This is a long post in response to all the religious talk we have had here on dKos lately. The length is necessary as this is a complex issue...take the time to read all the way through and you will understand why we must stop this trend now...
Ya know, for a long time, I agreed with this whole concept of "live and let live" and "lets find a way to work together" bullshit but to be honest, the Bush admin and the atrocities committed by his followers have convinced me that trying to get along is just a pathetic waste of time.
I know that sounds almost churlish but I have taken this internal debate to the deepest philosophical roots and it always ends up coming back to the simple fact that humans in general are selfish assholes and religion for the most part just gives them an excuse to BE assholes.
And THAT of course sounds overly-pessimistic and dismissive of the race of man in general but despite my many forays into the mysanthropic outer lands, I am a fairly optimistic person nowadays because I think that man, despite all his inherent flaws, has the ability to turn it all around so easily, simply by making a choice to do the right thing, even if it is not the best personal choice.
I have studied many religions of man and read the new testament (a few times), old testament, Koran (in English and Arabic), and all kinds of Buddhist and quasi-paganistic books. I kept coming back to the same thought though, that this was all a bunch of smoke and mirrors to make us forget that we already know everything worth learning from these books.
We KNOW that killing is wrong, unless it is to defend ourselves, or others.
We KNOW that promising to do one thing (such as be faithful to one person) and then not doing that which was promised is wrong.
We KNOW that allowing others to die of hunger or curable disease while we dine in fancy restaurants is wrong.
I could go on with that but it all comes down to one thing, and someone else already said this in this thread, the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have done unto you" or said even simpler, "Don't be a hypocrit."
But all religions, and for that matter all governments/politics, originated out of hypocrisy. What amazes me is how many "Christians" (sorry, not meaning to attack Christians in general but YOU said my country is mostly Christian) can look so "objectively" at Mayan sacrificial rituals to pagan gods and say how "barbaric" and "deluded" those people were. That just makes me believe you have never read the Bible. There are all these analyses and documentaries that talk about how the "high priests" used their positions as "spokesmen" for their gods to take advantage of the uneducated masses. Doesn't that sound familiar to any of you churchgoers who constantly see your ministers and priests dragged away in handcuffs? For that matter, doesn't that sound familiar when you look at the way Bush is running this country now? Make everyone afraid of this omni-present, omni-powerful mystical figure (God, or Osama or Saddam or A-terrorist-to-be-named-later-when-its-convenient) who can rain fire on us whenever they damn well please, and then convince us that THEY are the ONLY ones who could possibly communicate in a postive way with, or protect us from, these awful ends.
The troubling thing about religion is that its only relevance to us as people living our lives is to "instruct us on the proper way to conduct ourselves" or more simply, its a set of rules or guidelines for how to live (with the obvious rejoinder of "and thus please your god(s)"). Humans figured out at some point in our evolution that to survive, we had to somehow learn to live together in harmony, and thus we had to create some rules to subvert our natural tendencies as humans towards survival and procreation, otherwise, we would steal the weaker mans food when we were hungry and every man would be trying to have sex with every woman out there. And the biggest of all is that, quite often, the easiest way to deal with a problem with another person would have been to just fight them to the death. Having rules became important to curb these natural tendencies but those rules only worked if everyone agreed to follow them.
What has occurred though, from long ago up through even today, is that the keepers or makers of the rules have been corrupted by their position of power and used that power to cheat the system. "Yeah yeah we know all that" you are saying but what so many people haven't figured out is what happened in the next step. These "leaders" figured out that people weren't trusting them not to be corrupt so they changed the message a bit to say that the rules came from some sort of god - a mystical concept of power and omniscience that could be both benevolent and/or retributory, based on your behaviour (sounds like another childhood myth to force us to be "good" doesn't it? hint - he has a sleigh pulled by reindeer). And of course only the "special, chosen" people could converse with God (or gods) so they were given money and deference for everything.
So now lets look at example from that "oh-so-Christian" of bedrocks, the Bible. Do we take it completely literally or do you just have to kinda sorta figure it out for yourself? Well, of course you can't take it literally or every person in the world should properly be "smote down" by his neighbor for any number of transgressions every one of us has committed at some point. So how literal should you take it then? Who is the judge of that? <sarcasm> Well obviously the average man or woman isn't smart enough to understand the word of god enough to interpret it is he? </sarcasm> So that means that us lowly stupid people must trust in, you guessed it, other men to interpret for us, which parts of the Bible we should pay attention to. This is such an accepted way of dealing with things that I have almost never met a Christian in my life who A) was not a preacher or priest and then B) had ever read the Bible cover to cover. So obviously these preachers and prists and monks and rabbis and blah blah blah are the greatest of people among us, touched by God and they are simply above reproach right? I mean we would never catch them with their hands down little schoolboy's pants now would we? Oh crap forgot my sarcasm tags...
