The Dozen Reasons Religion Is Dirty

Some of the most heinous atrocities of all time can be attributed to religious bigotry, and thinking as convoluted and destructive as a skinning babies alive.You want horror? Read the Bible (Old or New Testament).You want evil? Read the Koran.So here's a sampling of the worst of the worst.Technologies like the Medieval rack, the Atom Bomb, and Biological Warfare pare nicely with concepts promoting conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace.
1.Chosen people don't exist.It's an ugly idea beginning with Hebrews and morphing through all sects.Christians were the Chosen in the New Testament.Calvinists speak of "God's Elect". 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 descendants of the gods.Religious sects are divisive,primitive, and tribal.Religious truths promise an afterlife of blessings and privilege.Gangs do the same thing.
2.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.
3.Holy War(the war most often fought)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.” The holy wars of today, 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.
4.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 of 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. Raif Badawi waited 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 is a core premise of Christianity. It is righteous torture.If it’s intense and prolonged enough it can somehow fix the damage done by evil, and/or 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.God is a nasty creature.Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain came from nowhere, 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 make meaning of it. The problem, of course is that glorifying suffering,or turning it into a spiritual good, 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 has been used from the beginning. Scarification and other body modifications defines tribal membership as long as recorded history. Genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks. Judaism's, 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 Israelis.
Islamic, 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. An estimated 2 million girls annually are subjected to the procedure, with consequences including hemorrhage, infection, painful urination and death.
7.Blood sacrifice still occurs in some Hindus,during the Festival of Gadhimai, and some Muslims,during Eid al Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice.The ritual slaughter of sacrificial animals on a mass scale can be found in Hindu scriptures including the Gita and Puranas actually 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.Our ancient ancestors slit the throats on humans and animals or cut out their hearts. They burned the bodies or organs in order to send the smoke of sacrifices heavenward. They believed they were literally feeding supernatural beings. In time, in most religions, the rationale changed, and 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, and 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.Catholics still eat and drink the "blood and flesh" of Jesus symbolically.
8.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.
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. 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.How sick is that?
9.Like hell, the concept of Karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior. 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, hungry rabbit, or mangy dog, must have done something in this or a previous life to bring their position on themselves.
10.Eternal life is such a bad invention,that 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.We have created our own coffin on earth with climate change.
11.Male ownership of female fertility made women brood mares and children assets. This didn't originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, and if a woman should die in childbearing, she was made to do it, most certainly did. Traditional religions variously asserts 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. Islam’s maniacal obsession with covering the female body began with this concept. Evangelical promise rings, and gender segregated sidewalks in Jerusalem and Orthodox Jewish women wearing wigs over shaved heads in New York, also comes from these beliefs.
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 out-breed their enemies.
12.Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship) – Preliterate people handed down their best guesses about gods and goodness by way of oral tradition. 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 a moral community with each other were free to evolve as culture and technology changed. 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 what is essentially,"book worship", known as "Bibliolatry".
“...Because the faith of Islam is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the religion.” This statement illustrates a lack of information about the origins and evolution of religious dogmas. 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.
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 exist doesn’t solve them. Change comes with introspection and insight. The willingness to acknowledge our faults and flaws while still embracing our strengths and potential for growth is what enables us to evolve as a society.
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.