Archive for September 2011
A little bit of religion is a good thing
11 September 2011. It’s the 10th anniversary of that day of which Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld said:
“Religion drove those planes into those buildings, it’s amazing how good religion is at mobilizing people to do awful, murderous things. There is this dark side to it, and anyone who loves religious experience, including me, better begin to own that there is a serious shadow side to this thing.”
We have all experienced the threat firsthand on that fateful day in September 2001 when the screams of “Allah Akbar” were drowned by the thunderous impact of passenger jets crashing into the Twin Towers. We have all of us lived the terror, immediate or threatening, of continuing mutual reactionary consequences, of “infidels”, on both sides of the divide, brutally murdered, of children bleeding to death in Afghanistan and Iraq, of public unrest in protest of mere cartoons. But it is preferable, required even; better, the done thing, to be tolerant, to grin and bear, rather than to affront a believer’s sentiment by a tart remark. Rubbish! Shall we be tolerant? No, a thousand times no! It is feckless to be tolerant.
Contributing writer at TIME, Amy Sullivan, writes in Articles of Faith: The Importance of Understanding Religion in a Post-9/11 World, that “the wishful thinking of the neo-atheists ignores the fact that a little religion often does a lot of good.”
A little bit of drugs also does a lot of good.
But the benefits are meticulously monitored an controlled.
Prescriptions by trained specialists are required to deliver the “lot of good” of “a little drugs”.
Religion.
“To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used”, wrote Richard Dawkins in Religion’s misguided missiles.
The world will be a much better place without reified mythology, no matter how cute the stories are.
I give you the city Jos, where religious slaughtering continues unabated.
Religion. People, said Voltaire, who believe absurdities will commit atrocities. Period.
There is no place for religion in this day and age.
Not even “a little bit”.
