Invisible Friends, Bigotry, and Blame
Offline Reprinted from my wordpress blog:
Many children have invisible friends. For the most part, the practice is seen as relatively harmless, and healthy for the budding imagination. Most of the time, invisible friends are just flights of fancy, and after a relatively short time, fade into the past and give way to big kid diversions. I tend to agree that invisible friends are mostly harmless for children, especially if the parent is very clear in explaining that games and imagination are fun, but that the invisible friend doesn’t have any real place in the universe.
As an example, most parents will not tolerate their child blaming the invisible friend for breaking the window or wetting the bed. When children begin to use the invisible friend as an excuse for their own moral failings, parents usually know enough to put a stop to the whole thing.
Perhaps we should start applying the same logic to adults. The recent case of two girls being expelled from a religious school for acting like lesbians got me to thinking about how Christians and other theists use their god (or gods) as scapegoats for their own moral failings. This becomes particularly obvious to me when I talk to Christians who are obviously bigoted against gays. ”Well,” they opine, “I don’t hate gays, but the Bible clearly says that they are an abomination, and are sinners, perverting the natural use of sex.”
Slap me in the face and call me Betsy, but I can’t see any difference between that and saying that Jack the Invisible Eight Year Old was the one who threw the ball through the window.
Have you noticed that people go to churches that agree with their own ethics? That is, if you go to a Southern Baptist church, pretty much everybody there is going to have the same views on morals and biblical interpretation. Sure, you have some leeway, but you’re not going to see any gay women as ministers. Not for long, anyway. If you go to an Episcopalian church in Boston, you can be relatively certain that you’re going to be in the company of relatively liberal people who believe in a very loose interpretation of the Bible, particularly when it involves hating gays and outlawing abortion and other such public issues.
Isn’t it about time that we start calling things what they are? I’m tired of letting adults hide behind their invisible friends. People who go to churches that promote bigotry are bigots, and I’m done giving them a free pass. If they really felt so strongly that bigotry is wrong, guess what… they wouldn’t be in the church they’re in.
So get angry at me if you want, but I’m done being polite to bigots. I refuse to let them blame their personal opinions on God and get away with it. It’s just another way that religion gets a free pass. Want to be a bigot? Join a bigoted church. Then, you can say anything you want, and blame it on God.
Nope. I’m done with it. Bigots are bigots, and they don’t get away with it just by blaming their invisible friend. Their parents should have taught them better.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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I know I've mentioned this before, but in my view human religious beliefs have always seemed to be nothing more than a reflection of the believer's own ego.
This is an interesting article from New Scientist that seems to touch on your thought process here. The title is Religion: A Figment of Human Imagination
www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
Aren't you a little too bigoted against bigots? I really can't tolerate your bigotry anymore...
Awe crap, I did it too!
I know you're only kidding here, but you do realise that christians actually use that argument in all seriousness, don't you ?
yeah
Bingo.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
In all seriousness I am quite intolerant of bigoted people and I'm ok with it. I am intolerant of their character and their actions. To me there is nothing wrong with that.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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I agree with you about the anger towards bigotry Hamby. However, I think that most of these people that you are referring to are just homophobic. It's just convenient that Biblical passages seem to support their homophobic beliefs. I feel like most of them would still be bigots without religion.
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." (CS Lewis)
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." (CS Lewis)
That's pretty much guaranteed to be true, but the point Hamby makes is that with the scripture to back them up, they become Magic Bigots, with the power to convince other bigots (and innocent bystanders) that it's now okay to engage in behaviours that otherwise might trigger some moral compunction.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I couldn't concentrate on what Christos was saying because I was distracted by his avatar. That is the scariest shit I've ever seen.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
It's a hilarious avatar. I love it.
I will say, although I highly disagree with the expulsion of the two girls by the Lutheran school, what the school did was not technically illegal and was upheld by a judge. To a certain extent Hamby, you should probably blame the government as well.
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." (CS Lewis)
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." (CS Lewis)
I'm going to bust your balls a little bit here.
Why is it that you pointed-out the technicality? The Christian community in the states seems to love doing this when it comes to homosexuality discrimination. It's not hard to say, 'That was the wrong decision' or 'That was bigoted', is it? The judge is not a robot who is programmed to allow people to get away with murder (so to speak) so long as they exploit a loophole; it would have been rather easy for the judge to award damages to the girls for the unwarranted expulsion.
If the school had kicked-out a couple of black kids would you still have defended the technicality? What about if the school had kicked-out a couple of Christians?
It is not the fault of 'the government' that Christian dogma has polluted North American culture with an unhealthy attachment to & idealization of 'traditional' marriage and sex.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940