, so to them at least the notion of having lots of offspring isn’t out of date. I attended a Catholic wedding once, and found the whole event a bit tawdry and more than a little creepy; the priest emphasized MANY times how important it was for the newlywed couple to have many children and raise them all Catholic.

      • On behalf of my Catholic family (though I do not now share their religion), consider saying, “Most Catholics.” The emphasis on As Many Offspring As Possible isn’t nearly as universal these days as you might think. Also, all the Catholics I know would have agreed with you about the creeptasticness about the wedding you attended.

        • What’s also interesting is the implications for the church’s real moral authority, when so many people who otherwise consider themselves “good Catholics” find that to live in today’s reality they must ignore the church’s teachings on contraception. I did too, when I was Catholic. As a regular contraceptive user who’s never wanted any children, I found that I feel more in integrity if I don’t profess that faith (which is sad). But from the full congregations at my local Catholic church and the length of the Communion lines, many people’s mileage obviously varies.

  9. The Tanach, the “Old Testament”, is where most of the anti-sex laws originate. They were probably devised to: a) keep the ancient Israelites from imitating neighboring Pagans and b) make sure there were lots and lots of offspring so the tribe would survive. Both reasons are out of date. And I find it ironic that all the anti-sex-obsessed fundies ignore almost all the other prohibitions that are in the text, and parts of the ten commandments. I grew up Jewish, and honoring the Sabbath was very important. Almost all of these sex-obsessed idiots ignore the Sabbath rules, whether they chose Sunday or Saturday, not to mention ignoring many of the other prohibitions, like ones about not mixing two kinds of fiber in cloth.

  10. Well said. And that said, given my recent cessation of breastfeeding, I found this typo quite amusing — “morality is ultimately founded on the notion that you should teat others with compassion and respect”.

    I’ve *always* teated others with compassion and respect, and even passion and wild abandon. 😛

  11. Well said. And that said, given my recent cessation of breastfeeding, I found this typo quite amusing — “morality is ultimately founded on the notion that you should teat others with compassion and respect”.

    I’ve *always* teated others with compassion and respect, and even passion and wild abandon. 😛

  12. …and thanks to Mr. Parnell, those of us with impeccable food safety programs and records have had to re-double our efforts and work even harder to keep the FDA off our backs.

    I know this is kind of off the subject for this post, but folks like Mr. Parnell are really fucking it up for companies like mine who are trying really hard to keep the food product we sell safe for human consumption.

    I’m a food safety manager…and I’m polyamorous and love sex.

    Guess this makes me the worse person though…

  13. …and thanks to Mr. Parnell, those of us with impeccable food safety programs and records have had to re-double our efforts and work even harder to keep the FDA off our backs.

    I know this is kind of off the subject for this post, but folks like Mr. Parnell are really fucking it up for companies like mine who are trying really hard to keep the food product we sell safe for human consumption.

    I’m a food safety manager…and I’m polyamorous and love sex.

    Guess this makes me the worse person though…

  14. I am not religious and I never was. We had religion classes once a week since the first grade over here and until the 12th and even then I argued all the time with the priest, telling him why things didn’t make sense and why I would not accept a god like that. Poor man, he was begging me not to ask anymore and asking me why a 7 year old is so curious and can’t just accept other people’s judgements. And of course, even later, when I had teachers (female), they never had answers for what I argued. Me being as passionate as I am about this I felt a bit like choking the teacher who said that women who abort are strapped on a cliff in the afterlife and huge eagles eat them forever, haha. Very Prometheus like, haha. I almost got expelled that time.

    No one in my close family was/is either. Where I live, orthodoxism is the official religion, but mostly ladies over 60 and a few men around the same ages go. The priests say the things in church in the form of chants and they’re rather unintelligible. From what I know, they tell biblical stories that have a moral in the end and pray every now and then. Over here, people who say stupid things like “girls who like oral are sluts” don’t really say them because of religion, but because they don’t pass stuff through the mental filters. If asked, they can’t give any real reasons why giving oral is bad. And what I wish upon them is that they never, ever get oral again 😉

    I am not familiar with the doctrines of Parnell’s religion, but I’d think it states somewhere it’s wrong to kill others and to lie. Do they use the 10 commandments? If so, then it’s hard for me to think Parnell believed that what he was doing was right. The laws are also clearly against killing innocents and doing what he did. Unless he was mentally ill and that would make sense, since he lives his life according to what he *thinks* a being in the sky wants and since he seems to have thought he could get away with this.

    I, too, had someone argue with me that morality and compassion can’t exists outside belief in a god and that it’s inherited through religion. He also said that if people didn’t believe in god, they would commit crimes. I find that pretty crazy, to be honest. Basically implying that if he wouldn’t believe there was a god who would send him to hell if he killed, he would do it. “Oddly”, I never ever refrained from doing something because of god. In fact, I never took any god in consideration while deciding to do anything, not even when I was very, very little. And I could not do something vile, haha. And, by the way, is touching yourself worth an eternity in hell? Oh, yes, yes it is. I never liked the way heaven was presented. Sounds boring to me. No sex, no life…besides, being alive is so much fun, I could never give it up to be “an angel”. But that is another debate.

    I think compassion might be something we are born with or not, because it seems to me that religious lunatics can’t be taught that having any kind of consensual sex is perfectly fine. I always wondered about this. How can people live their lives according to what they think someone invisible says? How did this even start? Why don’t they use their logic filters? Do they have them? Does one get born with logic, compassion and so on? (What is the meaning of life, why are there so many species of everything and so on. Just kidding. Though I have been thinking a lot about the second question these days…) I’d like being pointed towards interesting reads in relation to these questions, if you know them.

