Fundamentalist Christians have very strong views on certain things that you and I may disagree with, but that doesn't mean that Christianity or religion itself more broadly is a cancer.
For instance, they hate abortion because they view it as murder, which is itself a morally consistent position to take. If you believed abortion was murder I'd hope that you would hate it to.
We just happen to disagree with them on the status of a fetus.
Now their intolerance of certain groups (LGBT people most prominently) itself cannot be tolerated, but their intolerance is more a result of religion being influenced by the status quo of old world values.
As society as a whole becomes more accepting of different people over time, religion will also adopt those values just as successful religions have always done. Viewed in this light organized religion is not a cancer but simply something that must be refined a bit in the context of our changing society.
I find it also surprising that the Christian muscle in this country is immense, they could move mountains, but for over 20 years the only issues which has captivated their national attention have been sexual ones. And now there's this transgender business.
Is there no Christian political consensus to be had on the poor? Why was there national discussion on a constitutional ban for gay marriage during the presidential elections? Did the thought of stopping gay marriage rally the base?
But attitudes about marriage and sexuality are really very small and insignificant aspects of religion as a whole. Politics and culture war have inflamed certain issues in America, but those issues will resolve themselves in time.
Once they do people will have less of a reason to be mad at religion. What I'm cautioning against is conflating frustration towards religious attitudes about particular things that are slowly changing in the present with thr idea that there is something fundamentally wrong about religion itself.
If you made a mistake about something, I wouldn't automatically assume you yourself are broken. I would just help correct you then wish you the best.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-ri...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/books/review/one-nation-u...
In terms of LGBT hate, that's largely an outgrowth of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam etc and their cultural influences. For comparison you need to look at what they replaced, and that's very much a mixed bag.
I would suggest that when you have a large number of options the bust by metric X (Morality) is unlikely to be chosen if it's Metric Y that's used. For the same reason the gold metal winning sprinter is unlikely to also be the best looking.
I don't think that's true. At some point, an abhorrent moral code is going to entail a proposition that is either factually incorrect or inconsistent with itself.
People disagree to the degree killing cows is OK. But, both sides can be consistent based around what lives matter. Classify Group X say Murders, Outlaws, Nazi's, white people, or even humans outside the tribe in the killing allowed category and everything can stay consistent.
Except it's not consistent with basic facts, like the fact that the differences between any group of humans is non-existent. There's also a Kantian argument to be made that killing period, is inherently logically inconsistent.
That's clearly a false assumption. As long as I can identify a group say people who's social security numbers end in 7 then their exists a difference between them and all other groups. Now placing any real value on having a SSN ending in 7 may seem meaningless, but the difference exists.
PS: It could even be useful as a means of load balancing.
That's not a difference, that's an arbitrary classification that has no moral implications.
A meaningful difference with moral implications would be something like one race being superior to another, as the Nazis believed, or some bloodlines being divinely selected, as the Royal family of England once believed. This enables you to argue that one class of people is bound to a different set of moral prescriptions than another.
When arguing that one group of people have different moral prescriptions, then you are implicitly asserting that there is some objective, factual difference between these groups that entails this conclusion. Such differences don't actually exist, ergo, there is no justification for treating them any differently.
Now, assigning meaning to differences is by definition part of a specific moral framework and does not generalize.
To a theoretical "hyper intelligent" 207 dimensional being we may not qualify as sentient. After-all, anything bound by something as meaningless as time is incapable of making decisions and will always respond the same to given stimuli at specific points of space-time. Such linear beings don't actually feel things they simply respond to stimuli much like plants.
AKA Same facts, different interpretation = different moral framework.
PS: Do we save women and children first, or are young warriors more important to long term survival? Same 'fact' different interpretation of that fact.
That's right. The "difference" you pointed out is not a difference of the people themselves, it's a difference in classification in a completely separate system from the people.
If you do pure random assignment then having a 7 at the end of your SSN could make a difference. EX: We rolled a 10 sided die an a 7 came up. On the other hand if you want to maximizing the number of people saved other things may be considered (Age, weight, vision etc).
