An atheist lists the reasons she’s angry at Christians, because a lot of Christians, as Christians are jerks or worse.
Okay, Christians: even Christ got angry on occaision. Wouldn’t Christ get angry at some of this stuff?
I’m angry — enraged — at the priests who molest children and tell them it’s God’s will. I’m enraged at the Catholic Church that consciously, deliberately, repeatedly, for years, acted to protect priests who molested children, and consciously and deliberately acted to keep it a secret, placing the Church’s reputation as a higher priority than, for fuck’s sake, children not being molested. And I’m enraged that the Church is now trying to argue, in court, that protecting child-molesting priests from prosecution, and shuffling those priests from diocese to diocese so they can molest kids in a whole new community that doesn’t yet suspect them, is a Constitutionally protected form of free religious expression.
…
And I’m angry that Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, the ACLU, and the People For the American Way. I’m angry that the theology of a wrathful God exacting revenge against pagans and abortionists by sending radical Muslims to blow up a building full of secretaries and investment bankers… this was a theology held by a powerful, widely-respected religious leader with millions of followers.
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I’m angry that huge swaths of public policy in this country — not just on same-sex marriage, but on abortion and stem-cell research and sex education in schools — are being based, not on evidence of which policies do and don’t work and what is and isn’t true about the world, but on religious texts written hundreds or thousands of years ago, and on their own personal feelings about how those texts should be interpreted, with no supporting evidence whatsoever — and no apparent concept of why any evidence should be needed.
I maintain that Christianity would be a great religion if it weren’t for two things:
- The insistence that somehow the Old Testament trumps the New
- Hypocrites
Too bad the inevitable direction of organized religion is to crawl in bed with hypocrites. And too bad I read so much 🙂
(via ***Dave)
The insistence that somehow the Old Testament trumps the New
Despite the rather straightforward statements by Jesus (and, on occasion, Paul) that the reverse is true.
Too bad the inevitable direction of organized religion is to crawl in bed with hypocrites.
Not sure I fully agree with “inevitable,” but it’s a constant temptation, as hypocrisy is often short-term profitable, as well as corrosively and emotionally comforting (“he’s doing it, so it’s okay for me to do it, too”).
Well, if it’s true that power corrupts, isn’t it also true that the inevitable tendency for an organized group with power — and why else organize, but for more power? either over others or the self — will attract people who aren’t sincere?
And isn’t it true that even more so than attracting people who aren’t sincere, an organized group will attract people who want to be in a group, who want to believe that because they belong to the group, they don’t have to actually adhere to its precepts? They aren’t all conscious of it, granted.
It’s inevitable that people are, at some point, hypocrites — there are too many things to keep track of*
for a given person to always do what they say they believe is right. A group with 1) power and 2) the ability to provide cover (to the self or others) of hypocracy will attract hypocrites. A group that can provide power over and cover from people’s beliefs will attract a *lot* of hypocrites, ones that don’t try to work out how to stop.
*The brain can intuitively grasp groups of around five objects/ideas; after that, it tends to split the groups into smaller units, which are then combined. Try this with pennies, having someone else hold an unspecificed number of pennies and show them to you for a split second. Anyway, most people have more than five “rules” they have to follow, like “Be polite” “Be kind” “Be loyal” “Love your parents” “Avoid pain” “Avoid embarrassment of the self” “Don’t kill” “Obey authority” and so on and so on…if two or more of these things come in conflict (“Don’t Kill” “Obey authority”), unless you abandon the “rules” and follow some kind of deeper principle, you’ll end up acting as a hypocrite.