Religion's Twelve Deadly Sins

Alternet's Valerie Tarico has written an insightful piece about 12-concepts, integral to organized religions, that "promote conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace."

First up is the concept of "chosen people" - that separates believers from non-believers, the believers alone linked to God.   Then there's the companion concept of "heretics."  Again, non-believers.  Call for the headsman!

Religions have also introduced us to the notion of Holy War.  Gott Mit Uns, that sort of thing.  When Muslims do it we call it Jihad.  When we do it, it's just getting rid of Satan.  Man has been doing it for thousands of years and, it seems, it never gets old.

Then there's "blasphemy" - the crime of saying things that offend religious doctrine.  The Bible has a cure for that - death.

Religions have also introduced us to the notion of "glorified suffering" and who doesn't love a martyr who suffers agony and death in the name of God.  The Catholic church loves them, makes them saints.  Islam goes a step further and provides them with explosive vests.

"Genital mutilation."  Alright, let's get real - circumcision.  No illustration required.

"Blood sacrifice."  It's more than killing goats.

Then there's the trump card, the ace in the hole, "Hell."  It's an awful place.  It's forever and ever.  And it's where you go if you don't do what the nice man at the front of the church tells you to do.  The nice thing is, it never gets old.  We do and, as we draw ever nearer to our final exit, Hell looms ever larger.

Religions that go the reincarnation route fall back on "Karma."  Stay in line or else you'll pay for it in the next life when you return as a toilet seat.

If life on Earth is brutal and nasty, don't fret, there's always the afterlife.  That's your payoff, "Eternal Life."  Now, don't forget to tithe and, remember, the guy with the keys to Heaven, he's counting.

"Male Ownership of Female Fertility."  I'll let you get this directly from Val:
"The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman should die of childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional religions variously assert that men have a god-ordained right to give women in marriage, take them in war, exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the origins of their offspring can’t be assured. Hence Catholicism’s maniacal obsession with the virginity of Mary and female martyrs."

And last, but by no means least, "Bibliolatry."  This is book worship so integral to all modern religions.  It binds the faithful to notions of what is and isn't, right and wrong, as envisioned way back in ancient times when writing was discovered.  We know that the apostles didn't write their chapters of the New Testament.  Somebody else did.  But, hey, it's in writing so it's magical, divine.

It's particularly prevalent in religious fundamentalism whether Islamic, Judaic or Christian.  There are plenty of Christian fundamentalists who hold a fierce belief in Biblical Inerrancy.  No matter how contradictory, no matter how vague or at odds with reality, it's the Word of God and that's all there is to it.

I urge you to read the entire article here.

Freedom of Religion? Not Unless We Also Get Freedom From Religion.

I'm all for freedom of religion - on one condition.   Freedom of religion must also mean freedom from religion.   Religion should be practised in churches, that's where it belongs, not in legislatures, not in our schools, not in any of our public institutions.

I think about religion a fair bit.   It's pretty hard not to think about religion these days or at least the ascendancy of religious radicalism or fundamentalism.

What I find telling is how fundamentalism seems to appeal to a section of a population no matter the faith.   In the West it surfaces as Christian fundamentalism.   In Israel, it's Jewish fundamentalism.  In the Muslim world it's Islamist fundamentalism, Islamism.   In India, it's Hindu fundamentalism.   Whatever the state or region there's a percentage of the population susceptible or drawn to the particular radical, authoritarian and often unhinged religious  fundamentalism on offer.   These are people with a great capacity for suspension of disbelief and a hefty appetite for mysticism.  Who needs reality when you've got that?

(As an aside - imagine Steve Harper today had he been born and raised in Riyadh.  He'd probably be on someone's no fly list or undergoing rendition therapy.)

As I understand the history of fundamentalism, it's always been around but, like a coal vein fire, it has usually been well underground.   Now, however, the fire has reached the surface and that's where the trouble starts.

Andrew Bacevich chronicles this in his excellent book, The New American Militarism, in which he outlines the unholy marriage of the political radical right with the religious radical right with the military leadership and the military/industrial/commercial warfighting complex out of which is formed the perpetual warfare state.

In my day (and before) the American officer class was predominantly Episcopalian.   Today evangelical fundamentalism has taken over.  It surfaces in oddball characters like General Born-Again Boykin who said this of a Muslim adversary at a public event, " I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."   And Boykin is by no means an exception.   There's an undercurrent of this "Holy Warrior" business running throughout the US military as though we needed another reason to keep our distance.

Religious extremism finds its political toehold in social conservatism of the sort that appeals to Harper's far-right political conservatism.   It is within social conservatism that the radical political far-right and the radical religious far-right find unity.  And in that union they quietly undermine our freedom from religion.

