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savedfromsalvation · 6 years

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The 12 Worst Ideas Organized Religion Has Unleashed On the World

These dubious concepts advocate conflict, cruelty and suffering.

By Valerie Tarico / AlterNet

April 30, 2018, 10:34 PM GMT

Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to invent ideas or concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good.

I've previously highlighted some of humanity’s best moral and spiritual concepts, our shared moral core. Here, by way of contrast, are some of the worst. These twelve dubious concepts promote conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, they belong in the dustbin of history just as soon as we can get them there.

1. Chosen People –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,” believing that they themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144,000 souls will get a special place in the afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were thought to be descended directly from gods (in contrast to everyone else).

Religious sects are inherently tribal and divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer. “Gang symbols” like special haircuts, attire, hand signals and jargon differentiate insiders from outsiders and subtly (or not so subtly) convey to both that insiders are inherently superior.

Islam teaches the concept of “dhimmitude” and provides special rules for the subjugation of religious minorities, with monotheists getting better treatment than polytheists. Christianity blurs together the concepts of unbeliever and evildoer. Ultimately, heretics are a threat that needs to be neutralized by conversion, conquest, isolation, domination, or—in worst cases—mass murder.

3. Holy War – If war can be holy, anything goes. The medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a twenty year campaign of extermination against heretical Cathar Christians in the south of France, promising their land and possessions to real Christians who signed on as crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims have slaughtered each other for centuries. The Hebrew scriptures recount battle after battle in which their war God, Yahweh, helps them to not only defeat but also exterminate the shepherding cultures that occupy their “Promised Land.” As in later holy wars, like the modern rise of ISIS, divine sanction let them kill the elderly and children, burn orchards, and take virgin females as sexual slaves—all while retaining a sense of moral superiority.

The idea that blasphemy must be prevented or avenged has caused millions of murders over the centuries and countless other horrors. As I write, blogger Raif Badawi awaits round after round of flogging in Saudi Arabia—1000 lashes in batches of 50—while his wife and children plead from Canada for the international community to do something.

5. Glorified suffering – Picture secret societies of monks flogging their own backs. The image that comes to mind is probably from Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, but the idea isn’t one he made up. A core premise of Christianity is that righteous torture—if it’s just intense and prolonged enough–can somehow fix the damage done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of crucifixes litter the world as testaments to this belief. Shia Muslims beat themselves with lashes and chains during Aashura, a form of sanctified suffering called Matam that commemorates the death of the martyr Hussein. Self-denial in the form of asceticism and fasting is a part of both Eastern and Western religions, not only because deprivation induces altered states but also because people believe suffering somehow brings us closer to divinity.

Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain came unbidden, and people had very little power to control it. An aspirin or heating pad would have been a miracle to the writers of the Bible, Quran, or Gita. Faced with uncontrollable suffering, the best advice religion could offer was to lean in or make meaning of it. The problem, of course is that glorifying suffering—turning it into a spiritual good—has made people more willing to inflict it on not only themselves and their enemies but also those who are helpless, including the ill or dying (as in the case of Mother Teresa and the American Bishops) and children (as in the child beating Patriarchy movement).

6. Genital mutilation – Primitive people have used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that. Infant circumcision in Judaism serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts. In one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to convert and submit his clan to the procedure as a show of commitment to a peace treaty. (While the men lie incapacitated, the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.)

In Islam, painful male circumcision serves as a rite of passage into manhood, initiation into a powerful club. By contrast, in some Muslim cultures cutting away or burning the female clitoris and labia ritually establishes the submission of women by reducing sexual arousal and agency. An estimated 2 million girls annually are subjected to the procedure, with consequences including hemorrhage, infection, painful urination and death. – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only some Hindus (, goddess of power) and some Muslims (, Feast of the Sacrifice) continue to ritually slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale. Hindu scriptures including the Gita and Puranas forbid ritual killing, and most Hindus now eschew the practice based on the principle of ahimsa, but it persists as a residual of folk religion.

7. Blood sacrifice – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only some Hindus (during the Festival of Gadhimai, goddess of power) and some Muslims (during Eid al Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice) continue to ritually slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale. Hindu scriptures including the Gita and Puranas forbid ritual killing, and most Hindus now eschew the practice based on the principle of ahimsa, but it persists as a residual of folk religion.

