"What has religion got to offer but War, Intolerance/hatred (of other religions and minority groups), and poverty? religion should not only be banned from classrooms but from the whole planet"I faithfully reproduce the comment as is, grammatical warts and all, keyed in, I imagine, in the first flush of a righteous indignation.
They’re common accusations, straight out of the New Atheist playbook. Religious belief is irrational, snarling, psychologically and socially stunting. In the enduring formulation of Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great (2007): “Religion poisons everything.”
Christians have, after all, tortured heretics, burned witches, hoarded wealth, propped up slavery, rubber-stamped colonialism, expelled or massacred entire Jewish communities, silenced women, persecuted gay people, and moved known child molesters from parish to parish. These are not accusations; they are history.
And not only history. You don’t have to look far—probably not much farther than the murky corners of our own hearts—to see the same old ugliness cropping up today: the self-righteousness, the love of respectability and comfort, the inertia and cowardice, the militant certitude, the blindness to inconvenient truths, the fear of difference, the fear of losing power, the fear of change or challenge.
But underneath the cynicism, the absolutism, sometimes the smugness, I wonder if what I’m really hearing is...continue here.
-- Natasha Moore
But, the good news is, there is still what Miroslav Volf calls a 'thick' kind of religion. Read the article (from the 'continue here' link above).
