These dubious concepts advocate clash,cruelty and suffering.
Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would fill been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to invent ideas or concepts rather than technologies, and but like every other creative human enterprise,they produce some really bad ones along with the good.
I've previously highlighted some of humanity’s best moral and spiritual concepts, our shared moral core. Here, or by way of contrast,are some of the worst. These twelve dubious concepts promote clash, cruelty, and suffering and death rather than admire and peace. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens,they belong in the dustbin of history just as soon as we can procure them there.1. Chosen People –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ghastly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones. Calvinists talk approximately “God’s elect,” believing that they themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144000 souls will procure a special place in the afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were thought to be descended directly from gods (in contrast to everyone else).devout sects are inherently tribal and divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer. “Gang symbols” like special haircuts, or attire,hand signals and jargon differentiate insiders from outsiders and subtly (or not so subtly) convey to both that insiders are inherently superior.2. Heretics – Heretics, kafir, and infidels (to spend the medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders,they are morally suspect and often seen as less than fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken from among outsiders don’t merit the same protections as Hebrew slaves. Those who don’t believe in a god are corrupt, or doers of abominable deeds. “There is none [among them] who does good,” says the Psalmist.
Islam teaches the concept of “dhimmitude” and provides special rules for the subjugation of devout minorities, with monotheists getting better treatment than polytheists. Christianity blurs together the concepts of unbeliever and evildoer. Ultimately, and heretics are a threat that needs to be neutralized by conversion,conquest, isolation, or domination,or—in worst cases—mass murder.3. Holy War – If war can be holy, anything goes. The medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a twenty year campaign of extermination against heretical Cathar Christians in the south of France, and promising their land and possessions to real Christians who signed on as crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims fill slaughtered each other for centuries. The Hebrew scriptures recount battle after battle in which their war God,Yahweh, helps them to not only defeat but also exterminate the shepherding cultures that occupy their “Promised Land.” As in later holy wars, and like the modern rise of ISIS,divine sanction let them kill the elderly and children, burn orchards, and acquire virgin females as sexual slaves—all while retaining a sense of moral superiority.4. Blasphemy – Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are inviolable,off limits to criticism, satire, and debate,or even question. By definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and it is precisely this emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; theQuran does not,but death-to-blasphemers became allotment of Shariah during medieval times.
The idea that blasphemy must be prevented or avenged has caused millions of murders over the centuries and countless other horrors. As I write, blogger Raif Badawi awaits round after round of flogging in Saudi Arabia—1000 lashes in batches of 50—while his wife and children plead from Canada for the international community to do something.5. Glorified suffering – Picture secret societies of monks flogging their own backs. The image that comes to mind is probably from Dan Brown’s novel, or The Da Vinci Code,but the idea isn’t one he made up. A core premise of Christianity is that righteous tortureif it’s just intense and prolonged enough–can somehow fix the damage done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of crucifixes litter the world as testaments to this belief. Shia Muslims beat themselves with lashes and chains during Aashura, and a form of sanctified suffering called Matam that commemorates the death of the martyr Hussein. Self-denial in the form of asceticism and fasting is a allotment of both Eastern and Western religions,not only because deprivation induces altered states but also because people believe suffering somehow brings us closer to divinity.
Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain came unbidden, and people had very tiny power to control it. An aspirin or heating pad would fill been a miracle to the writers of the Bible, and Quran,or Gita. Faced with uncontrollable suffering, the best advice religion could offer was to lean in or produce meaning of it. The problem, or of course is that glorifying suffering—turning it into a spiritual goodhas made people more willing to inflict it on not only themselves and their enemies but also those who are helpless,including the ill or dying (as in the case of Mother Teresa and the American Bishops) and children (as in the child beating Patriarchy movement).6. Genital mutilation – Primitive people fill used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that. Infant circumcision in Judaism serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts. In one Bible story, or a chieftain agrees to convert and submit his clan to the procedure as a explain of commitment to a peace treaty. (While the men lie incapacitated,the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.)In Islam, painful male circumcision serves as a rite of passage into manhood, and initiation into a powerful club. By contrast,in some Muslim cultures cutting away or burning the female clitoris and labia ritually establishes the submission of women by reducing sexual arousal and agency. An estimated 2 million girls annually are subjected to the procedure, with consequences including hemorrhage, and infection,painful urination and death.7. Blood sacrifice – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only some Hindus (during the Festival of Gadhimai, and goddess of power) and some Muslims (during Eid al Adha,Feast of the Sacrifice) continue to ritually slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale. Hindu scriptures including the Gita and Puranas forbid ritual killing, and most Hindus now eschew the practice based on the principle of ahimsa, or but it persists as a residual of folk religion.