I am not going to say a specific system is the only correct one in that case, but rather many of the differences you suggest are meaningless could suddenly become meaningful differentiation in a moral system. Further, those differences are not necessarily inherently important outside of that specific system and situation.
For instance, they hate abortion because they view it as murder, which is itself a morally consistent position to take. If you believed abortion was murder I'd hope that you would hate it to.
While I'm aware that this statement is not 100% true it significantly more often than not seems to be the case.
Note that I don't intend to provoke, or get into a flame war, but I'm really curious about this utterly inconsistent view.
However for those that do support the death penalty while at the same time condemning abortion, it's important to realize that for them there is no inconsistency.
It goes like this: abortion is bad because the unborn are morally equivalent to birthed people (by virtue of their souls), and they are essentially innocent beings.
Criminals are not innocent, and therefore killing them is excusable.
Their belief is not inconsistent because of the role innocence plays. Now you may disregard the importance of innocence here, but that doesn't make their views inconsistent.
Their belief is not inconsistent because of the role innocence plays. Now you may disregard the importance of innocence here, but that doesn't make their views inconsistent
In that view the possibility of one innocent person being killed should automatically illegitimze capitol punishment. Apparently it does not.
While I can understand the stance of the catholic church I still think that logically you cannot oppose abortion, while supporting the death penalty.
You made me understand, however, that this inconsistency is not applicable to a lot of those people. It doesn't make it logically less inconsistent in my view.
Anyway, thanks for the insight. It's at the very least, very interesting.
> While I can understand the stance of the catholic church I still think that logically you cannot oppose abortion, while supporting the death penalty
I think that the Catholic view is that murder is defined as "intentional taking of innocent human life" and that it is immoral. In this case you are not intentionally taking an innocent life. Similarly in case of abortion, the church does not oppose treatments that could save the mother's life that could cause the child's death. Here, your intention is to save the mother's life, not to hurt the child. The loss of child's life is an unintenional but unavoidable side effect : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_and_the_Catholic_Ch...
When Pope Francis addressed the United States Congress, he was chided by many for denouncing the death penalty which took 23 American lives in 2017, while staying silent on abortion, of which 652,639 took place in 2014.
There are certainly churches, typically evangelical, that are rabidly anti-abortion while promoting the death penalty, but it's less common in Catholic communities or even mainline Protestant denominations.
I believe abortion is murder. However, I also realize it can be medically necessary if the mother's life would be threatened and so it should be permitted in that instance. Now, I don't deny that abortion is economically useful for some because it obviates personal responsibility, but I think that use is murder. There is the tricky situation when rape is involved, and while I still think it's wrong I'm not adamantly against it in that scenario.
I also believe execution is murder. However, for extreme cases I think it is necessary to execute people who have committed the worst of crimes when it can be definitively proven (e.g., rape, torture, and deliberate murder).
So in my mind both are morally wrong, but there are extreme situations where they should be permitted and I think are necessary.
Because babies are innocent by default and murderers are not?
What I've observed in America of late is a lack of religions maintaining social relevance and so increasingly becoming scapegoated by the crazies that hold out. I also consider scientific method to be an unconventional "religion" insofar as it's proliferated enough to have crazies of its own telling people how to live their lives and making dogmatic claims it itself cannot even support (your god isn't real we haven't observed it yet--would sound petty and absurd were the same argument made to counter theorized atomic particles).
It's hard because religions need to take the more difficult moral and ethical stances that no (faction balancing federated democractic) government should take, and like you mention with abortion some of those end up leaking out into the legal system.
