What We Should Do:

Yeah? Then apparently you've not been paying attention to the incredibly LARGER number of vitriolic, inflammatory, and downright aggressive sentiments expressed by the religious faction against the rest of us! Throughout history there have always been huge swaths of territory on this globe where an atheist or even someone who is not a member of the so-charming Abrahamic sects could be executed with no fear of punishment. There are arguably equally large tracts where Abrahamists of competing sects are out gunning for each other. And the earth is in a brief respite right now. The more "normal" state over the past two thousand years has been for the Abrahamists to be on a mission from their god to wipe out our (as well as each other's) entire cultures, including our written histories, our traditions, and our very languages. Sometimes they let us live if we agreed to convert at swordpoint, other times we were only allowed to live as slaves, and other times they just casually exterminated us like we were gophers in their angry, vengeful, cruel and abusive god's front lawn.

It scares me a lot worse to see the leader of the world's most powerful country citing his religion as he sends troops without provocation into a sovereign nation whose people (Iraqis) just happen to be of the same religion (Islam) as the people (Saudis) who perpetrated 9/11. It scares me even worse when he deliberately saturates the airwaves with photos of those soldiers demeaning Muslims (don't tell me that happened by accident, nobody takes hundreds of photos of themselves committing atrocities as souvenirs of their summer vacation) so that now two frelling BILLION Muslims are starting to think that we really are the Great Satan and now they're going to come and try to kill ME even though I'm not one of the superstitious yokels that attends Bush's damn church.

Quick??? This has been going on for two thousand years -- more if you count the atrocities that the Abrahamist Jews got away with before Jesus's time. Abrahamism has brought us the burning of the libraries of the Cushitic Egyptians and the Aztecs, the Inquisition, the total annihilation of the civlizations of the New World, and a nearly constant state of feudal, revenge-driven warfare in the Middle East. It has failed to deter its followers from practicing slavery, genocide, the subjugation of women, and the repression of sub-Sahran Africa. That's a pretty sad list of evil achievements.

And what are these "helpful aspects" that "far outweighed the harmful" listed above? A hundred years after the abolition of slavery, a few liberal Christian churches finally pulled their heads out of the sand and gave their blessing to the civil rights movement -- while the more traditional denominations steadfastly supported segregation. After demonizing Jews for centuries and finally sitting passively with their eyes averted as their leaders came close to killing off the entire ethnic group, guilt-ridden European Christians finally began meekly supporting the Jewish cause -- as long as it involved only sending them money and Mercedes-Benz buses and giving them somebody else's homeland to take over rather than inviting them to live next door in Paris or Rome.

Your apologistic reassurance notwithstanding, the balance sheet after two thousand years of our having to share this planet with the Abrahamists is not very inspiring. It's difficult to imagine ways in which the world could be any worse off if Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed had not existed. Wait a minute, Jesus actually didn't exist, those sections in the writings of Josephus turned out to be forgeries, didn't they. Oh crap, this stuff is just unstoppable.

This consistent, only occasionally and briefly interrupted, pattern of behavior that I have identified in the Abrahamic communities is not "hypocrisy." With no qualms they loudly call each other and the rest of us "infidels," "heathens," "pagans". They joyfully and with great fanfare proclaim themselves superior to each other and the rest of us. They proudly march off to war, crusades, witch hunts, and occupations of other lands, dead certain that they are doing their god's bidding. There is no hypocrisy here.

These religions really are evil. It's time for us to speak the truth instead of being the only ones who support "freedom of religion" for someone other than our own damn selves.

 

Thanks for your supportive words. Now you'll have to excuse me while I go put on my flame-retardant suit.

 

No, we wouldn't! And that's the whole frelling point. NOTHING makes people as angry, hateful, irrational, righteous, and violent as the Abrahamic religions. Well maybe soccer, I'll never understand that crap, and even then they have to be stone drunk and they only do it in the stadiums.

