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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (8634)	3/15/2001 6:41:49 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Let's run down the list of exculpatory examples you instance as demonstrating an overall beneficial effect of religious belief: The tiny minorities of Christians and others who sheltered the Jews were sheltering them from the real world consequences of an insane ideology deeply rooted in traditional Christian belief about Jews. The majorities of those who got behind the Jewish Holocaust, and that of the homosexuals and Gypsies, were Christians. If you were casting up a balance here, I wouldn't be too sanguine about which pan in the scale is going to be higher and which lower. On slavery and the development of attitudes against it: the legitimacy of slavery, and the slave trade, in its great Muslim and Christian branches, arose directly out of scriptural sanctions. It's true that here and there humanitarian ideas percolating from the Enlightenment found an echo in certain subgroups of the slavery-defending religions. Such were the abolitionists. Such was John Brown. These were dissidents against the mainstream defenders of iniquity in their own larger religious context. The magnitudes that have to be assessed in attempting to decide whether religious belief stimulated more good action than it did bad action are, not to put too fine a point on it, humbling. Religion was a powerful motivator in the self-righteous genocide and enslavement of millions of native Americans in the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the New World, for example. That such genocidal actions were sometimes followed by the establishment of charitable institutions (whose underlying stated motive was to proselytize among the shattered survivors) is not too surprising, guilt being what it is. (Oddly, and horribly, many of the institutions devoted to the care of the most disadvantaged among the defeated indigenous peoples, ie orphans and so on, have been revealed lately as hells of torture conducted by the religious folk staffing them. There is no evidence that religious services were ever interrupted while the torture of Canadian children (to give a recent example) went on. I understand that the late-arriving due bills for this monstrous conduct are close to bankrupting the Anglican Church in Canada.) Another example: devout high Anglicans brought the blessings of sanitary water to China at the same time that they conspired and made war whose purpose was to force opium consumption on the Chinese people. A dicey calculus indeed, wouldn't you agree?