Criticizing Religion

A couple of weeks ago, an occasional reader of my Blog commented that I pick on Christianity a lot. If you click on the “Religion” tag to pull up old posts, you’ll certainly see that’s true. You’ll also see that I’ve criticized Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, and Scientology. I do this because I’m a skeptic and I can’t stand hypocrisy or stupidity. Religion tends to bring out both. Trying to resolve complicated, modern problems by applying centuries-old religious dogma (coming from primitive tribes who didn’t understand the world a tenth as well as we do) leads directly to stupid (and often cruel) behavior and irrational positions. Dusty old holy books have nothing useful to contribute to issues like stem cell research, civil rights, gender roles, population control, cloning or any of the myriad modern issues humanity is grappling with. We need to have honest, insightful discussions of these issues and when someone brings out their holy book, which just happens to agree with their position, all they’re doing is getting in the way of rational, reasonable solutions.

I criticize Christianity more than other religions for two reasons. One, I live in the United States, a nation composed of a large Christian majority, and so I’m exposed to Christianity on a daily basis, much more so than any other religion. And two, U.S. Christians are particularly aggressive at pushing their religion on others. As a general rule, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews aren’t trying to push creationism into public schools, aren’t trying to institutionalize their religion into the U.S. government, aren’t endangering the health and safety of children, and aren’t acting all high and mighty while pushing their ridiculously out-of-date, irrational ideas. Since religious behavior worldwide is mostly homogeneous, I’m sure they do this in other countries, but in the U.S., not so much.

So, until religious folk learn to keep their religion out of other people’s business and stop trying to drag our country and world back into the Dark Ages, I will continue to criticize their actions. Sadly, I don’t expect this to happen in my lifetime.