    • Logic is learned, although some people learn it easier than others.

      Sure, Parnell’s religion covers things like don’t kill and don’t lie, but said that the obsession with sex is so strong that everything else gets overlooked and sex becomes the primary defining character, leaving people to pick and choose which parts of their text they want to follow, and conveniently ignoring everything else.

      • How do people learn it, though? And then how come people raised in religious families can be non religious from a very young age? But my main curiosity is why most of the religious fanatics seem to fail at being logic and could they really learn it?

        I do agree with that, these religions in the USA seem to focus on sex in a strangely obsessive way. I was only saying it’s hard for me to believe that Parnell thought that what he was doing is a good and kind thing to do, religiously or legally.

        I wish I could see how a religion free alternative universe would be. If I can’t have that, I wish I could experience the disappearance of religions during my lifetime. That way, I’ll probably live forever too, so only benefits 🙂

        • Well, I learned the rules of logic in logic class, and I continue to learn it by studying the Logical Fallacies available in several places on the internet and listening to other people who are good at logic.

          Like any learned skill, some people have a natural aptitude for it, and others have a harder time learning it, and not using that skill can cause it to deteriorate.

          As for how come some people are religious and some aren’t, there are lots of different possible reasons for that. One is that hyper-religiosity is actually a brain condition. They have located a section in the brain that, when either stimulated or suppressed (I forget which), causes the individual to become hyper-religious. Some people are just more prone to religiosity than others naturally.

          Another is that many people turn away from religion, not because of logic, but because of other reasons. Some people leave or question their upbringing or their family because of abuse. Some because of exposure to other ideas. There are many non-religious people who are not non-religious because of any logical consideration of the questions. Being non-religious does not automatically make someone logical or rational.

          There are quite a few books on why people believe the things they do and why it’s so hard to get people to change their minds – I could not possibly do the topic justice in a blog comment. Check out Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Know What Isn’t So, for starters. They cover a lot of the questions you’re asking.

          There are plenty of European nations, or areas in Europe that are, more or less, secular, to give you a starting place for what a religion-free universe would look like. But the fact is that humans basically evolved to believe in stuff like religion and learning logic and critical thinking is not “natural”, it’s something we have to work at. That’s what the scientific method does, btw, corrects for our natural tendencies towards logical fallacies and biases and personal beliefs.

          • I had logic classes too and I loved them, but at the time I didn’t see them as learning a skill, necessarily, like playing guitar, so thanks for these answers,they are worth thinking about. I think, though, that logic classes need to be coupled with working on understanding and that the whole process is very complex. Like human beings, after all.

            I have a feeling that the book you recommended me will be really interesting to read, thanks!

            I’d like going in time and seeing the very first person who started religious behaviours and see how he convinced the others. It’s strange that it is so widespread and after all this time it’s not defunct. I’m having one of those (often, in my case) moments when I feel like I’m seeing everything for the first time and I have about a billion of questions on everything. It’s so complex and big and mysterious and amazing…it all, haha. 🙂

    • I am not familiar with the doctrines of Parnell’s religion, but I’d think it states somewhere it’s wrong to kill others and to lie. Do they use the 10 commandments?

      They do, but it seems to me only as a sort of idol. Conservative Evangelicals talk about the importance of the Ten Commandments but generally don’t seem to stress very much about what they are or what they mean (and nobody pays any attention to the one about “thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or on earth below,” which would specifically forbid all representational art. Most Christians add a “…but it’s OK if you don’t worship it” clause, which isn’t in the commandment.

      The real meat of the religious teachings of Evangelical churches, is sex, sex, sex. Killing is OK, as long as it’s terrrerrerrrists or Arabs or foreigners. Lying is OK as long as it’s in the service of killing terrrerrerrrists or Arabs or foreigners.

      I think that’s an inevitable consequence of the view that morality is an arbitrary list of rules handed down from above, rather than an overarching framework of compassionate behavior; if a person doesn’t understand the foundation, but sees only a list of arbitrary and disconnected rules, it becomes easier to carve out exceptions and harder to see how the rules fit together. So if the rules include statements like “don’t kill” and “gays are bad,” that person is left with a quandry; is it OK to kill gays, or not? It’s OK to kill someone who’s trying to murder you, and murderers are bad, so it must be OK to kill bad people, right? If it’s OK to kill bad people, then the rule against killing must not apply to gays, right?

      I, too, had someone argue with me that morality and compassion can’t exists outside belief in a god and that it’s inherited through religion. He also said that if people didn’t believe in god, they would commit crimes. I find that pretty crazy, to be honest.

      It’s worse than that–it’s immoral. A code of morality that relies on the notion of punishment in order to make it stick isn’t really a code of morality at all. I think that people who believe you have to have a god in order to have morality, and that people without a god have no morality, don’t really get why morality is important in the first place.

      • I find most religious stuff ridiculous. And all religious texts seem to me very subjective and clearly made, interpreted, tweaked and so on by people according to what they wanted/needed in those times. I find this particularly funny: “for you shall worship no other god, because the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”. Or the stuff about children paying for their parents’ sins up to the 7th generation…how very petty, haha.

        I agree with you. People do seem very selective with religious requirements. And I understand what you are saying, but I don’t understand why, when noticing that so much of the stuff said is ridiculous so many people don’t question the whole religion and god deal. Instead they pick what fits them.