And now they're targeting our kids in our public schools.  The fundamentalist Christian Group, Invisible Children, that produced the controversial Kony 2012 video is working to get their video into high schools and colleges for what founder Jason Russell openly admits is an evangelical "trojan horse".




The time for polite reservation is just about over. If we're to have a healthy democracy that respects both freedom of religion and freedom from religion we are going to have to reinforce secularism in our institutions. These people won't stop until we do.

Our Right to Know - Political Religion in Canada

Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor isn't the easiest read on the bookshelf. It's a plodding work packed full of seedy Christofascists who are far more annoying than intriguing. What makes it a worthwhile read is that it is immensely important to those of us who don't share the fundamentalist Christian nationalists' view of what Canada should be and are concerned at the underhanded way they intend to achieve their goals.

Some of their names are known to us - Manning, Day, Harper and McVety. More are less well known and more yet are barely known if known at all. They resemble a classic "fifth column," a group that seeks to clandestinely undermine secular Canada and traditional Canadian values in order to substitute their narrow Christian nationalist theocracy. They operate by stealth and by guile and outright deception. They conceal the very beliefs they hold superior and wish to enshrine as our national ethos. They're a despicable gang of Sneaky Petes, real Back Door Charlies.

If you're planning to read Armageddon Factor do yourself a favour. Go to your library and first read Phillip's American Theocracy followed next by Chris Hedges American Fascists and, perhaps, Sharlet's The Family. These books make Armageddon Factor far more digestible because they trace the birth and rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, its insinuation into the halls of power and the threat it poses to American democracy and the world. It is from American Christian nationalism that the movement spread into Canada, the movement of Manning, Day and Harper, the very movement they work so hard to mask.

These Christofascists, like religious fundamentalists of other faiths, are extremists in the sense of Barry Goldwater's Cold War rhetoric when he proclaimed that "extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice." The seminal distinction is that the Christian nationalists aren't seeking to defend your secular liberty but to eliminate it whenever it conflicts with their fundamentalist beliefs. They seek to impose their stamp on Canada much as the Roman Catholic church imposed its own on rural Quebec up to the end of WWII.

It troubles me when anyone hides from us in open view. I find real hostility in those who seek to use guile and deceit against me. Surely that sort of person is my enemy for they can wish me no good in that which they conceal from me. There is no benevolence in subversion, no honesty or fairness in the clandestine. Those who do these things are not your fellows nor, in any sense, are you theirs. You are not an equal in their narrowly exclusionary world.

As Hedges reveals, the Christian Right, the Christofascists, are at war with America and, like it or not, their northern brethren are intent on waging war on our Canada:

"Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age - he was then close to 80 - we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

"The warning, given to me nearly 25-years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of leaders in the Christian Right who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible."


The key to this whole business is in Hedges' term, "a new political religion." After all that is the essence of theocracy, a political expression of a religious belief. Think radical Islam - Salafism and Wahabism; think Shinto; think radical Zionism. Think radicalism.


Yet it's not every aspect of secularism that they reject, at least not while it works for them. One tenet of secular tolerance is to place a person's religious beliefs "off limits." Each to his own. This is the shield of Christian fascism. What they reject is the corollary, no one faith above another. For it is not all faith they wish to enshrine in power in Canada, it is theirs alone. They want to become a state religion, theirs is a genuinely political religion.


It is precisely because fundamentalist Christian nationalism is a political religion that we are entitled to forget the "off limits" rule. We are entitled to scrutinize the political dimension of this faith and we're entitled to full and candid disclosure. If those who wish to wield their religion as a political force in our country perceive Armageddon as a welcome thing, the herald to The Rapture, their political expression of that belief has to be laid out before the public. If those who want our consent to govern this country think the end of the world is just dandy, we have a right to know that. If environmental catastrophe is readily accommodated within their religion, we have a right to know that. If they see the expansion of Israel to its Biblical domain essential to fulfilment of prophesy, they must come out and say so. If Canada's domestic and foreign policy is to be lashed to their religious beliefs, they have no right to conceal their quest. To be less than open about their political religion is to be at war with Canada, at war with the Canadian public that lives beyond their theocratic coven.


If these people wish to foist their magical thinking, their radical Christian nationalism on our Canada, we owe it to our country and to our people to expose them and to push back just as hard as it takes. That begins by confronting them, rejecting false flags and demanding they state their intentions. We have to accept political religion as a force at work in our Parliament and that begins by those who practise it coming clean with the rest of us.


The Americans saw the evil inherent in state religion when they first amended their Constitution to enshrine separation of church and state. Jefferson was plain on the intent to create a wall of separation between church and state. Now that political religion is spreading its tentacles through our Canada, we deserve nothing less than outright, express and constitutional separation of church and state.