“Religion” – including Christianity and Judaism – is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” At least that’s according to the No. 1 New York Times bestseller “God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything” by journalist Christopher Hitchens.
But how does a religeon like Wicca fit in with this quote which I humbly thieved from a very interesting christian blogger?
In my personal view, a lot of the negative stuff attributed to the Big religions like Christianity and Islam would be the result of relying on texts that were written thousands of years ago, saturated with the values of that time and the subtle re-editings that people in power enjoy making. I’m not going to pretend to know what I am talking about when it comes to the bible as I have only ever known snippets, but it makes sense to me that a book written in a time when women were supressed for political reasons too deep to question would have a fair amount of female subjugation in it and that a book that has been through countless editions would vary from it’s original manuscript somewhere along the line.
I can see the truth in Mr. Hitchen’s quote up there – a major attribute of “religious folks”, which in our western world we see as Christian (or, nowadays, Muslim) is often, sadly, intolerance, violence, racisim and bigotry. I am reminded of the Top Gear episode I watched yesterday, when Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James went through the very religious state of alabama with offensive (but hilarious) slogans written on their cars. (“Man Love Rules”, “Country and Western is Rubbish, and “Hilary for President”) Pulling in at a petrol station, a woman came up to them, shouted at them and said she was “calling the boys”, and the top gear guys were chased along the highway. Of course, the christian sterotype nowadays is a white southern american who hates blacks, immigrants and rap music and keeps a shotgun in the back porch.
The whole point of Christianity as I have experienced it is God’s love, recieving God’s love through Jesus Christ and through that being special enough to get into heaven. (I get that the people who hassle us heathens to convert are doing it because they care about us, if sometimes tempered with a bit of very human righteousness, which is fair enough. there is only one jesus after all, unless you are mormon, where it gets complex). There is also all the stuff about being kind, helping thy neighbour and supporting charity. All in all, there is nothing wrong with this.
I find it hard trying to find an angle with which to approach these kind of Christianity based debates. Usually I say nothing at all, unless some fellow pagan with Issues jumps up and starts Christian Bashing, when I usually stand up and tell them to stand down. Because it is a hard religeon to defend, I guess.
I understand the positive aspects of Christianity, and these are the ones I always focus on – Jesus Christ was, of course, an incredible man, and as I see it the point of christianity is to try and follow in his footsteps, act as he would do, which is very admirable. I just trip up on the negative bits, such as the relentless persecution of so-called “witches” in the medieval times, centuries of anti-semitisim, crusades against other religions, the stuff about homosexuals being evil, all other religions being false, and innumerable other little things that I can’t recall at this moment.
Wicca is by no means free of the negative sides – we’ve all heard of the sexual predator haunting the beltaine fires, kids disregarding the god-focus of wicca to go around demon hunting and claiming spirit possession and whatnot, but Wicca is a very young religion, so we are going to have to give it time to see what atrocities will be committed in it’s name.
Because, In response to the quote, it’s people who are intolerant, violent, messed up, bigots, hipocrites and righteous psychos. As with any religeon, people shape the way the religeion progresses and changes, and there are a lot of disillusioned, violent, hypocritical, hatred-ridden and just plain mean people out there who have shaped the progression of religion. The problem is that the bigoted, hypocritical, violent and sexist people of the past found a voice that is still being applied to and used in what I believe is a culture and society which has outgrown the -isims.
I guess it all depends on how you perceive religion. My answer would be – God is Great, but not all people are.
I understand your confusion.
You might make more progress if you started to learn about people and what makes them tick instead of worrying about God.
After all you are living among people not God and you need to work out how to be able to understand and predict the other guy so you can get to live a life under your own control.
You must have noticed by now that they are basically two types of people. One lot are creative and try to make things better for themselves and others. They other group spend their efforts making it hard for the artists, creators and producers. While the creators get their pleasure from helping and pleasing others the Toned get their kicks from seeing and helping others fail. Your first job is to acquire the ability to notice the difference between the two. Befriend the decent and spot and avoid the downers is a great place to start a more satisfying life.
Lesson 2
Hey there Archiesview,
Thanks for your comment! I must confess not to be such a worrier about God, and whatever spirituality I’m plodding along with has a great emphasis on being in the world, having fun, making great friends and chasing the dream. Contrary to the post and the blog really, I’m not so much a muser on religion, I tend to get on with my own stuff and try my best to get along with people, and sometimes get a bit confused as to why others don’t act the same way.
I’m not particularly good at this kind of theorising, as I sure is evidenced by my post, but generally in the pagan viewpoint, we live among the divine as much as we live among people, and you tend to experience it by realising what an awesome thing life is.
😀
Well Demi I see your point. We do live in the here and now and getting along with others and chasing the dream can be more productive and useful than worrying about things which are much harder to experience or prove. It looks like you have some interest in understanding others so I thought I would mention the following and see what you make of it.
I have been reading some of the stuff written by a guy called L Ron Hubbard and he apparently spent a bit of time looking into people and their motivations and character. He wrote a book about it.
Briefly, he says you can assess everybody no matter who they are on a scale which he called the Tone Scale.
Everybody runs at a certain sort of wavelength, like they have a basic “Tone” or attitude from which they approach life. He graded this into a chart and gave the different points numbers just so they could be charted. The idea was so a person could quickly assess a friend or a person or a considered partner so they could predict how their relationship would work out.
This is a short list taken from the list he made just to give an idea of it.
4.0 Enthusiasm
3.5 Cheerfulness
3.0 Conservatism
2.8 Contented
2.5 Boredom
2.0 Antagonism
1.5 Anger
1.1 Covert Hostility
1.0 Fear
0.5 Grief
0.05 Apathy
0.0 Death
What he then did was write a full description of how to recognise these tones and what the reactions that each of these people at the different “Tones” give to situations and which ones to pick as friends (and the ones to avoid). He also discovered that in the lower range (below 2.0) were the people you mention that are such a pain and a puzzle as to why they make it so hard on others and can’t be decent and what to do about that.