When our ancient ancestors slit the throats of humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of sacrifices heavenward, many believed they were literally feeding supernatural beings. In time, in most religions, the rationale changed—the gods didn’t need feeding so much as signs of devotion and penance. The residual child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes, it is there) typically has this function. Christianity’s persistent focus on blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the be-all-end-all lamb without blemish, the final “propitiation” for human sin—is hopefully the last iteration of humanity’s long fascination with blood sacrifice.

8. Hell – Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering the Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.

Most Buddhists see hell as a metaphor, a journey into the evil inside the self, but the descriptions of torturing monsters and levels of hell can be quite explicit. Likewise, many Muslims and Christians hasten to assure that it is a real place, full of fire and the anguish of non-believers. Some Christians have gone so far as to insist that the screams of the damned can be heard from the center of the Earth or that observing their anguish from afar will be one of the pleasures of paradise.

9. Karma – Like hell, the concept of karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has enormous costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karmasanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the victim. If what goes around comes around, then the disabled child or cancer patient or untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or mangy dog) must have done something in either this life or a past one to bring their position on themselves.

10. Eternal Life – To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the idea of gem encrusted walls, streets of gold, the fountain of youth, or an eternity of angelic chorus (or sex with virgins) may have seemed like sheer bliss. But it doesn’t take much analysis to realize how quickly eternal paradise would become hellish—an endless repetition of never changing groundhog days (because how could they change if they were perfect).

The real reason that the notion of eternal life is such a bad invention, though, is the degree to which it diminishes and degrades existence on this earthly plane. With eyes lifted heavenward, we can’t see the intricate beauty beneath our feet. Devout believers put their spiritual energy into preparing for a world to come rather than cherishing and stewarding the one wild and precious world we have been given.

11. Male Ownership of Female Fertility – The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman should die of childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional religions variously assert that men have a god-ordained right to give women in marriage, take them in war, exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the origins of their offspring can’t be assured. Hence Catholicism’s maniacal obsession with the virginity of Mary and female martyrs.

As we approach the limits of our planetary life support system and stare dystopia in the face, defining women as breeders and children as assets becomes ever more costly. We now know that resource scarcity is a conflict trigger and that demand for water and arable land is growing even as both resources decline. And yet, a pope who claims to care about the desperate poor lectures them against contraceptionwhile Muslim leaders ban vasectomies in a drive to outbreed their enemies.

12. Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship) – Preliterate people handed down their best guesses about gods and goodness by way of oral tradition, and they made objects of stone and wood, idols, to channel their devotion. Their notions of what was good and what was Real and how to live in moral community with each other were free to evolve as culture and technology changed. But the advent of the written word changed that. As our Iron Age ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas into sacred texts, these texts allowed their understanding of gods and goodness to become static. The sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam forbid idol worship, but over time the texts themselves became idols, and many modern believers practice—essentially—book worship, also known as bibliolatry.

Adherents who think their faith is perfect, are not just naïve or ill informed. They are developmentally arrested, and in the case of the world’s major religions, they are anchored to the Iron Age, a time of violence, slavery, desperation and early death.

Ironically, the mindset that our sacred texts are perfect betrays the very quest that drove our ancestors to write those texts. Each of the men who wrote part of the Bible, Quran, or Gita took his received tradition, revised it, and offered his own best articulation of what is good and real. We can honor the quest of our spiritual ancestors, or we can honor their answers, but we cannot do both.

Religious apologists often try to deny, minimize, or explain away the sins of scripture and the evils of religious history. “It wasn’t really slavery.” “That’s just the Old Testament.” “He didn’t mean it that way.” “You have to understand how bad their enemies were.” “Those people who did harm in the name of God weren’t real [Christians/Jews/Muslims].” Such platitudes may offer comfort, but denying problems doesn’t solve them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Change comes with introspection and insight, a willingness to acknowledge our faults and flaws while still embracing our strengths and potential for growth.

In a world that is teeming with humanity, armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones, we don’t need defenders of religion’s status quo—we need real reformation, as radical as that of the 16th Century and much, much broader. It is only by acknowledging religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope of embracing the best.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington, and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at valerietarico.com.