        I realize how fortunate I’ve been to be shielded from religion. Especially me being me, it’s a wonder I haven’t been burnt at stake, haha. The one time it interfered with my life in a direct way was when I was little, living in a secluded village. One by one, the people there started forbidding their kids to play with me and my sister because we were apparently talking too openly and weird 🙂 They actually said I was corrupting their kids and putting ideas into their heads. And I was in kindergarten, my sister 3 years younger than I was. Only our best friend, whose parents had a religion that celebrated saturdays, was running away from home to stay with us. But thankfully, in 2003, when I was 13, we moved from there.

        One of the things I dislike most about religion is that many of its followers aren’t harmless, but very dangerous. I think that feeling superior enough to feel entitled to “make justice” and punish “those in wrong” is frightening.

        But I am curious about something. We have a religious lunatic, the dangerous kind who also believes that without a god anyone would be morally free to commit crimes. One day, this human stops believing in god. Do you think he’d start doing even worse things?

        In this context, do you think that if suddenly all religious thoughts disappeared more people would commit more crimes or not? I tend to believe they wouldn’t, because most of those who would kind of already do them. But, on the other hand, I know there are many people who believe that one can’t be stopped from doing bad stuff if they don’t believe in god. Do you think there are many people who don’t commit crimes just because they believe they will go to hell if they do?

  15. I am not religious and I never was. We had religion classes once a week since the first grade over here and until the 12th and even then I argued all the time with the priest, telling him why things didn’t make sense and why I would not accept a god like that. Poor man, he was begging me not to ask anymore and asking me why a 7 year old is so curious and can’t just accept other people’s judgements. And of course, even later, when I had teachers (female), they never had answers for what I argued. Me being as passionate as I am about this I felt a bit like choking the teacher who said that women who abort are strapped on a cliff in the afterlife and huge eagles eat them forever, haha. Very Prometheus like, haha. I almost got expelled that time.

    No one in my close family was/is either. Where I live, orthodoxism is the official religion, but mostly ladies over 60 and a few men around the same ages go. The priests say the things in church in the form of chants and they’re rather unintelligible. From what I know, they tell biblical stories that have a moral in the end and pray every now and then. Over here, people who say stupid things like “girls who like oral are sluts” don’t really say them because of religion, but because they don’t pass stuff through the mental filters. If asked, they can’t give any real reasons why giving oral is bad. And what I wish upon them is that they never, ever get oral again 😉

    I am not familiar with the doctrines of Parnell’s religion, but I’d think it states somewhere it’s wrong to kill others and to lie. Do they use the 10 commandments? If so, then it’s hard for me to think Parnell believed that what he was doing was right. The laws are also clearly against killing innocents and doing what he did. Unless he was mentally ill and that would make sense, since he lives his life according to what he *thinks* a being in the sky wants and since he seems to have thought he could get away with this.

    I, too, had someone argue with me that morality and compassion can’t exists outside belief in a god and that it’s inherited through religion. He also said that if people didn’t believe in god, they would commit crimes. I find that pretty crazy, to be honest. Basically implying that if he wouldn’t believe there was a god who would send him to hell if he killed, he would do it. “Oddly”, I never ever refrained from doing something because of god. In fact, I never took any god in consideration while deciding to do anything, not even when I was very, very little. And I could not do something vile, haha. And, by the way, is touching yourself worth an eternity in hell? Oh, yes, yes it is. I never liked the way heaven was presented. Sounds boring to me. No sex, no life…besides, being alive is so much fun, I could never give it up to be “an angel”. But that is another debate.

    I think compassion might be something we are born with or not, because it seems to me that religious lunatics can’t be taught that having any kind of consensual sex is perfectly fine. I always wondered about this. How can people live their lives according to what they think someone invisible says? How did this even start? Why don’t they use their logic filters? Do they have them? Does one get born with logic, compassion and so on? (What is the meaning of life, why are there so many species of everything and so on. Just kidding. Though I have been thinking a lot about the second question these days…) I’d like being pointed towards interesting reads in relation to these questions, if you know them.

  16. The religious right are often neither.

    And on a funny note as I’m sitting in our university center about to head to class someone comes over and lays a leaflet down next to me for one of the campus christian groups.

  17. The religious right are often neither.

    And on a funny note as I’m sitting in our university center about to head to class someone comes over and lays a leaflet down next to me for one of the campus christian groups.

  18. Whatever higher power may or may not be out there, religion is a most human creation. So, like all human endeavors, it is what we make it. People can use it as a tool to seek enlightenment or help others, or as a weapon to enrich themselves and beat up on others in one way or another. Sometimes a little bit of both, and a whole lot of muddy-in-the-middle stuff, too.

    What is a shame is the level of privilege some religion gets in this country, as you’ve described so well. The unquestioning presumption that Certain Kind of Religious=Moral, and the related implication that Anything Else=Less Moral or Immoral, make me want to spit teeth.

  19. Whatever higher power may or may not be out there, religion is a most human creation. So, like all human endeavors, it is what we make it. People can use it as a tool to seek enlightenment or help others, or as a weapon to enrich themselves and beat up on others in one way or another. Sometimes a little bit of both, and a whole lot of muddy-in-the-middle stuff, too.

    What is a shame is the level of privilege some religion gets in this country, as you’ve described so well. The unquestioning presumption that Certain Kind of Religious=Moral, and the related implication that Anything Else=Less Moral or Immoral, make me want to spit teeth.

