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Topic: Sanctimonious monsters (Read 647 times) |
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
  
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Sanctimonious monsters
« on: 2008-04-18 23:46:27 » |
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Another great post from Pharyngula
Quote:| Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition. |
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Hermit
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Re:Sanctimonious monsters
« Reply #1 on: 2008-04-19 09:46:44 » |
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I replied at #425
Neither of these nutjobs values life in the slightest.
The Pope claims to cherish life, but he, like his predecessors, advocates a policy of breeding the planet into disaster and humanity into extinction. This year millions of people are likely to starve, partly in consequence of the "civilized" world having decided we need their food to fuel our cars, partly due to depletion of natural resources due to overpopulation, and partly due to the ever escalating cost of fossil fuel and the fertilizers we make from it. The Roman Catholic Church is not going to be helping to solve these problems. Like their Gods (The poor will be with us always), it has neither the capacity nor the will. Indeed the nett flow of money within the Catholic Church is from the world's poor to Rome. Were it to be reversed, centuries of tradition would be undone. And if the Pope stands for anything, he stands for tradition while mouthing platitudes.
As for the USA, aside from the devastation we are directly responsible for in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Sudan and elsewhere, along with the genocide we support in the Palestine, the USA has the worst infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation, and relies evermore on suicide as a cure for retirement and hospital costs, all while residents have a much higher probability of being killed by a securicrat than by a criminal (including so called terrorists) and while we lock up 1% of the total population in jails mostly for non violent "crime" with no victims. If one believes the view of the USA through the TV set, the only time that life is precious to an American is when the cortex is not yet formed (think fetus) or is brain dead (think Terry Schraivo) and there is capital to be made from it. Which, perhaps, says rather more than most Americans would like to stipulate to about how highly they value the brain. Perhaps that is why they have allowed the Bush unregime (a regime is a system under which progress occurs) to establish debts exceeding $450,000 per household. Which will almost certainly lead to more prayer in the future, poverty and prayer bing intimately connected.
As for the Pope's blather and Bush's beliefs about America being a nation of prayer, the USA does seem more prone to prey upon darker skinned people than upon its knees. And while we might be in a fair way to becoming a religious basket case today, with social and ethical problems rising commensurately with irrational beliefs, at least in opposition to the other industrialized nations which are doing the opposite, we really cannot blame it on the founders. The founders of the USA tended, by and large, to reject the Christianity, Theism, superstition and ignorance of our current leadership for a blander but rational and far more humanistic Deism in so much as they vested importance in religion at all.
Adams is illuminating on the subject. "The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses....
Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind." ["A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America", 1787-88, Adams, John]
The overwhelming trappings of religion and superstition in American civil life are not, by and large, historic. Some were introduced as a unifying theme in the horrible period after the civil war, which was almost as rampant with revivalism, fundamentalism and extremism as the right wing today, and these were reinforced and joined by other similar efforts in the 1950s and 60s as a response to the fear engendered in most Americans by the "godless communists".
I could go on to address the fact that our law is (thankfully) [b]not[b] based on the obscene Mosaic law, and point out the hilarity that those making this claim usually miss out on the fact that the "Ten Commandments" they reference were those supposedly written and destroyed by Moses, while the replacements, supposedly written personally by their Gods, are ignored. I could observe that the New Testament is worse in many ways, although generally taken to be the opposite and as but one example, point to the many references permitting and regulating slavery in the babble. I might even discuss the complete failure in logic required to assert that the Gods are the source of ethics (morality being merely the customs and collected prejudice you are taught at your mother's knee, ethics being considered), and therefore right to follow, without being able to address how it can be known which Gods are ethical unless there is some non-god-referenced source of ethics. I could but I won't. It has all been said before and supported with carefully researched references.
More critically, I could raise how these underlying referents, like the language we use, support a "Christian," or at least religious perspective at a level which means that even as we argue against this blatant unrolling of the advances which secular humanism has brought mankind in the last 400 years or so (which vastly exceed all the alleged benefits of all religions and priests ever); so too we reinforce the religious tapestry against which we are objecting. I'm not sure that I have a solution to that, but I am sure I don't see one here either.
I weyken that until we overcome these hurdles, that for all we write most excellent rants, which the above is, that it is not going to change the fact that the USA appears to be trying desperately, and under Bush succeeding all to well, to turn back the klepsydra and return to the era when all men were ruled by religion - and there are reasons why that era is sometimes referenced as the Dark Ages. After all, "there is in every village a torch: The School teacher. And an extinguisher: The Priest." [Victor Hugo] For a recent excellent example of how religion helps people, values life, and is just plain wrong, never mind immoral, just follow this link, Jesus Still* Hates Non-Jewish Girl Children.
My recommendation is not to grant the religious bastards the moral high ground, because, like their god thingies, there is no evidence supporting this at all.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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