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confrontingbabble-on · 6 years

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“These twelve dubious concepts promote conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace.

2. Heretics – Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders, they are morally suspect and often seen as less than fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken from among outsiders don’t merit the same protections as Hebrew slaves. Those who don’t believe in a god are corrupt, doers of abominable deeds. “There is none [among them] who does good,” says the Psalmist. Islam teaches the concept of “dhimmitude” and provides special rules for the subjugation of religious minorities, with monotheists getting better treatment than polytheists. Christianity blurs together the concepts of unbeliever and evildoer. Ultimately, heretics are a threat that needs to be neutralized by conversion, conquest, isolation, domination, or—in worst cases—mass murder.

4. Blasphemy – Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are inviolable, off limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even question. By definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and it is precisely this emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran does not, but death-to-blasphemers became part of Shariah during medieval times.The idea that blasphemy must be prevented or avenged has caused millions of murders over the centuries and countless other horrors. As I write, blogger Raif Badawi awaits round after round of flogging in Saudi Arabia—1000 lashes in batches of 50—while his wife and children plead from Canada for the international community to do something.

6. Genital mutilation – Primitive people have used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that. In Judaism, infant circumcision serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts. In one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to convert and submit his clan to the procedure as a show of commitment to a peace treaty. (While the men lie incapacitated, the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.)

7. Blood sacrifice – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only some Hindus (during the Festival of Gadhimai) and some Muslims (during Eid al Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice) continue to ritually slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale. Hindu scriptures including the Gita and Puranas forbid ritual killing, and most Hindus now eschew the practice based on the principle of ahimsa, but it persists as a residual of folk religion.

When our ancient ancestors slit the throats on humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of sacrifices heavenward, many believed that they were literally feeding supernatural beings. In time, in most religions, the rationale changed—the gods didn’t need feeding so much as they needed signs of devotion and penance. The residual child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes it is there) typically has this function. Christianity’s persistent focus on blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the be-all-end-all lamb without blemish, the final “propitiation” for human sin—is hopefully the last iteration of humanity’s long fascination with blood sacrifice.

8. Hell – Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering that Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.

9. Karma – Like hell, the concept of karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has enormous costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karma can sanctify the broad human practice of blaming the victim. If what goes around comes around, then the disabled child or cancer patient or untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or mangy dog) must have done something in this or a previous life to bring their position on themselves.

As we approach the limits of our planetary life support system and stare dystopia in the face, defining women as breeders and children as assets becomes even more costly. We now know that resource scarcity is a conflict trigger and that demand for water and arable land is growing even as both resources decline. And yet, a pope who claims to care about the desperate poor lectures them against contraception while Muslim leaders ban vasectomies in a drive to outbreed their enemies.

“Because the faith of Islam is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the religion,” says one young Muslim explaining his faith online. His statement betrays a naïve lack of information about the origins and evolution of his own dogmas. But more broadly, it sums up the challenge all religions face moving forward. Imagine if a physicist said, “Because our understanding of physics is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the field.” Adherents who think their faith is perfect, are not just naïve or ill informed. They are developmentally arrested, and in the case of the world’s major religions, they are anchored to the Iron Age, a time of violence, slavery, desperation and early death.

Change comes with introspection and insight, a willingness to acknowledge our faults and flaws while still embracing our strengths and potential for growth. In a world that is teeming with humanity, armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones, we don’t need defenders of religion’s status quo—we need real reformation, as radical as that of the 16th Century and much, much broader. It is only by acknowledging religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope of embracing the best.”