I know you were joking but it's a good springboard for this discussion. The only other thing that comes close is politics. People have fought some pretty bloody wars over politics. But then one side wins and the other side gives in and that conflict is over. It doesn't keep brewing for a thousand years. When we forced the Japanese to surrender after WWII, they didn't have secret meetings in basements with candles where they plotted to restore the empire and conquer the world. Even after the American Civil War, which many historians single out as the most horrible in history by many measures, the people of the South never made a serious attempt to restore the Confederacy, despite the ill will toward "damn Yankees" and the slogans about "hanging on to your Confederate money." Every single time the Union went to war, the Sons of the South marched off with the Sons of the North and fought side by side. In fact, starting with the Vietnam Era, we feel like the Southerners have co-opted our flag and we've reciprocated by putting five of them in the White House.

I know I'm oversimplifying and some animosities kept simmering for multiple generations, but today even the French, Germans, and English have buried the hatchet. Nothing like the never-ending 3-way battle between Judaism, Christendom, and Islam, or between the Catholics and the Protestants, or between the Shias, Sunnis, Wahhabis, Sufis, Hashemites, and whatever other Islamic sects there are.

There is something about this pathetic "one god and he's got a penis" paradigm, this foolish attempt to straitjacket the human spirit into a one-dimensional spectrum where everything is either "good" or "evil" and there are no other choices, that makes a good chunk of that human spirit fester for generations and then explode like a river of lava, burning down everything that gets in its way.

Sports doesn't do this, politics doesn't do this, economic theories don't do this, even flat-out ethnic hatred doesn't do this.

Only the monotheistic, patriarchal religions of Abraham do this to our poor planet.

 

No, I haven't forgotten them. How could I? I am old enough to have lived through the inception of the last two and I had an aunt and uncle who emigrated to the USSR during the Great Depression because life was "so good" over there.

I conceded in my posting that there have been other "great ideas" in the history of the human race -- as well as a rather larger number of crappy ideas -- that motivated people to the same peaks of hatred and irrational violence that I'm speaking of. But I also made the point that not a single one of those ideas has survived for six frelling thousand years and is still inspiring people to commit genocide and other barbarisms in its name.

The USSR is dead. A few minor Soviet satraps have managed to hang onto power in some of the newly liberated republics, but they have no movement. They just have a few sycophants who know which side their bread is buttered on and will be loyal just until the leaders die. And most importantly, they are no longer preaching communism. They're just opportunists.

Communist China exists, but one must put it in context. China was conquered by Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes several centuries ago and they took complete control of the country. There was never an insurgency. They were never overthrown. Yet two or three centuries later, they had disappeared. There was no evidence of Mongols in China except for a few buildings and some grandchildren of suspicious ancestry. China was once again in the hands of the Chinese.

China was conquered by the Manchus a few centuries later. Same thing happened again. No insurgency, no overthrow. Only this time the conquerers had the misfortune of having their own country on China's border. Not only was China magically once again under the rule of Chinese people -- but so was Manchuria!

So now we have China conquered by communism. Any bets on how this will turn out? Especially seeing how things are going right this minute, major experimentation with capitalism?

China is the world's oldest continuous civilization. They have a more patient sense of history than we do. Things take a little longer. But they happen. Have no misgivings, China will absorb, dissipate, and destroy the communists just as it did the Mongols and the Manchurians.

The Khmer Rouge? They didn't survive as long as the Nazis!

My point stands. People rise up and commit atrocities for all kinds of reasons, but they settle down again and progress continues. The Abrahamic religions motivate people to commit continuous strings of atrocities for centuries.

The Dark Ages lasted for an entire Millennium. The repression of sub-Saharan Africa has arguably not yet stopped. The indigenous American peoples are still second-class citizens in their own lands. The holy war between Christendom and Araby is about to flare up again -- what, the fifth time in thirteen hundred years? The Jews and Palestinians are determined to kill each other over a piece of real estate they've been contesting for a thousand years.

Nothing the Russians, Chinese, or Cambodians have done compares to this. The Abrahamic religions instill a sense of hatred, irrationality, and violence, that never ever goes away. It's like the Evil Twin of the Energizer Bunny: still going.