  20. I hear you and mostly agree.

    Something to know, though: the 72 virgins thing? That’s not actually any kind of thing in Islam — it’s vaguely mentioned in some texts, but isn’t really a big part of what Muslims talk about when they talk about the afterlife.

    For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/72_Virgins

    It’s just a repulsive enough idea that it became very popular among anti-Arab conservatives in the U.S.

    (I’m not saying that there aren’t a huge number of problems with fundamental Islam and sexuality. From horrible treatment of women in Afghanistan and Saudi, to heart-wrenchingly terrible acid-splashing attacks in Muslim communities in Bangladesh, to rising persecution of homosexuals in Egypt, to increasing hostility even in fairly tolerant countries like Lebanon, there’s a big problem that requires a lot of social change. But the 72 virgins thing is more a Western smear attempt than an actual doctrine of Islam.)

  21. I hear you and mostly agree.

    Something to know, though: the 72 virgins thing? That’s not actually any kind of thing in Islam — it’s vaguely mentioned in some texts, but isn’t really a big part of what Muslims talk about when they talk about the afterlife.

    For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/72_Virgins

    It’s just a repulsive enough idea that it became very popular among anti-Arab conservatives in the U.S.

    (I’m not saying that there aren’t a huge number of problems with fundamental Islam and sexuality. From horrible treatment of women in Afghanistan and Saudi, to heart-wrenchingly terrible acid-splashing attacks in Muslim communities in Bangladesh, to rising persecution of homosexuals in Egypt, to increasing hostility even in fairly tolerant countries like Lebanon, there’s a big problem that requires a lot of social change. But the 72 virgins thing is more a Western smear attempt than an actual doctrine of Islam.)

  22. My best friend in high school was beaten and sexually molested her entire adolescence. She and her family were Hindu and claimed ultimate morality based on their religion, which was all about justifying the subjugation of women & that men were not responsible for their sexual actions because it was women who led them astray.

    When I found out, I convinced her to go to the authorities. They investigated, warned him not to leave the area, and he promptly booked passage to Canada where his brothers lived and where he held dual citizenship. His brothers held the same “values” as he and had contributed to the protection and abuse of my friend in the past.

    He was eventually convicted, and her mom spent the next year screaming at her (I could hear her in the background every time we spoke on the phone) about how it was my friend who “broke up the family” and how she was a slut and a harlot for tempting her father in the first place. It was so bad, she opted for foster care rather than continue to live with her own mother while her father was in jail.

    This is another example of ‘s general point, which is the religion is so obsessed about rules about sex that they seem to have forgotten to teach their followers about any methods or reasons for being a “moral” person. His religion didn’t “make him do it”, his religion gave him a free pass to do it. Most people have a sense of empathy, and have “moral values”, and merely cherry pick those passages in their religious texts that support their sense of ethics. So when someone is *actually* ethical, it’s *in spite* of their religion, not because of it. But the religious framework of obsession with sex, coupled with belief in the authority figure and unquestioning obedience, gives the unethical among us a place to flourish.

  23. Logic is learned, although some people learn it easier than others.

    Sure, Parnell’s religion covers things like don’t kill and don’t lie, but said that the obsession with sex is so strong that everything else gets overlooked and sex becomes the primary defining character, leaving people to pick and choose which parts of their text they want to follow, and conveniently ignoring everything else.

  24. How do people learn it, though? And then how come people raised in religious families can be non religious from a very young age? But my main curiosity is why most of the religious fanatics seem to fail at being logic and could they really learn it?

    I do agree with that, these religions in the USA seem to focus on sex in a strangely obsessive way. I was only saying it’s hard for me to believe that Parnell thought that what he was doing is a good and kind thing to do, religiously or legally.

    I wish I could see how a religion free alternative universe would be. If I can’t have that, I wish I could experience the disappearance of religions during my lifetime. That way, I’ll probably live forever too, so only benefits 🙂

  25. The Wife and I suffered through a joke last night with no punch line — South Park’s 200th episode. There was so much bleeping, we didn’t know what to do. And it wasn’t profanity, as we Americans define it. Oh, and one character was entirely blacked out with the word CENSORED across the black box.

    It turns out Parker and Stone tried to portray and mock the prophet Mohammed, but Comedy Central wouldn’t let them even try. Jesus, slammed. Joseph Smith, mocked. Buddha, slighted. But no, not Moe.

    You’re absolutely right about the sex thing. It misses needed moral touchstones (like don’t poison people) because it obsesses over silly ones. Which makes me want to do things I really don’t even want to do, like tear off my clothes in a church just to force my nudity on the religious. I’m tired of the enforced morality over my pee pee or over someone else’s supposed sacrosanct idolatry.

    /rant

  26. The Wife and I suffered through a joke last night with no punch line — South Park’s 200th episode. There was so much bleeping, we didn’t know what to do. And it wasn’t profanity, as we Americans define it. Oh, and one character was entirely blacked out with the word CENSORED across the black box.

    It turns out Parker and Stone tried to portray and mock the prophet Mohammed, but Comedy Central wouldn’t let them even try. Jesus, slammed. Joseph Smith, mocked. Buddha, slighted. But no, not Moe.

    You’re absolutely right about the sex thing. It misses needed moral touchstones (like don’t poison people) because it obsesses over silly ones. Which makes me want to do things I really don’t even want to do, like tear off my clothes in a church just to force my nudity on the religious. I’m tired of the enforced morality over my pee pee or over someone else’s supposed sacrosanct idolatry.

