Thursday, October 28, 2010
Religious Extremists
I've been reading a lot of Dan Savage recently. One of his big causes is gay marriage. I'm fine with all that. Seriously, why on earth should I care if two dudes want the same legal designation as a man and a woman? But more to the point, he's recently posted a couple of interesting notes on the subject of religious intolerance in this country--a country that was founded, quite frankly, by religious extremists who couldn't fit in in their own homelands. Be that as it may, I'm sick to death of religion in general and religion in this country in particular. My gripe is that all you ever hear about religion comes from the extremists, the crazies. Moderate views a rarely expressed, and if so, only as a brief counterpoint to the bombast of the screaming extremists. The result is that the nutjobs, by making so much noise, are taken seriously as mainstream in the absence of any counter-opinion. I guess sensible doesn't really sell in today's extreme media market. Anyway, I was taken by two recent posts on Dan Savage's blog in which there are pleas for moderates religious types to step up and make their voices heard over those of the extremist-haters. Here they are: here and here.
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This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteI have had to edit a post by PROWLERS a moment ago. Most of the post has been deleted for being off-topic. Because it is not possible for me to delete only part of a post, I include here the salient part of the post:
ReplyDeleteFrom PROWLERS: "Another example of religious extremism is Barack Obama's church, which is nothing more than an anti-American, racist hate-group."
It is clear from this comment that the writer's true agenda is simply an anti-Obama tirade, which is off topic and not the point of this post. The point of this post is that religious moderates need to speak up over the roar of the crazies that somehow pass as mainstream. Still, we leave the edited post here because we there is a point to be made that all religious groups are inherently flawed, be it President Obama's, Ted Haggard's, Osama bin Laden's, Benjamin Netanyhu's, the Pope's, or that of your seemingly friendly pedophilic youth pastor from down the street. The point is that these organizations have sometimes done good on a local level, but over the ages they have been all been responsible for atrocity after atrocity. Hatred is a natural result of any religious ideology over time.