I was asked recently why I spend so much time talking about religion (esp. christianity). I was asked "Why don't you just let people believe whatever they want to believe?" Honestly, that strikes me as a fair question. After all, at first glance, whether or not someone believes in some sort of deity seems like a fairly trivial, and personal issue that shouldn't concern anyone else. My answer: "What people believe, affects what they think, which affects how they act." Let me try to illustrate this for you.
According to the Bible:
1) You and I deserve to burn because our great, great (X number of times great) grandmother wanted a piece of fruit.
2) One ancient tribe of semitic nomads is superior to all other people who don't belong to that tribe.
3) Enslaving other people, and beating one's slaves is perfectly, morally permissible.
4) Women are essentially stupid creatures who were created to be subservient to men, who are to take orders from men without question, and who should essentially be nothing more than the property of their husbands.
5) (My most personal objection) My girlfriend should be put to death for who she is. To wit, a bisexual womon.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Further, these biblical beliefs effect people's actions. There are hundreds of thousands of people who not only believe that they are worthless without their deity to give meaning to their lives, but believe that everyone's lives are meaningless if they don't worship that same deity. There are people who claim that natural disasters are their deity's way of punishing societies who are accepting of gay people. There are people who hold that other people should be barred from certain aspects of society based on nothing more than their ancestry, skin tone, or who they're attracted to. There are even people (an astounding number of people, I might add) who seem to think that they cannot possibly have a moral code without their deity, never stopping to realize how hideous and immoral their deity's moral code is. As absurd as these beliefs are, there are thousands upon thousands of people who honestly believe that these "principles" are, and should be, binding upon all of humanity.
In light of this, I will be continuing to point out the moral obscenities of a book that many believe to be the infallible word of a flawless deity, until christianity as we know it is nothing more than a fringe cult that is taken less seriously than scientology.
That being said, if you want to follow a principle of "love your neighbor as yourself", or select a few choice gems of scripture and live your life according to those few gems, then please, by all means continue. But always remember that you don't need a god in order to live your life that way. In fact, according to the Bible, your god hasn't spent his OWN existence living according to those principles.
To sum up, in the words of the great, late, Christopher Hitchens: “In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.”
