In my first post I said most atheists are made and sadly the reason for their change of mind, all too often, is religion itself. It doesn’t take a serious historian to understand that ancient religions weren’t very civilized.
The ancient Aztec’s engaged in human sacrifice,
cutting the hearts out of living human offerings to appease their gods. Another lost culture, the ancient Assyrians,
were noted for their cruelty. They also
engaged in human sacrifice but they used children, using them in sacrificial
offerings through fire. Archaeologists
have unearthed urns containing the tiny bones of children and babies involved
in these religious rites.
But let’s be honest, “modern” religion
doesn’t have a much better track record.
Christians of today claim the message their leader Jesus Christ
proclaimed was that of love and tolerance.
Yet during the middle and dark ages people were burned at the stake,
tortured, hanged, imprisoned or excommunicated by order of the Catholic Church
(and Protestant) because a few brave souls dared to challenge what the church
taught or attempted to translate the Bible into the languages of the day.
It is claimed the Pope is the infallible
descendant of St. Peter but an afternoon spent reading the history of the popes
shows a group of power hungry men who attempted to lead entire countries and
engaged in a life of debauchery unequalled by their uneducated
parishioners. Interestingly the apostle
Peter himself never claimed to be infallible, (reading the gospels shows he was
not) so these men are claiming to be something higher than the man they
supposedly descended from.
Of course, most of these events are decades
and centuries ago yet the religions of today have given fresh reasons for atheists
to hate them.
The Westboro Baptist Church pickets the
funerals of homosexuals, carrying signs I won’t repeat here claiming God killed
these ones because of their lifestyle.
They also picket after natural disasters such as the tsunami in 2004 and
the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, claiming it’s the fault of homosexuals half
way around the world that God decided innocent people in impoverished countries
deserved to die.
The Catholic Church or one of its
subsidiaries seems to be in the news every other day as revelations of child
abuse continue to surface. It is bad
enough these events occurred at all but the church’s insistence on secretly
relocating these priests because they didn’t have the manpower to replace them
just adds to the wrong. The church’s
unscriptural stance on abstinence for priests contributes to the problem.
While some religious leaders preyed on
young boys others preyed on young girls.
Certain pastors of the First Baptist Church were arrested for sex or
attempted sex with underage girls and Jack Shaap, then pastor of the church,
was arrested for taking a female minor across state lines with the purpose of
having sex.
Warren Jeffs, who is apparently still the
president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is
currently serving a prison sentence for rape as an accomplice with two girls,
aged 12 and 15. Mr. Jeffs has received
“revelations” while in prison that Jesus Christ wants him released. Don’t you think if Warren Jeffs was really a
messenger of Christ that He could release him from prison without the help of
his followers?
During times of war, notably the first and
second world war, priests stood on opposing sides of the battle blessing the
troops. Catholics fight Catholics and
Protestants fight Protestants on opposing sides of WWI and WWII with priests
blessing the troops to go and kill each other.
Why would a Catholic from one land kill a Catholic from another? Aren’t they all brothers in the faith?
By this point I’ve thoroughly sickened
myself and the sad part is I haven’t even covered the tip of the iceberg. From this post it would seem atheists have a
long list of reasons to avoid religion and the gods they supposedly represent. Sadly too many atheists use examples like
these to lump all theists into the same mold, but isn’t generalizing entire
groups of people on the actions of some the foundation of prejudice and
discrimination? It would be the same as
saying since one atheist was a murderer then all of them are.
But who or what is really at fault?
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