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington.

https://valerietarico.com/2015/01/20/religions-dirty-dozen-12-really-bad-religious-ideas-that-have-made-the-world-worse/

#atheist #agnostic #secular humanist #skeptic #Religion #Christianity #religious insanity

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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Betrayal of the Kurds, Trump Joins His Predecessors, but Why? America has done little but betray the Kurdish people, over and over. You see, you can only betray someone that trusts you and the Kurds, to a fault, are trusting people who love Americans. Problem is, the Americans the Kurds love don’t run America and, quite frankly, maybe just don’t exist anymore. We begin with this quote from the Daily Beast, a media outlet once controlled by powerful Israeli/American Congresswoman Jane Harman, whose career plummeted when she was caught aiding superspy Jonathan Pollard. That’s another story, the public story is that Pollard was aiding Israel with intelligence on Palestinians. The truth? Pollard destroyed the CIA by accessing lists of deep cover operatives which were sold to the highest bidder, and that would be the Soviet Union. Over 1000 were “liquidated.” I only bring this up as we will, as we go on here, enter a differentiated reality. I served in the KRG with the UN mission at the height of the American occupation. As a diplomat and American who was critical of US policy, I built strong relationships, strong friendships and angered more than a few when I failed to buckle under to US pressure from Baghdad. As with any issue, the first thing we address is or should we why a reader should care, why does it matter now, even if one lives 3000 or 7000 miles away? Always an answer are issues of right and wrong, good and bad, there is a place for morality and justice, even today. Here is our Daily Beast quote, as promised: “It’s clear that Donald Trump feels no remorse over his decision to abandon the U.S. military’s Kurdish allies in Syria to make way for an attack from Turkey. The White House announced late Sunday that U.S. troops will withdraw from northern Syria and leave the Kurds, who have carried out the majority of the fighting against ISIS and led the fight to take down the terror group’s “caliphate,” to face an invasion from Turkey. Writing Monday morning, Trump more or less said “tough luck” to the allies he’s abandoned, saying the Kurds “will now have to figure the situation out.” He wrote: “The Kurds fought with us but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades. I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home. WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.” The president added: ‘We are 7000 miles away and will crush ISIS again if they come anywhere near us!’” The Kurds exist in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran in significant numbers. The land the occupy changes as they have both been ethnically cleansed and acted as “ethnic cleansers” when backed by the US. Thus, Syrians have always had a Kurdish population north of Aleppo and in some Eastern regions but generally deny a historical Kurdish region in Hasakah or particularly in Deir Ezzor, where Kurds removed Arab populations and have acted as a hostile occupying force as demonstrated by widespread uprisings in some areas against Kurdish rule. Inside Iraq, Kurds had held regions north of Bagdad until removed by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, moved north as their presence threatened control of the massive Kirkuk oil reserves. We are also going to supply some background material now as well, as context is everything and as Trump so often rightfully acknowledges, what the public is told is 100% fake. Run the clock up to 2014 and the lightning ISIS takeover of much of Iraq. I was there at the time, representing a defense group out of the UAE, Britain, France and the US, trying to reorganize Iraq’s military. I won’t go there but saying it was a “fools’ mission” is understatement. You see, the CIA had preceded me with bushels of Saudi cash and a story. They were going to put the minority Sunni population of Iraq back into preeminence but in order to do that, a fake terror group had to be created, one tightly controlled, which would start a civil war that would destroy the powerful Shiite militias backed by Iran and foster an American return. The CIAs goal was to rebuild infrastructure and a political climate that would allow the US to manipulate a divided Iraq into hosting an American invasion of Iran from its soil and ISIS was going to make that possible. Thus, Americans in Iraq during the war on ISIS primarily bombed Iraqi militias fighting ISIS while supplying ISIS and using American resources to keep the war going as long as possible. General Soleimani of Iran had other ideas and had not been considered. In early October, the US again tried to assassinate Soleimani, the 4th or was it the 5th time? We have other stories, Syria is clear, al Qaeda and ISIS allied with Israel and Saudi Arabia with the US both fighting them and aiding them. What the public never understands is that it is the war that matters, not who is fighting or even who is winning or losing, the long game is always built on conflict. Only during conflict can oil and gas prices be openly manipulated making