Member-only story
I don’t have a problem with religion for the reasons many people do. It’s not the moral absolutism or the sexism by default (well…that’s not all it is). I don’t dislike it because I’m rebelling or because I want to be able to have sex before marriage. My whole problem with religion is that it is the blueprint for every school of thought that prizes obedience above reason.
Every time you’ve seen a person behave in a stupid, unreasonable or bigoted way and thought to yourself “how could they possibly think that’s okay”, that person was making same errors of critical thinking as someone who believes that God wants homosexuals to burn in hell.
Now there’s a discussion to be had about how fair it is to compare a person’s faith with the actions of a bigot. I would that most religious people are decent, kind, tolerant, but the reason that I think that all faith is bad, not just faith when twisted by extremism, is that all faith is constantly vulnerable to being twisted by extremism.
Faith (and the failings of reason and personality responsibility that underpin it) is like a virus lying dormant in the minds of everyone who has embraced it. It legitimises the idea that moral duties and responsibilities can and even should be accepted with no explanation or justification other than the authority of the person bestowing them. That questioning…
