Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Religious Believers: If You're Against Church/State Separation, Here's How It's Gonna Work



In light of the recent uproar over the refusal by Rowan County clerk Kim Davis to issue marriage licences to anyone in her county due to her "deeply-held" religious belief against same sex marriage, and her subsequent jail time, I've been motivated to write about an idea I've been entertaining on what a legal system could look like if government and religion were in business together.

Imagine if the government legally forced every religious person to live according to the rules of their religion so that they had to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. They would not be allowed to pick and choose which religious rules they wanted to live by or force others to live by. It would work like this. Everyone would have to register their religious affiliation with the government. For whatever religion you register with, special laws would apply to you on top of civil laws from that religion. So if you register as a Catholic, it would be illegal for you to divorce, or to use any contraception, have abortions, masturbate, have any sex outside of marriage, and even watch pornography. Your internet service provider would have to block pornographic websites from being accessed. If you register as a Muslim, it would be illegal to eat pork, drink alcohol, eat during Ramadan, have any sex outside of marriage, watch porn, and daily prayer would be mandatory.

All the special religious rules would be laws that each member of the religion would have to adhere to, under penalty of the law. Failure obey these laws would result in anything ranging from a fine, to a prison sentence. Your religion would be displayed on your state issued ID, so a liquor store clerk would be able to see if you were Muslim and trying to buy alcohol, and a convenient store clerk would be able to see if you were a Christian and trying to buy condoms, and they would be obligated to refuse to sell it to you. All the regular secular laws that exist would still apply to everyone, but the religious laws would apply in addition to them for registered religious adherents. If the two were in conflict, there'd be a general preference for secular law over religious law, so if someone's religion allowed human sacrifice, or wife beating, it would still be illegal for them.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Have A Happy Labor Day Weekend!



I will be hedonistically partying this long weekend and relaxing and probably will not be able to blog. I have so many blog ideas in the pipe but so little time to write them. Aahhh! Enjoy your weekend! Stay safe.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

The Philosophical Definition Of An Asshole


Assholes: A Theory is a recent book by philosophy professor Aaron James which explores the concept of assholes. Usually male, but not always, he offers this interesting definition of an asshole:

The guy who systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.

We all probably know a few of those people. It would also seem that many self declared religious prophets are assholes, given their sense of entitlement. Mohammad was definitely an asshole. According to him, he was allowed to have as many wives as he wanted, but all other men could only have up to four. Joseph Smith was definitely an asshole. He told his wife that god commanded him to marry other women, lots of them, and that an angel even appeared to him with a sword threatening him if he didn't comply.

Oh Mormonism. You make it so easy for us atheists. I suppose many things can be a cover for assholery but religion sure does a fine job.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Peter Joseph On "Economic Calculation in a Natural Law"


Peter Joseph is a popular documentary maker with a strong online presence. He's mostly known for the Zeitgeist documentary in 2007 which went viral in the early days of YouTube. It featured a section on Jesus mythicism which wasn't well cited and many of its claims have since been for the most part debunked, but nonetheless became very influential and caught the attention of virtually the entire Christian community.

But this post is not about that. Peter Joseph's main focus is on creating a new cultural paradigm in terms of how we live, where we get our energy, what we do for a living, and the structure of our economy. He argues that we phase out our market based economy and replace it with a resource based economy. The current market based economy is unsustainable and is designed to fail. It is a train wreck waiting to happen. And educating the public on this while promoting his alternative, is his main agenda. Too often however, his criticism of Christianity is all people hear and some people just shut out all his ideas based on that.

Regardless of whether or not you're a believer, I think his ideas are worth listening to. They are concerned with the dangerous direction humanity is headed towards and how we need to change the current system for the better and achieve the energy and resource stability and abundance in order to avoid the cliff that we are headed towards. I'm not saying I agree with him on every point, or that I'm endorsing all his views, but we need to explore alternatives to the current paradigm, which is poisonous.


Sunday, August 30, 2015

The Religion-Table Analogy



Last month when I was visiting my family we got into a conversation about what gives our lives purpose. I mentioned to my mother and sister that helping rid the world of religion gives my life purpose, and my sister, who is not religious in a traditional sense but very spiritual, shot back and said that there is a lot of good in religion. I agreed with her that all religions have some good in them but that the metaphysical beliefs that justify the good things in religion, also justify the bad things in religion, and I came up with what I call the religion-table analogy to try and explain it a bit better.

It works like this. A table is held up by its legs. On the table you can have good things and bad things, like, say, healthy food, and poisonous food. That represents the good of religion and the bad. The legs represent the metaphysical beliefs of religion that support all of its claims. The same metaphysical arguments that liberal Christians like former president Jimmy Carter can use to justify the truth of his god, are also used by the members of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Westboro Baptist Church, the KKK, and many others, to justify their god and their bad theology. Moderate and liberal theism provides cover for conservative and fundamentalist theism. Instead of just criticizing the fundamentalists, I'm focusing on refuting the metaphysical claims of religion altogether because chopping off the legs of the table takes down everything having to do with the religion. Keeping the legs of the table intact will always allow for the extremist to metaphysically justify their claims. Furthermore, anything good from religion can be justified without it. No one needs to believe Jesus was divine in order to see that helping the poor is good. No one needs to believe Mohammad spoke to the angel Gabriel to see that there is something wrong with charging excessive interest. But many of the bad things that religions have can only be justified with religion. ISIS' despicable theology of rape for example, cannot be justified without a belief in god.

And that's why religion has to go—all of it. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a debate with a hardcore religious fundie and they've tried to trot out the cosmological argument, or the moral argument, in an attempt to justify and lend intellectual credit to their extremist and absurd ideas. Destroy the legs of the religion table, and you destroy all of religion. This is not to say that I believe religion should be refuted because it can do bad things. I primarily believe religion should be refuted because they're all false. But to be responsible, you cannot just stop there. Since religions provide for many comforts in the lives of people, like giving them a sense of meaning, purpose, morality, community, and so forth, religion needs to be replaced with secular alternatives. When this is done, there is little to no difference in the ethical behavior and well-being of an atheist over a theist. And the lives of hundreds of millions of atheists around the world can attest to that.

Monday, August 24, 2015

EASTERN PHILOSOPHY - Confucius


Sunday, August 23, 2015

Personal Being



I find it very odd, that the concept of god involves this totally non-physical abstract being that exists and that has a personality. It's personal. It has desires. It has goals. It wants certain things and doesn't want other things. In fact, it's so personal that we address it using a gender pronoun, like he, she, him, or her.

Share

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...