The Christian children who tormented my sister and me and the little boy routinely called by them (with no correction from any parent except mine) "Joey the Jew," were operating in perfect fidelity to the Christian historical tradition of harassing, enslaving, killing, attempting to incorporate by any means necessary, their religious competitors. I do forgive them. It isn't their fault that they were raised in a belief system in which they were recipients of the instruction that all opposition to their own beliefs was to be attributed to a superhero of evil named Satan. Poor things, really, is the way I see it now.
Then, of course, they were just a part of the larger picture that included being required each day by my teachers at the public school to lower my head and "pray" to a being I understood to be both imaginary, and the "reason" for my suffering at the hands of those who were under the impression the being was a real thing, somehow ordering them to make me "pray" to it, and to beat me up.
I recently read about some studies demonstrating a positive correlation between religion and prejudice/discrimination. Here's a quote from one of the three, entitled "Religion and Prejudice," by Bruce Hunsberger. "Those who made the strongest claims to being 'true believers' of Christianity, and who reportedly follow traditional religious teachings most scrupulously, are also those who tend to be the most intolerant of their fellow human beings." The study finds that not only are religious people more likely to discriminate than nonreligious, but the intensity of the discrimination increases with intensity of belief.
One of the other studies found that of all the religious groupings the one that was the least likely to discriminate was the non-religious one-- atheists.
And of course we all already know that of all the religious categories represented in prisons, the most underrepresented compared with their proportion in the population is the atheists.
I'm so proud of us! |
