Guardian: Religion is a bloody disgrace

[muriel_volestrangler]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1302082,00.html

The Abrahamic family of faiths is now frighteningly dysfunctional

Even in the 1980s, Matthew Arnold's 150-year-old Dover Beach poem about the tide of faith receding still deafened us all. We worried about the death of God, being honest to God, and religion evaporating into the secular air. Perhaps that's why it didn't seem to us to play a significant part in most of the troubles of the world - with Belfast and Jerusalem as only partial exceptions. I remember giving sermons about the derivation of the Hebrew word for war - milchamah - which is from the word lechem, bread. The Marxists, I said, had a point when they saw economics as the basis for all struggle. It's poverty, not religion, that is the problem "out there". But the real problem, here where it matters, is the receding tide of faith.

With hindsight, I can see what a staggeringly insular perspective it was. Because faith is not on the retreat from most of the beaches of the world, only in northern Europe; because religion continues to be a hugely significant factor in global conflict. What is happening today isn't new, it's just that we faith leaders in this country didn't see it, didn't see what was coming and didn't have a clue as to our part in it all.
...
In fact, though most religious traditions are big on humility in theory, we do not seem to have a clue what it means. I half-expect to be invited to an international conference on humility and religion in which there are endless papers seeking to demonstrate in which faith the concept of humility originated and who should be awarded the gold medal for being the most humble.

But clinging to old imperialistic and triumphal notions in the face of glaring reality is not the only charge against us. We have utterly failed to stand up against the fearful, exploitative and reactionary forces - to be labelled for shorthand and convenience purposes only as "fundamentalist" - and allowed them to dominate each of us and the world stage perhaps as never before. I hope it is sufficient to say "settlers", "far-right churches in America", and "Islamic extremists" for us to be clear about whom I am talking.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield is the head of the Movement for Reform Judaism

[ixion]

1. nearly all religious institutions preach humility and tolerance and

practice arrogance and intolerance in the extreme.

[starroute]

2. It's not a rebirth of faith -- it's the failure of secular institutions

The problems with most contemporary religions is that ever since the 1830's they have fallen further and further out of touch with science. What people forget is that in the 1800's there were still many questions about the physical world and nature and life and mind that seemed unanswerable except by assuming a creator-god to work out the fine details and infuse consciousness into dead matter. Even organic chemistry was assumed to be a sort of divine mystery that could never be reproduced in the laboratory.

But one at a time, all the old scientific mysteries that so puzzled the 19th century have turned out to be explainable. New mysteries have come along to replace them -- but the traditional religions with their doctrine of a creator-god aren't much help in illuminating such things as quantum mechanics. At the same time, growing awareness of the age and size of the universe, the variety of religious beliefs even on our own planet, and the ordinary literary processes which lie behind the world's scriptures have undercut the ability of any one religion to lay special claim to revealed truth.

That is why mainstream creeds are being squeezed out by fundamentalism in all the old religions. Fundamentalism is the "My mind is already made up. Don't confuse me with the facts." school of religious belief. The less grounds there are for reasonable, thinking people to endorse traditional religion, the more they will be superseded by religious know-nothings.

That traditional religions have actually been gaining strength despite their increasing intellectual impoverishment is less a tribute to religion than a sign of the failure of the current world-system to offer any hope for the future to the majority of the world's population. It's no coincidence that fundamentalists tend to be the poorest, most uprooted, most cut off from the economic mainstream of the world's peoples. (That plus a few really rich folk looking for a convenient tool to control the masses.) They're aiming for pie in the sky when they die, 'cause they sure ain't getting any here on earth.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. That's in line with what Karen Armstrong says about fundamentalism,

that it appeals to people who are the "losers" of the modern world.

I heard her speak at the Episcopal cathedral in Portland, and she gave herself as an example of someone who benefited from the modern world: able to support herself as a writer and researcher, able to travel the world, appear in the media, and do so as a single woman.

But an awful lot of people have been terribly hurt by the modern world, whether it's from economic dislocation, loss of traditional communities, wars, or whatever, and they have been unable to take advantage of the good things about the modern world. Therefore they are susceptible to calls to go "back to the good old days."

[smirkymonkey]

7. That's what I have always thought...

fundamentalism is reactionary, whether religious, political or ideological.

This past century has seen such rapid change and many are not equipped to keep pace with it, for whatever reason. It's a fear-based reaction to that which one cannot control.

We are seeing that right here in this country w/ Christian fundamentalists. They are clinging tooth & nail to a world which doesn't exist anymore and trying to drag this country back down with them.

[bogey18]

9. I kill you in the Name of God

"There has been more blood spilled and evil done in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in history." - Charles Kimball, professor of Religion at Wake Forest University.

[airstrip1]

8. Too bloody right

but are not the free market globalist economic mantras quoted by the West's politicians, the international corporations, IMF and World Bank just as dogmatic and inhumane as the ravings of some of the fundamentalists. Our system states that if you have no economic value then you have no worth. It is hardly suprising that people on the receiving end of this ideology are attracted to belief systems that offer an alternative. For example, the Muslim radicals have a role for all their followers even if it is just as a sacrificial victim in their war with the infidel. Looking at the Middle East it is easy to see how successful they have been in mobilising discontent. By comparison the secular elites of the West seem only to care about the next quarters corporate figures and how many lay offs will be required to maintain their profit margins. No prizes for guessing whose going to win this particular struggle.

[Gyre]

3. This entire topic

reminds me of the scene in "2000; A Space Odyssey", where "the monolith" appears and all the primates are going nuts and fawning over it. At least that was "a fact" with an apparently reasonable simian response to something completely unexplainable.

What we have now with a global resurgence of human religious extremism based on unverifiable legend and mythology is pure insanity.

Gyre

[dand]

4. "Pure insanity", that is a perfect description.

[Catfight]

6. Indeed. n/t