Day 4 - my views on religion
I'm a Roman Catholic. (I have been since before I was born...)
This basically for me means I try to be nice to people and I go to church on sundays. I don't follow what the pope says on certain aspects of life like birth control etc. I can't afford a whole tribe of little beeblebears.
I do get annoyed by the stereotyping of religous people as zealots, extremists or paedophiles. I don't fit into any of those groupings thank you very much. only a very small percentage of religous believers fit into such moulds, and only in the same proportions as will be found in the non-religous population.
Richard Dawkins is, in my opinion, a religous extremist. He wants to force his point of view down the throats of those who disagree with him. He takes seriously the soundbite that to make a good person do evil requires religion, and to say that and believe it requires a person to stop thinking entirely. First of all, I don't know anyone who is purely good, or purely evil. Everyone has both sets of impulses to do good and to do bad. To make people who would normally ignore the darker impulses do evil does not require religion. It often requires only hunger, or patriotism, or a concern for animal rights.
Tribalism is a huge cause of the injustices and evils in this world; when one grouping of people decides iot is somehow better than other groupings. However religion is only one form of tribe. There are many others, and religion is becoming a much lesser influence in the western world, and tribalism leading to nastiness is not going away. People are the problem, not what they profess to believe.
This basically for me means I try to be nice to people and I go to church on sundays. I don't follow what the pope says on certain aspects of life like birth control etc. I can't afford a whole tribe of little beeblebears.
I do get annoyed by the stereotyping of religous people as zealots, extremists or paedophiles. I don't fit into any of those groupings thank you very much. only a very small percentage of religous believers fit into such moulds, and only in the same proportions as will be found in the non-religous population.
Richard Dawkins is, in my opinion, a religous extremist. He wants to force his point of view down the throats of those who disagree with him. He takes seriously the soundbite that to make a good person do evil requires religion, and to say that and believe it requires a person to stop thinking entirely. First of all, I don't know anyone who is purely good, or purely evil. Everyone has both sets of impulses to do good and to do bad. To make people who would normally ignore the darker impulses do evil does not require religion. It often requires only hunger, or patriotism, or a concern for animal rights.
Tribalism is a huge cause of the injustices and evils in this world; when one grouping of people decides iot is somehow better than other groupings. However religion is only one form of tribe. There are many others, and religion is becoming a much lesser influence in the western world, and tribalism leading to nastiness is not going away. People are the problem, not what they profess to believe.