by Jehalapeno 19 Replies latest jw friends
Religion has a helluva lot to answer for that I'm not sure I can ever forgive. It has been a haven for all types of abuses of power, torture, rape and murder included. It's a parasite financially and, by extension of it's wealth and power politically influential and that makes it all pervasive and dangerous. It likes it's secrets too much for my liking.
Personal faith and belief that contributes to the fabric of a healthy functioning society that protects children I don't have a problem with.
Some people need religion I don't. Religion has been some what abusive to me but I don't hate it, I hate the Watchtower corporation but other religions my interest is only mild so no hatred because I just am not very interested in joining any, don't wish them ill or anything it fills a need for some people and I'm ok with it.
JEHALAPENO:
While I cannot say that I ‘hate’ religion, my bad experience with the Jehovah’s Witness religion has cured me of any need to belong to anything.
You can be spiritual without religion.
I hate all religion. But I can tolerate some. I can not tolerate Islam, JWs. Mormons, Scientoligists, Pentecostals, southern Baptists or any radical groups.
We live in a unique time in history. Not sure what technology, video and the information age in general will do for religion as it has been. There is no doubt that with few exceptions, organized religion has been used as a control tool for the masses, usually politically.
Whomever Jesus might have been, the greatest rule after loving "god" is to love your neighbor as yourself. I can run with that. I won't go to church to tell me who my neighbor is (Jesus had a comment or two on that...) but if everyone can be viewed as our neighbor, and we love them, be a Christian then. These are the greatest two commandments, right? ;)
Jehalopeno, I understand your experience after leaving the JWorg, going from a polarized position to a more moderate appraisal of religion and religious people. I imagine that your experience, which was like mine, is the norm. I still loathe the JW religion and rue the wasted time spent with it.
I like too that you brought in the historical matter of John Lock whose informed and modest aims were to clear the philosophical ground so that others could cultivate it. Along with David Hume, Diderot and The Encyclopaedists and the agency of the White House under Jefferson who cribbed much of Lock’s work, much philosophical progress was made and the Enlightenment began to have an impact. Just as the Renaissance and the Reformation had revised the world views of the West, the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century began to end abject servility to the principle of monarchy as well as constraining aristocratic and religious privilege. It is Humanists today who are still pressing on under the Enlightenment banner.
Therefore ideas; accurate and evidence based mental concepts of the tangible world, matter very much as do understanding the zeitgeist in which ideas are shaped.
My point is that to make progress, humanity must keep changing for the better. By dragging forward the old irrational belief of unknowable, invisible gods into the modern world, it diminishes the effectiveness of societies’ aims for advancement into areas such as rational education, peace-making and realization of human potential. So there are grave errors in perpetuating long sanctioned religious myths about being answerable to gods when no such things can have any logical validity.
Religion is retrograde, religion is a faulty life raft; it should not be banned but exposed to reason and left to die a quiet death.
Cofty - "I still have no tolerance of Islam. It is the slow kid in the class. If it ever catches up in terms of personal freedoms then and only then will I give it a break."
Simon - "I think that's unfair on slow kids. It's more like the bully of the class that picks on the weak, steals and beheads some of the other children..."
...In part (I suspect), because he's the slow kid, and deep down, knows it, and hates all the other kids for it (because he certainly can't hate "Allah" for it, after all).
The thing which I suspect puts many people off the Watch Tower movement is that they have always promoted themselves as the one-and-only custodian and bastion of “truth,” but, as we all know only too well, their “truth” has always been their own rather unique and dogmatic interpretation of it – and any and everything but actual truth.
Many folks use religious books (“holy writing”), such as the Judao-Christian Bible, in an attempt to validate their own socio-political views, which only too often are simply self-serving tools, or “tricks of the trade,” for their own vain aggrandizement.
The Watch Tower did, however, once early on present a truth which is quite a factually sound and most poignant reality, which is when they had their followers go around in what they called “information marches” bearing signs and placards stating: “RELIGION IS A SNARE AND A RACKET!” Yes indeed, they got that truth bang-on right!
re. the OP...
I felt that way a bit as part of my fade.
I more-or-less got over it much the same way Jehalapeno did, too.
These days, as far as I'm concerned, any group (religious or otherwise) that fairly utilizes the democratic process, embraces fiscal and policy transparency, respects and accepts what history and science have to say (regardless of the implications), and fosters genuinely positive community activism...
...has my respect.
T'S OK TO BELIEVE IN GOD.
I truly feel that holding on to that tradition in our society is important to the preservation of individual human rights.
Well... maybe if you look at it through the lenses of the US..... and even then it's only important because delusional people have gotten used to seeing some rights as "god-given rights"...which of course is nonsense.
Now take your US goggles out, and recognize that "belief in God" in my other areas of the world is an outright impediment to the respect for human rights.
And even in the US, many of the rights that are associated with modernity, such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of choice, equal marriage, etc etc, clearly don't have their origins in the writings of bronze age minds.