billions, can huge arms contracts be given away and more billions stolen and governments openly corrupted while the public is lulled into permanent hopelessness under newly empowered police state apparatus in the former Western democracies. Do we talk “Turkey,” the plot to overthrow Erdogan? He says it was the CIA, yet he still sits at the table with NATO and regularly visits the US. Thus, we have a Turkish army poised to enter Syria to slaughter the Kurds who soft of fought ISIS, but mostly stole Arab land and channeled Syrian and Iraqi oil, several billion barrels, through Turkey and into world markets enriching whom? We are then reminded of the Kurdish war on ISIS that allowed ISIS oil convoys to drive right through the Kurdish capital of Erbil for years, right though “battle lines” in a war that was 99% “sitzkrieg” and 1% “blitzkrieg.” Yet like the Palestinians, the Kurds wish their own state. Instead, they were pushed to take someone else’s land, empowered by the CIA’s plots against Turkey, Iraq and Syria, a tool to be used and discarded. They fell into a trap any idiot should have seen, one they had been in before, over and over. Where can they turn? Will Damascus and Moscow save them? Some Kurdish units fought alongside Syrian forces to liberate Aleppo. I have spoken with Syrian leaders and Syria is willing to support a Kurdish autonomous zone predicated on US withdrawal and a reestablishment of Arab communities that were crushed by an American/Kurdish incursion that had little or nothing to do with fighting ISIS. Time and time again, ISIS forces were evacuated from areas where claims were made that ISIS forces were “defeated.” Time and time again, ISIS forces were moved to training camps for redeployment in Syria or Afghanistan when it was claimed they were defeated in battle. Reestablishing trust is a problem for the Kurds and, to an extent, why they face obliteration now. Yet there is an inherent decency to the Kurdish people and if they may be faulted it is for trusting the wrong people or for grasping and opportunities “too good to be true” which of course did turn out to be exactly that, “too good to be true.” We then look at Turkey and ask ourselves, is a potential Syrian sovereignty predicated on real security issues? That answer would generally be “no,” a quite emphatic “no.” Turkey hardly has “clean hands” when it comes to Syria. In Idlib, Turkey has worked hand in hand with ISIS and al Qaeda for years, has violated every agreement and only complies when forced with economic sanctions and military defeat. Turkey continues to consider Hatay Turkish land though that region is ethnically Syrian and has been since time immemorial. Across the border into Idlib, the Turkish occupation, hand in hand with Saudi paid al Qaeda, yes, the same al Qaeda at one time accused of staging 9/11, is an undeniable reality. Yet, with the decline of American power, having lost a “playground fight” threat-match with Iran while Saudi Arabia begins to crumble from both within and without, it is clear that Russia holds all the cards. The question isn’t whether the Kurds will be punished but how much punishment will be allowed as the Turkish incursion spits in the face of Russian guarantees of Syrian sovereignty. Behind this all is the survival of Syria. Idlib province, occupied by Turkey, sits on large oil and gas reserves coveted by Turkey and their Israeli partners. A further threat to Turkey is the proposed oil pipeline from Iran to the Mediterranean, which would cut Turkey’s revenue from Iraq’s Kirkuk oil fields. One might also add that Turkey allowed the theft of Iraqi oil, sold through Turkey, largely to Exxon and BP, for many years, under both US and ISIS occupation. A further reminder is Turkey’s role in the looting of Northern Syria. Entire factories were removed, banks looted, everything that could be moved from the most industrialized regions of Syria were trucked into Turkey and divided up by key families loyal to Erdogan. The Ministry of Justice in Damascus has a list, a long list, endless evidence and is unlikely to “forgive and forget” the theft of $100 billion in assets by Turkey. I have reviewed these records personally. Iraq has a similar list and the Baghdad government cites Kurdish complicity in the looting of Iraq by ISIS. All roads to Turkey and the world’s markets go through 100% Kurdish controlled regions, those thousands of oil trucks for instance, escorted out of Iraq by Kurds, not ISIS. Not everyone in the world is ignorant of geography. Yet, when the Kurds face wrath, particularly under the hand least offended, that of Turkey, should they not be defended, particularly by America? Behind this is a longer game, one of preventing the inevitability of an Islamic “super-state” capable of stabilizing the region and setting up a broad trade zone between Europe and China. This, of course, is not just the southern route of the “Silk Road” but something more. Playing the “great game” of divide and conquer, pitting Sunni and Shiite against one another, supporting the terrorist MEK or toying with the Kurds are only ways of putting off what is an inevitability. It isn’t an Islamic nuclear superpower that is feared but rather the most dangerous threat the “elites” and “oligarchs” face of all, of peace “breaking out.”

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