Marriage is another thing that's danced the line but I think it falls on the other side: people let it leak into laws, or more accurately it existed in laws as the status quo, when it doesn't belong there. Two gay peole who are truly e.g. Catholic can happily live together and love each other. If they believe the Catholic criteria and definition of marriage they do not seek it. Yet they are fully allowed to openly share their love in any way the church allows for any other unmarried couple. Sexual intercourse, a beautiful enjoyable act in the church's eye, remains for the purpose of procreation and is respected not as a lustful act of pleasure, but as an intensely spiritual experience under the pretext of two married humans creating a child. In practice and due to it being socially progressive and now very safe (old "status quo thought" of abstinence is a good way to prevent spread of disease), of course people have lots of extramarital sex. But those people are not to be shunned, or excluded in most Christian sects. Extramarital sex is no more grave a sin if it between two members of the same sex as were it between a happily engaged heterosexual couple. So marriage is a religious concept that should mostly remain religious. Legally as a society it's probably in our interest to subsidize couples or parties living together (sharing space and resources) and then further subsidize those parties who choose to raise children (of their own or by way of adoption). But man it kills me how many people on both sides brought religion into what was largely a social topic during the whole marriage equality push despite the fact that I agree with the outcome.
So what is the problem? Globalization exposes fundamental radicals easier? Perhaps, but I think in America it's our ingrained social willingness to yield to "prosperous" economic policy that ends up causing the economy to ehm trump human rights. IMO it's a slow trickle of those decisions that has caused us to regress. Why is healthcare expensive, because it must prove its value economically. We don't value health enough (or we value the healthcare industry too much) to make sacrifices required to legally mandate socialized care (we would kill a huge industry, and then it's just a huge expense the government incurs that didn't exist before, lose lose). It's really that simple albeit no less unfortunate, and I personally have the health care industry to thank for most of what I've been given in life. A true doctor will take care of all patients who stumble into the ER whether they get paid market rate or not, it's part of their ethical code. So in that sense we have some sort of basic level of universal healthcare. We just haven't all agreed whether we should pay for your weed and contraception and experimental procedures and more reasonably your preventative medicine (although the business model discourages prevention while selecting for continued consistent doctor visits—another problem) too. And we certainly have failed to convey to the less fortunate an attitude of openness and acceptance and assure them that they will be taken care of to a reasonable extent by our doctors and hospitals. Insurance companies with convoluted policies and systems designed to minimize their payouts certainly don't help paint that picture.
The same thing has happened to education. Both "industries are seen as businesses and expected to run like one (make money). As long as the peripheral participants in these industries (hospital/school executive staff, insurance/loan agencies, etc.) keep demanding we run things like a business, and as long as we as Americans are okay condoning said behavior directly or by proxy of hyper economic political focus, nothing will change. Call me crazy but since when is caring for the health of your neighbor or raising the next generation to be better than the current iteration about making money? Sadly in America, it is.
The difference is that god is supposed to be observable, and isn't. You can look at religious texts and teachings and say "doing this should show that effect", and see that it doesn't.
For theorized particles, they come with "this is how to observe it, we just aren't able to do the experiment yet". And then when research technology reaches the point where we can, someone goes and does the experiment. And at that point, a lack of results absolutely is taken as evidence that whatever particle doesn't actually exist as predicted.
I found about a Unitarian Universalist church in my area and now am considering joining.
In contrast to other religions I've seen, the UU church welcomes everyone no matter their background or who they love. The church I attend has a reproductive task force that helps pregnant women and new moms no matter what they have decided to do with the pregnancy. There is a group that goes to Planned Parenthood in my city to protect women from the protesters. They by diapers for mothers with no money to buy them. They will give rides to doctor appointments for those that need them but can't afford them. They strongly believe we need more sex education and free birth control and that if we have those the need for abortion will be greatly reduced.
So please don't cast your net so widely.
The big distinction for me isn’t whether you believe but whether the focus is internal or external: some people use their religion for self improvement, pushing themselves to be better and help others more; other religions seem to use it as a justification for trying to coerce other people to share their beliefs and to ennoble the hateful things they were going to do anyway. I have far fewer problems with the first group, whereas the latter is completely toxic and increasingly dangerous since they started getting politically active in the 1970s in the backlash to desegregation (abortion wasn’t even an issue until they needed something new to dehumanize the opposition with).