    /rant

  27. After much pondering, I tend to the standpoint that the whole sex stuff is really a *cultural* thing more than a religious one. People use religious dogma as justifications for cultural taboos against sexuality, but non-religious people are just as likely to use other excuses for the same taboos, I think. At least that is my impression. Some strains of radical feminism are more puritan than religious fundamentalists. Also the profound hypocrisy about sex is difficult to explain solely on religious grounds – all religions are pretty clear that you can’t fool god – but is perfectly predictable when the taboo is social instead.

    I think the root of the problem is that a lot of people inherit sexual hang-ups from their parents, grow old surrounded by others with similarly dysfunctional sexuality, and cope with the abuse by externalizing – thereby spreading the poison. It’s just so hard to have any mature conversation about sexuality when people either act scandalized or else start giggling at the naughtiness…

    • I would tweak that a little to say that thee are both religious and social taboos about sex, but the religions turn those taboos into matters of orthodoxy, and in doing so become efficient instruments for transmitting those taboos.

      There are social taboos about sex and sexuality, but they seem to me to be fairly nebulously defined, and transmitted indirectly. The religions turn those into sermons: “If you have sex this way, you will go to hell.” That creates a feedback loop, where the religious institutions become instrumental in spreading and reinforcing the taboos.

      The Second Wave feminist arguments against sex, for example, lacked staying power, and have been completely rejected by many Third Wave feminists–in part because they did not have the power of a formal and socially privileged institution behind them.

      • I have to agree with kawakii that the cultural hangups generally come first, and then religion gets dragged in to justify it. Although once that happens, I think they become a sort of closed circle, with religious excuses becoming religious requirements which get handed down to the next generation which steep in the same culture…

        In local Pagan communities, I’ve encountered people who use their religion as an excuse to justify a lot of adolescent-style “you can’t make me nyah!” responses to any sort of authority (you know, rather than the adult-style reasoned response to the demands of authority, “I’ll think about that and see if it makes sense and comply if so, OK?”). Even worse are those who think Paganism means that there’s no reason not to do drugs and have sex with anyone who asks so why aren’t you smoking my dope and putting out for me? What are you, sex-negative or something?

        So my own religion is not exempt – I doubt any religion is – but when it happens the pressures tend to be in the other direction. And, of course, not being a dominant religion in the U.S., it doesn’t have the engine of privilege behind it to make it as grave a threat as the example your post so eloquently condemns.

        • Even worse are those who think Paganism means that there’s no reason not to do drugs and have sex with anyone who asks so why aren’t you smoking my dope and putting out for me? What are you, sex-negative or something?

          I think, most of the time, that derives from being told (incorrectly) that Wicca is a religion that has no standards; they get told that the way to be Wiccan is to say you are Wiccan.

  28. After much pondering, I tend to the standpoint that the whole sex stuff is really a *cultural* thing more than a religious one. People use religious dogma as justifications for cultural taboos against sexuality, but non-religious people are just as likely to use other excuses for the same taboos, I think. At least that is my impression. Some strains of radical feminism are more puritan than religious fundamentalists. Also the profound hypocrisy about sex is difficult to explain solely on religious grounds – all religions are pretty clear that you can’t fool god – but is perfectly predictable when the taboo is social instead.

    I think the root of the problem is that a lot of people inherit sexual hang-ups from their parents, grow old surrounded by others with similarly dysfunctional sexuality, and cope with the abuse by externalizing – thereby spreading the poison. It’s just so hard to have any mature conversation about sexuality when people either act scandalized or else start giggling at the naughtiness…

  29. Well, I learned the rules of logic in logic class, and I continue to learn it by studying the Logical Fallacies available in several places on the internet and listening to other people who are good at logic.

    Like any learned skill, some people have a natural aptitude for it, and others have a harder time learning it, and not using that skill can cause it to deteriorate.

    As for how come some people are religious and some aren’t, there are lots of different possible reasons for that. One is that hyper-religiosity is actually a brain condition. They have located a section in the brain that, when either stimulated or suppressed (I forget which), causes the individual to become hyper-religious. Some people are just more prone to religiosity than others naturally.

    Another is that many people turn away from religion, not because of logic, but because of other reasons. Some people leave or question their upbringing or their family because of abuse. Some because of exposure to other ideas. There are many non-religious people who are not non-religious because of any logical consideration of the questions. Being non-religious does not automatically make someone logical or rational.

    There are quite a few books on why people believe the things they do and why it’s so hard to get people to change their minds – I could not possibly do the topic justice in a blog comment. Check out Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Know What Isn’t So, for starters. They cover a lot of the questions you’re asking.

    There are plenty of European nations, or areas in Europe that are, more or less, secular, to give you a starting place for what a religion-free universe would look like. But the fact is that humans basically evolved to believe in stuff like religion and learning logic and critical thinking is not “natural”, it’s something we have to work at. That’s what the scientific method does, btw, corrects for our natural tendencies towards logical fallacies and biases and personal beliefs.

  30. I had logic classes too and I loved them, but at the time I didn’t see them as learning a skill, necessarily, like playing guitar, so thanks for these answers,they are worth thinking about. I think, though, that logic classes need to be coupled with working on understanding and that the whole process is very complex. Like human beings, after all.

    I have a feeling that the book you recommended me will be really interesting to read, thanks!