Anyway, what makes anyone think that their chosen "man of god" is any different than the high priests of the Mayans, standing on top of their pyramids, eviscerating a young virgin girl, proclaiming that it is "god's will"? We may be a little more tempered and savvy in todays world but these people use the same tools of fear and promises of untold happiness in the afterlife that they can't possibly deliver, to cow the average man or woman to do what is best for their own selfish interests. "Whoa, wait a minute, thats going too far" you say, because I am impugning the character of your religious leader but seriously, do you really know this person? Do you know anything about them other than that they say the "right" words at the "right" time? Does anyone really think that the parents of all those sexually abused children DIDN'T have full faith that THEIR man of god was a "good man"? I mean really, how many times do you have to be lied to, cajoled, stolen from, tricked, or taken advantage of by other people before you learn that you can't trust people blindly, ESPECIALLY when you are talking about a subject like "eternal damnation in hell" or whatever other boogeyman-like fantasy you are led to believe.
Ok to the damn point...the reason I chose this particular post to respond to is that it is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps man from evolving past the current step of our process. Every time people start to open up their minds and expand their sense of reasoning and clarity, a movement begins to reign all that in and it always is led by a flag of religion. Have any of you ever read any of the writings of our forefathers? Here's a good bit of homework for ya...find and read some of the debating political pamphlets/position papers circulated by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. This will give you a good representation of the two types of people in the world. Those who believe the average man is too stupid to rule himself and thus believe a cadre of aristrocratic or noblesse or godly men should rule and those who believe that despite man's faults and weaknesses individually, that when confronted with difficulties as a societal group, man will most often come to the right conclusion, with a few exceptions of course that correct themselves over time.
Why did socialism fail? So many people, even those who bitterly hated the "reds" have come out publicly and said that, "on paper", socialism is a great idea but in practical terms, is impossible to implement. Why? Because quite simply, to make sure everyone is equal, you have to have someone in a position of power to ensure that equality, and you also have to follow all the rules, just like a religion. But of course, the human frailty of greed and selfish hypocrisy always led to those in power abusing their positions and using the propaganda of the "rules" against anyone who dared to challenge them. This is exactly what Bush and his religious freak followers like Frist do to this very day. None of them actually live like a "true Christian" yet they use those same "rules" to say everyone else in the world is living wrongly, especially their political opponents.
My point about our forefathers writing is that it is amazing how much more enlightened and eloquent some of them seem to be than the average writer of today. They were starting on a grand experiment and they knew from personal experience what the downfalls were of sliding backwards into the age of darkness when everyone feared the unknown and relied on kings and priests to tell them whether they were good or bad or deserved to live or die. Every word was carefully measured to express just the right point in a subtle and sometimes deeply philosophical nature. Some of them did proclaim themselves to be "men of God" but most of them had grave reservations about the power that religion could have over the governance of man and made quite concerted efforts to ensure that America was as far from a theocracy as possible. We were advancing far faster than any other civilization on the planet, simply by virtue of the fact that we weren't paying attention to any of the constrictive, ridiculous rules of the religions of men and rather were following the laws of reason, as agreed to by the plurality of all men (except the blacks and women of course, but despite these exceptions they were well and truly much further along the rode than we gave them credit for). Why were these people so much more enlightened than we seem to be today? That doesn't make much sense does it? I could go into various examples where the political and religious leaders kept pulling us back to Dark Age thinking through the 18th and 19th centuries but they would be too obscure for most so lets look at the beginning of the 20th century.
America had been a powerful presence in the first World War and had truly established itself as a political, militaristic, and economic power around the world. The "roaring twenties" would show a new age of enlightenment in america where people began to be more inventive and free thinking and free spirited. If you study the writing of the times, you will see that people were throwing out their childish fears of eternal damnation and were lifting the cloak from their eyes that had been placed there by their religious and monied leaders. The turn of the century yielded incredible advances in science and philosophy and tolerance. Then the depression and world war 2 happened. These two events led people to be introspective and fearful once again, many even blaming themselves in some small way for being too high-minded or too "loose and free" and the rich people who came through the depression bruised but not broken, saw an opportunity to regain control over the average person: blame it all on faithless people and/or socialists and institute new rules of controls that challenge people as "un-american" if they even dare question anything. This led to the very strange and backwards fifties which looks in retrospect like some sick communistic joke where the government tried to tell you what you could read, who you could talk to, what you could say, and so on... This was a huge step backwards for mankind, especially coming from the most scientifically advanced nation in the world. The sixties ended up being a righteous backlash against that but we had stepped so far backwards that the sixties really seemed to only serve to bring us back to status quo, pre-50s freak out. The 70s were a daze following these upheavals and the 80s were a time of tentative steps forward, all the while with the religious leaders making inroads again, blaming everything bad on "godless" people. The 90s gave us another huge leap forward in the advancement of technology and human societal interaction as the world began to open up with the use of the internet, once again, enlightening people and challenging the ridiculous rules of our religious and political leaders who sought only to control the average man.
