I like this response to your article:
(from Hajai Romi)
This article contains so many fallacies it is hard to know where to begin, but it is best to say that to encapsulate several thousand years of human experience and a variety of behaviors and teachings under the rubric of "religion," then use those very same cherry-picked examples of the evils of ALL the religious teachings AND practices of the past several millennia to throw out the entire mess is the height of prejudice.
Separation of church and state was not instituted, as this article falsely claims, by the Founding Fathers because they knew of how "dangerous" all religion is, but because they had seen in Europe the sectarian wars between followers of different faiths. One may logically claim that such wars arose out of the fanaticism that religion engenders, but one could also argue that men will find reasons to torture and kill each other in the absence of religion. And indeed they do.
While the hypocrisy of the "Religious Right" is utterly contemptible, it is not religion itself (as if all religions were the same) that is the problem, but the lack of it. Or rather, it is the abuse of religion, and the fanaticism or the hypocrisy of people who claim to act because of it. After all, the Jesus Christ that the Despicable Right pretends to revere abhorred hypocrites and famously threw the money-grubbing money-changers out of the Temple.
In fact, this article is little more than an extremely bigoted screed against, among other things, one belief system in particular, a religion that has endured for over fourteen hundred years and today guides 1.3 billion human beings, the vast majority of which do not murder or even torture, and which, despite the inflammatory rhetoric of the West, do not uniformly mistreat women. Namely, Islam. It may be acceptable to Salon to promote bigoted comments about Islam, but it is nothing new. It certainly is part of the strategy of one nation in particular which uses its own religion to justify land theft and war crimes, all the while blaming this other religion for "fanaticism."
It is all very well and good to complain about ISIS and the presumed propensity of religious followers to kill, but as my mother used to say, "You should be careful when you point a finger because you're pointing three back at yourself."
People who complain about Muslims killing clearly do not know anything about the bloody history of Western imperialism in the Middle East, from the First Crusades to Denshawe, from the Sepoy Mutiny to the massacres at Deir Yassin, Kfar Qassim and Sabra and Shatila.
But getting back to the American Psychological Association... If we ignore the possibility, which has been raised, that ISIS is a creation of Israel and has no more to do with Islam than fish have with bicycles, does that make the participation in a presumably professional, quasi-medical organization in torture any more right and moral? By focussing on the issue of the existence or absence of God neatly avoids one issue raised by the satire in News Nerd, and that is the participation of the American Psychological Society in torture. Does the participation of the APA in torture disqualify them in any way from passing on the mental state of religious believers, or anybody else?
I submit that it does.
There are PLENTY of religious people who have acted in ways that defy the imagination of those who have sunk to participation in torture.
Martin Luther King, for instance. The Dalai Lama. Father Damien on Molokai. Countless monks, nuns and lay people who quietly and without any publicity do works of charity and compassion every day in every corner of the globe.
Meanwhile, we have the fakers, the pretend healers. People who claim to understand the human psyche, and then use their supposed insights for evil purposes. They really are the lowest form of intelligent life.
Perhaps the author of this article would like for religion not to exist, because religious folk would consign people who torture to one of the lower circles of a Dantean Hell.
And deservedly so.
As far as I am concerned, a person's religion means very little in predicting whether or not he or she will do something supremely compassionate, kind or humane.
Perhaps psychologists consider someone who risks his or her life for another human being to have some kind of insanity. After all, it does seem stupid or crazy for a stranger to dive in front of a speeding vehicle in order to push another person to safety, but I am inclined to think it bespeaks a something more than intelligence or sanity to do so. A kind of connection to a Super Intelligence or a Super Morality.
Some atheists I'm sure make that dive, because there are atheists who are motivated by humane concerns for their fellow human beings. I wonder, though, if the same self-righteous people who congratulate themselves on being intellectually superior to religious believers would grant the same possibility of sanity and intelligence to those believers as I just have to atheists.
"Turn the other cheek," and "Do unto others as you would have them do to you," are not the teachings of the insane.
In fact, they are the prescriptions for a society built on trust and human compassion, and those who criticize the followers of such teachings are almost as blind as those hypocrites who twist those teachings for political gain.
And I would argue they are not only the height of sane responses to insane situations, but they even CHANGE those insane situations.
And so, I would do unto Salon as I would have them do to us, the believers, and give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are trying to inject reason into the craziness of the Radical Right.
They just haven't achieved complete reason yet, though. There still ARE believers who practice religions of peace and tolerance.
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