    I’d like going in time and seeing the very first person who started religious behaviours and see how he convinced the others. It’s strange that it is so widespread and after all this time it’s not defunct. I’m having one of those (often, in my case) moments when I feel like I’m seeing everything for the first time and I have about a billion of questions on everything. It’s so complex and big and mysterious and amazing…it all, haha. 🙂

  31. I can’t remember the last time I read something that expressed so well PRECISELY what I’d been thinking for so long.

    I wish that I thought that saying it so well would make more of a difference to more people, and not just make those of us around go “EXACTLY!!!! EX-FUCKING-ACTLY!!!!!! That’s what I’ve been trying to say ALL ALONG!”… but then again it may very well.

    And if nothing else, I feel like I’m not the only one that thinks, “Look. How can you people not see this? When will you pull your heads out of your collective fanatical asses and think for yourselves? Can you imagine how many problems it would solve?!”

  32. I can’t remember the last time I read something that expressed so well PRECISELY what I’d been thinking for so long.

    I wish that I thought that saying it so well would make more of a difference to more people, and not just make those of us around go “EXACTLY!!!! EX-FUCKING-ACTLY!!!!!! That’s what I’ve been trying to say ALL ALONG!”… but then again it may very well.

    And if nothing else, I feel like I’m not the only one that thinks, “Look. How can you people not see this? When will you pull your heads out of your collective fanatical asses and think for yourselves? Can you imagine how many problems it would solve?!”

  33. I’m not sure where it states in the bible that masturbation will send you to hell. Must be a Catholic thing.

    The fascination of sexuality and what not to do in churches stem from the bible. A general named Constantine was visited in a dream and was thought to be God’s chosen one. Constantine went on to be emperor and developed a Christian Church, stopped persecutions against the Christians and had the bible put together by 16 Jewish priests.

    At that time sexuality in Ancient Rome was at an all time high. People demanded that the empire did something to reel it in. Roman mythology Pudicitia and her Greek equivalent Aidos weren’t working. So religion and the bible served a purpose of containing people. Hence so many sexual passages in the bible.

    Nowadays the church picks and chooses what they think today’s subject is and if sex is in the news well then the sermon is sex. Do unto others as you would have done to you isn’t exciting and won’t draw the crowds, but sex will.

    The gal a few posts up that spoke to her female pastor. That shouldn’t be. According to the letters Paul wrote to the Corinthians women should be seen not heard. So the church does pick and choose what should be used within that leather bound book.

    • I think the part about masturbation being a sin comes from a misinterpretation of the story of Onan – he was required to marry his brother’s widow to carry on the family line. But he refused to have sex with her, instead “spilling his seed upon the ground” (or something similar to that, I don’t remember an exact quote). As a result, god punished him. I don’t recall reading anywhere in there that specifically states masturbation in general is wrong – just that failing to breed the next generation was considered a dereliction of duty at best, and Onan happened to use masturbation as one of the ways of avoiding that duty.

      (As a side note, does anyone know what’s up with the prohibition against wearing clothes made of two kinds of thread? The prohibition against eating pork or shellfish makes sense because those foods are occasionally contaminated even today and it might have been difficult for people of that era to tell if they were. Most of the others seem understandable, if occasionally misguided, in the context of the time it was written. But I can’t think of any reason for the clothes thing.)

      • My understanding is that even in Biblical times, people knew how to prepare pork and shellfish safely. The prohibition against those had a very similar purpose to the prohibition against certain kinds of cloth: to keep their followers ethnically and culturally isolated from the surrounding cultures, and to prevent cultural assimilation.

      • Onan didn’t masturbate, he used the “withdrawal method” for contraception. Genesis 38:8-10. He didn’t want to raise up an heir to his dead kinsman, he wanted the property for himself. So the sin of Onan was not a sexual sin, according to the laws of the time it was a dereliction of duty…and a sin of selfishness, if anything.

        • While on that topic, the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality, but inhospitality: “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Ezekiel 16:49

          A lot of people get that wrong, either when justifying homophobia with the Bible, or condemning the Bible as the font of homophobia.

  34. I’m not sure where it states in the bible that masturbation will send you to hell. Must be a Catholic thing.

    The fascination of sexuality and what not to do in churches stem from the bible. A general named Constantine was visited in a dream and was thought to be God’s chosen one. Constantine went on to be emperor and developed a Christian Church, stopped persecutions against the Christians and had the bible put together by 16 Jewish priests.

    At that time sexuality in Ancient Rome was at an all time high. People demanded that the empire did something to reel it in. Roman mythology Pudicitia and her Greek equivalent Aidos weren’t working. So religion and the bible served a purpose of containing people. Hence so many sexual passages in the bible.

    Nowadays the church picks and chooses what they think today’s subject is and if sex is in the news well then the sermon is sex. Do unto others as you would have done to you isn’t exciting and won’t draw the crowds, but sex will.

    The gal a few posts up that spoke to her female pastor. That shouldn’t be. According to the letters Paul wrote to the Corinthians women should be seen not heard. So the church does pick and choose what should be used within that leather bound book.

  35. I think the part about masturbation being a sin comes from a misinterpretation of the story of Onan – he was required to marry his brother’s widow to carry on the family line. But he refused to have sex with her, instead “spilling his seed upon the ground” (or something similar to that, I don’t remember an exact quote). As a result, god punished him. I don’t recall reading anywhere in there that specifically states masturbation in general is wrong – just that failing to breed the next generation was considered a dereliction of duty at best, and Onan happened to use masturbation as one of the ways of avoiding that duty.