9/11 changed all that...this one event thrust the world and mankind back 3 steps once again and yet again, the religious, political, and monied (read: oil and insurance) leaders took advantage of the situation to try to take back control of the average man. The Patriot Act has got to be the least progressive step any man has ever taken to actually give up freedoms. It is a pathetic shame and smirch on our country and it is only a single tool of these people to subvert everything good people are trying to do to change this world for the better.
Now to fine tune the direction here to the relevant topic... Of all the tools the right is using to try to advance its goals, religion is the most primal and the most subversive. Where do most people get their religious ideas from originally? Their parents right? And what does the average 4 or 5 year old think of their parents? That they are practically gods themselves right? Kids soon learn this isn't the case but some of those feelings linger on for their entire lives. When someone questions the base "facts" they learned about "god" from their parents, people react to that from a much deeper level than thier rational mind because itis challenging a concept given to them primarily from godlike beings in their developmental childhood.
So the right steps out and says "God is on our side in the fight against terrorism so he supports...." whatever the hell it is we want to do about it. Anyone dares to challenge that and they are questioning god right? That is exactly how you eliminate debate and halt all advancement of human thought. Make people too afraid to express their real views and opinions and man can do nothing but fall backwards. Why is that? Well, to make it clearer you can break people down into three groups: those who are intelligent, forward thinkers who challenge current beliefs, those who couldn't care less and are just surviving, and then the large majority in the middle who want to believe in something but are possibly not very intelligent themselves or not very adventurous in their own thoughts. When the first group is convinced through fear to be quiet, they stop having any sort of effect on the larger middle group and thus, those in power are able to control the 80 or 90% of the people that make up the 2nd and 3rd group, because no one else is questioning the lies they use to hold that control. So once again, we are slipping backwards as a species and are ever losing ground as we overpopulate and poison our world.
Religion, and by using that word I am referring primarily to the control and fear-inducing aspects of it, is where I firmly lay the blame for the state we find our world in. Religion, and the mystical fears it relishes, makes people do things against their better judgement, and in most cases excuses behaviour every man woman and child knows is wrong simply by virtue of saying you believe in a person. How is that even close to rational or, even more prescient, sane? If someone came up to you and said you were going to have needles poked into your skin repeatedly for eternity if you didn't say out loud that the Mets were the best team in baseball, you would be looking for the nearest mental home to put them in. You may think that is an unfair comparison but to someone from the outside looking in, it doesnt seem that far from the mark.
So when I see the religious (radical right), political (Republican and to be fair some Democrats), and monied (oil, insurance, pharmaceutical) leaders holding all the real power in my country I have bled for, and that they are trying to turn back the clock even more by cranking up the fear and ridiculous rules to create a theocracy, it pisses me off when the people who I think should be on my side want to argue about whether talking about religion is going to help our cause or hurt it.
Lets drop the religion for a second and look at this from a different angle. Lets say you have two groups, the reds and the blues :P The reds say "we believe in A, B, and C" and they drill home how much they really really really belive in B because they know there are some blues who believe in B pretty strongly too. Many of the reds who say they believe in B don't really care about it, but they use it as a tool. When the blues see this, instead of talking about D, E, and F which really matter to people from both groups, they try to say that they also believe in B, but not as much as the reds because the reds are freaky zealots who take it too far. So nobody knows anything about D,E,and F and as far as they DO know, both sides agree on B but the reds seem to care MORE about it...hmmmmm makes it a pretty easy choice huh? Nevermind that the reds would take B so far to the extreme to eliminate D,E and F which are much more important to the average person from both groups, because the blues got so caught up in talking about B that no one actually heard about the things that really matter.
Simply put...religion has no place in politics. Let me say that again...religion has NO PLACE IN POLITICS. Yes dKos is one of those cool communities where you can drop a diary about just about anything but when you start seeing the discussion get taken over by people only wanting to talk about this topic at the expense of other, more important issues, you start to see the frustration. I don't begrudge anyone their faith and in fact I truly respect true believers, but honestly I've met thousands of people and traveled fairly extensively and have yet to meet someone who fits that description.
But dKos has, at least for me, and I'm guessing for many others, taken a step towards arresting the downhill slide back into a dark age of fear and loathing. This site, to me, is about illuminating the attempts by those in power to control and subvert average Americans and, in turn, the world. Its about progressive thoughts and ideas that are going to keep the candle of enlightenment burning through these dark years ahead but when you start bringing religious talk into the room, it starts a draft of wind blowing on our candle because it lends support to the arguments of the religious whackos on the other side. And if you let that wind get strong enough to blow out that candle (I would guess this would be the enlightened people of Kos getting sick of all the religious talk and walking away) then we are all doomed to stand in the dark once again.