Religious Bigotry on the Left
Published at 08:23 on 20 September 2018
This makes for a depressing read, and not being a Pagan, I’m not even in the target audience for the publication that ran it.
Religious claims are not scientific claims. As such, it is not possible to prove or disprove them according to any sort of scientifically rigorous standards. Furthermore, the majority of people have some sort of religious or at least spiritual beliefs.
Put those two factors together and you can pretty quickly take away some conclusions:
- If you’re hostile to any sort of religious belief, congratulations: you’ve automatically written off the majority of potential supporters for your cause.
- What should matter (really, the only thing that can matter for purposes of logic-based inquiry and debate) is an individual’s position and actions in the realm of real-world, non-spiritual, things that are provable via something approaching scientific inquiry.
If someone supports a freer, more egalitarian world, it should not matter whether they share your spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. Such beliefs should be basically irrelevant for purposes of forming broad-based coalitions. (Your beliefs are doubtless very important to you, but that in no way means others must share them.)
Assuming that just because someone is religious therefore they share all the very worst characteristics of any religious person is as bad as assuming that just because someone identifies as a socialist or a communist (or atheist) that s/he wants to do exactly the sort of stuff that Stalin and Pol Pot did.