    (As a side note, does anyone know what’s up with the prohibition against wearing clothes made of two kinds of thread? The prohibition against eating pork or shellfish makes sense because those foods are occasionally contaminated even today and it might have been difficult for people of that era to tell if they were. Most of the others seem understandable, if occasionally misguided, in the context of the time it was written. But I can’t think of any reason for the clothes thing.)

  36. The Catholics consider having lots and lots of babies a moral duty, so to them at least the notion of having lots of offspring isn’t out of date. I attended a Catholic wedding once, and found the whole event a bit tawdry and more than a little creepy; the priest emphasized MANY times how important it was for the newlywed couple to have many children and raise them all Catholic.

  37. I am not familiar with the doctrines of Parnell’s religion, but I’d think it states somewhere it’s wrong to kill others and to lie. Do they use the 10 commandments?

    They do, but it seems to me only as a sort of idol. Conservative Evangelicals talk about the importance of the Ten Commandments but generally don’t seem to stress very much about what they are or what they mean (and nobody pays any attention to the one about “thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or on earth below,” which would specifically forbid all representational art. Most Christians add a “…but it’s OK if you don’t worship it” clause, which isn’t in the commandment.

    The real meat of the religious teachings of Evangelical churches, is sex, sex, sex. Killing is OK, as long as it’s terrrerrerrrists or Arabs or foreigners. Lying is OK as long as it’s in the service of killing terrrerrerrrists or Arabs or foreigners.

    I think that’s an inevitable consequence of the view that morality is an arbitrary list of rules handed down from above, rather than an overarching framework of compassionate behavior; if a person doesn’t understand the foundation, but sees only a list of arbitrary and disconnected rules, it becomes easier to carve out exceptions and harder to see how the rules fit together. So if the rules include statements like “don’t kill” and “gays are bad,” that person is left with a quandry; is it OK to kill gays, or not? It’s OK to kill someone who’s trying to murder you, and murderers are bad, so it must be OK to kill bad people, right? If it’s OK to kill bad people, then the rule against killing must not apply to gays, right?

    I, too, had someone argue with me that morality and compassion can’t exists outside belief in a god and that it’s inherited through religion. He also said that if people didn’t believe in god, they would commit crimes. I find that pretty crazy, to be honest.

    It’s worse than that–it’s immoral. A code of morality that relies on the notion of punishment in order to make it stick isn’t really a code of morality at all. I think that people who believe you have to have a god in order to have morality, and that people without a god have no morality, don’t really get why morality is important in the first place.

  38. I would tweak that a little to say that thee are both religious and social taboos about sex, but the religions turn those taboos into matters of orthodoxy, and in doing so become efficient instruments for transmitting those taboos.

    There are social taboos about sex and sexuality, but they seem to me to be fairly nebulously defined, and transmitted indirectly. The religions turn those into sermons: “If you have sex this way, you will go to hell.” That creates a feedback loop, where the religious institutions become instrumental in spreading and reinforcing the taboos.

    The Second Wave feminist arguments against sex, for example, lacked staying power, and have been completely rejected by many Third Wave feminists–in part because they did not have the power of a formal and socially privileged institution behind them.

  39. My understanding is that even in Biblical times, people knew how to prepare pork and shellfish safely. The prohibition against those had a very similar purpose to the prohibition against certain kinds of cloth: to keep their followers ethnically and culturally isolated from the surrounding cultures, and to prevent cultural assimilation.

  40. I find most religious stuff ridiculous. And all religious texts seem to me very subjective and clearly made, interpreted, tweaked and so on by people according to what they wanted/needed in those times. I find this particularly funny: “for you shall worship no other god, because the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”. Or the stuff about children paying for their parents’ sins up to the 7th generation…how very petty, haha.

    I agree with you. People do seem very selective with religious requirements. And I understand what you are saying, but I don’t understand why, when noticing that so much of the stuff said is ridiculous so many people don’t question the whole religion and god deal. Instead they pick what fits them.

    I realize how fortunate I’ve been to be shielded from religion. Especially me being me, it’s a wonder I haven’t been burnt at stake, haha. The one time it interfered with my life in a direct way was when I was little, living in a secluded village. One by one, the people there started forbidding their kids to play with me and my sister because we were apparently talking too openly and weird 🙂 They actually said I was corrupting their kids and putting ideas into their heads. And I was in kindergarten, my sister 3 years younger than I was. Only our best friend, whose parents had a religion that celebrated saturdays, was running away from home to stay with us. But thankfully, in 2003, when I was 13, we moved from there.

    One of the things I dislike most about religion is that many of its followers aren’t harmless, but very dangerous. I think that feeling superior enough to feel entitled to “make justice” and punish “those in wrong” is frightening.

    But I am curious about something. We have a religious lunatic, the dangerous kind who also believes that without a god anyone would be morally free to commit crimes. One day, this human stops believing in god. Do you think he’d start doing even worse things?

    In this context, do you think that if suddenly all religious thoughts disappeared more people would commit more crimes or not? I tend to believe they wouldn’t, because most of those who would kind of already do them. But, on the other hand, I know there are many people who believe that one can’t be stopped from doing bad stuff if they don’t believe in god. Do you think there are many people who don’t commit crimes just because they believe they will go to hell if they do?