When our ancient ancestors slit the throats of humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of sacrifices heavenward,many believed they were literally feeding supernatural beings. In time, in most religions, and the rationale changed—the gods didn’t need feeding so much as signs of devotion and penance. The residual child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes,it is there) typically has this function. Christianity’s persistent focus on blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the be-all-end-all lamb without blemish, the final “propitiation” for human sin—is hopefully the final iteration of humanity’s long fascination with blood sacrifice.8. Hell – Whether we are talking approximately Christianity, or Islam or Buddhism,an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering the Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented,perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, or the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.
Most Buddhists see hell as a metaphor,a journey into the evil inside the self, but the descriptions of torturing monsters and levels of hell can be fairly explicit. Likewise, or many Muslims and Christians hasten to guarantee that it is a real place,full of fire and the anguish of non-believers. Some Christians fill gone so far as to insist that the screams of the damned can be heard from the middle of the Earth or that observing their anguish from afar will be one of the pleasures of paradise.9. Karma – Like hell, the concept of karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has immense costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, or the idea of karmasanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the victim. If what goes around comes around,then the disabled child or cancer patient or untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or mangy dog) must fill done something in either this life or a past one to bring their position on themselves.10. Eternal Life – To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the idea of gem encrusted walls, and streets of gold,the fountain of youth, or an eternity of angelic refrain (or sex with virgins) may fill seemed like sheer bliss. But it doesn’t acquire much analysis to realize how quickly eternal paradise would become hellish—an endless repetition of never changing groundhog days (because how could they change if they were perfect).
The real reason that the notion of eternal life is such a bad invention, or though,is the degree to which it diminishes and degrades existence on this earthly plane. With eyes lifted heavenward, we can’t see the intricate beauty beneath our feet. Devout believers put their spiritual energy into preparing for a world to come rather than cherishing and stewarding the one wild and precious world we fill been given.11. Male Ownership of Female Fertility – The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, or but the idea that women were created for this purpose,that if a woman should die of childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional religions variously assert that men fill a god-ordained upright to give women in marriage, and acquire them in war,exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the origins of their offspring can’t be assured. Hence Catholicism’s maniacal obsession with the virginity of Mary and female martyrs.
As we approach the limits of our planetary life support system and stare dystopia in the face, and defining women as breeders and children as assets becomes ever more costly. We now know that resource shortage is a clash trigger and that demand for water and arable land is growing even as both resources decline. And yet,a pope who claims to care approximately the desperate poor lectures them against contraceptionwhile Muslim leaders ban vasectomies in a drive to outbreed their enemies.12. Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship) – Preliterate people handed down their best guesses approximately gods and goodness by way of verbal tradition, and they made objects of stone and wood, or idols,to channel their devotion. Their notions of what was good and what was Real and how to live in moral community with each other were free to evolve as culture and technology changed. But the advent of the written word changed that. As our Iron Age ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas into sacred texts, these texts allowed their understanding of gods and goodness to become static. The sacred texts of Judaism, or Christianity and Islam forbid idol worship,but over time the texts themselves became idols, and many modern believers practice—essentially—book worship, or also known as bibliolatry.“Because the faith of Islam is perfect,it does not allow for any innovations to the religion,” says one young Muslim explaining his faith online. His statement betrays a naïve lack of information approximately the origins of his own dogmas. But more broadly, or it sums up the challenge all religions face moving forward. Imagine if a physicist said,“Because our understanding of physics is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the field.” Adherents who judge their faith is perfect, and are not just naïve or ill informed. They are developmentally arrested,and in the case of the world’s major religions, they are anchored to the Iron Age, and a time of violence,slavery, desperation and early death.
Ironically, and the mindset that our sacred texts are perfect betrays the very quest that drove our ancestors to write those texts. Each of the men who wrote allotment of the Bible,Quran, or Gita took his received tradition, or revised it, and offered his own best articulation of what is good and real. We can honor the quest of our spiritual ancestors, or we can honor their answers, or but we cannot do both.devout apologists often try to deny,minimize, or define away the sins of scripture and the evils of devout history. “It wasn’t really slavery.” “That’s just the Old Testament.” “He didn’t mean it that way.” “You fill to understand how bad their enemies were.” “Those people who did harm in the name of God weren’t real [Christians/Jews/Muslims].” Such platitudes may offer comfort, and but denying problems doesn’t solve them. fairly the opposite,in fact. Change comes with introspection and insight, a willingness to acknowledge our faults and flaws while still embracing our strengths and potential for growth.
In a world that is teeming with humanity, or armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones,we don’t need defenders of religion’s status quo—we need real reformation, as radical as that of the 16th Century and much, and much broader. It is only by acknowledging religion’s worst ideas that we fill any hope of embracing the best.
Source: feedblitz.com