  41. Perhaps it’s high time to reclaim the word and refedine the meaning? You know, 200-300 years ago, in certain part of the world, anti-religious people engaged religious at the “morality” battleground and actually won…

    Reapeat after me: Christians* are immoral authoritarians 😉

    *Not limited to it, but well, duh.

  42. Perhaps it’s high time to reclaim the word and refedine the meaning? You know, 200-300 years ago, in certain part of the world, anti-religious people engaged religious at the “morality” battleground and actually won…

    Reapeat after me: Christians* are immoral authoritarians 😉

    *Not limited to it, but well, duh.

  43. pigeons

    There is a video I remember from psychology 101 about BF Skinner’s superstitious pigeons. He gave them a food pay out on random intervals. The pigeons associated whatever activity they were doing at the time with the pay out and would repeat the activity until the payout happened again. Religion, to me, often seems to be a sophisticated collection of superstitions, so perhaps this is how it started. Superstitions can be amazingly powerful! I still “knock on wood” sometimes, even though logically I know that action will have no effect on the outcome of whatever I am thinking of. Something that powerful in a handy way of controlling people.
    Perhaps the focus on sex is like a magician’s misdirection. Look at the right hand waving around so you don’t see the trick being done with the left. After all, sex is exciting to people, whether they approve or not.

    • Re: pigeons

      Well, we had the opportunity to study religion in making and these cases were founded similarly to what you said. Cargo Cults, to be precise.

  44. pigeons

    There is a video I remember from psychology 101 about BF Skinner’s superstitious pigeons. He gave them a food pay out on random intervals. The pigeons associated whatever activity they were doing at the time with the pay out and would repeat the activity until the payout happened again. Religion, to me, often seems to be a sophisticated collection of superstitions, so perhaps this is how it started. Superstitions can be amazingly powerful! I still “knock on wood” sometimes, even though logically I know that action will have no effect on the outcome of whatever I am thinking of. Something that powerful in a handy way of controlling people.
    Perhaps the focus on sex is like a magician’s misdirection. Look at the right hand waving around so you don’t see the trick being done with the left. After all, sex is exciting to people, whether they approve or not.

  45. Re: pigeons

    Well, we had the opportunity to study religion in making and these cases were founded similarly to what you said. Cargo Cults, to be precise.

  46. Onan didn’t masturbate, he used the “withdrawal method” for contraception. Genesis 38:8-10. He didn’t want to raise up an heir to his dead kinsman, he wanted the property for himself. So the sin of Onan was not a sexual sin, according to the laws of the time it was a dereliction of duty…and a sin of selfishness, if anything.

  47. Thanks for you post – every time I see someone argue that because this or that flavor of organized, power-structured, dominant religion in the U.S. has done something despicable, “religion” is bad, I feel an urge to stand up and say, “What did we Wiccans ever do to you?”

    I see tacit’s response being “it’s about dominant religious traditions letting us down”… well, I really, really wish atheists as a whole would stop using “religion” as a short-hand for “dominant religious traditions.”

    I say this with much love for tacit’s posts and all genuine respect.

  48. On behalf of my Catholic family (though I do not now share their religion), consider saying, “Most Catholics.” The emphasis on As Many Offspring As Possible isn’t nearly as universal these days as you might think. Also, all the Catholics I know would have agreed with you about the creeptasticness about the wedding you attended.

  49. I have to agree with kawakii that the cultural hangups generally come first, and then religion gets dragged in to justify it. Although once that happens, I think they become a sort of closed circle, with religious excuses becoming religious requirements which get handed down to the next generation which steep in the same culture…

    In local Pagan communities, I’ve encountered people who use their religion as an excuse to justify a lot of adolescent-style “you can’t make me nyah!” responses to any sort of authority (you know, rather than the adult-style reasoned response to the demands of authority, “I’ll think about that and see if it makes sense and comply if so, OK?”). Even worse are those who think Paganism means that there’s no reason not to do drugs and have sex with anyone who asks so why aren’t you smoking my dope and putting out for me? What are you, sex-negative or something?

    So my own religion is not exempt – I doubt any religion is – but when it happens the pressures tend to be in the other direction. And, of course, not being a dominant religion in the U.S., it doesn’t have the engine of privilege behind it to make it as grave a threat as the example your post so eloquently condemns.

  50. While on that topic, the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality, but inhospitality: “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Ezekiel 16:49

    A lot of people get that wrong, either when justifying homophobia with the Bible, or condemning the Bible as the font of homophobia.

  51. “Most people have a sense of empathy, and have “moral values”, and merely cherry pick those passages in their religious texts that support their sense of ethics. So when someone is *actually* ethical, it’s *in spite* of their religion, not because of it. “

    I’ve been meaning to say a big fat “THIS!!!” to this since I read it. Thanks!

  52. What’s also interesting is the implications for the church’s real moral authority, when so many people who otherwise consider themselves “good Catholics” find that to live in today’s reality they must ignore the church’s teachings on contraception. I did too, when I was Catholic. As a regular contraceptive user who’s never wanted any children, I found that I feel more in integrity if I don’t profess that faith (which is sad). But from the full congregations at my local Catholic church and the length of the Communion lines, many people’s mileage obviously varies.

  53. Even worse are those who think Paganism means that there’s no reason not to do drugs and have sex with anyone who asks so why aren’t you smoking my dope and putting out for me? What are you, sex-negative or something?

    I think, most of the time, that derives from being told (incorrectly) that Wicca is a religion that has no standards; they get told that the way to be Wiccan is to say you are Wiccan.

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