An open letter to religious people

[exnihilo]

Quoting munchingfoo from 03:07, 4th Sep 2008 I would request that none of your supernatural beliefs affect me or anyone else who choses for them not to affect them. This would require the removal of Religious officials from all areas of government, the removal of tax free status for religions (except for charity specific parts), and the banning of all supernatural teachings and propoganda in state funded organisations. (Schools, BBC etc.)

In the interests of completeness, I expect we'd need to remove a lot of the art, stop playing much of the music and burn many of the books. Just in case you should ever encounter anything inspired by another's faith.

[WashingtonIrving]

Haven't we all discussed this enough to see that faith is a non(as opposed to ir)rational matter. "Evidence of faith" isn't like scientific evidence: it cannot compel belief without prior belief in God.


[hr]

"I said farewell honey, I'll see you Judgment Day"

[munchingfoo]

Quoting exnihilo from 23:10, 4th Sep 2008
In the interests of completeness, I expect we'd need to remove a lot of the art, stop playing much of the music and burn many of the books. Just in case you should ever encounter anything inspired by another's faith.

Yes... Nice exaggeration.

Would you care to explain how a book sitting on a shelf, short of landing on my head, would affect me, against my will? Similarly music? If my neighbours are playing music so loudly that it affects me, I will complain to the council, whether it be religious or otherwise. As for art, similar to books.

However, if you had asked if the government should fund the production of new religious books, art, or music, I would say no. That does affect me.

Some of these mediums may be propoganda, in which case they have no place within public institutions as part of a compulsory requirement. For example, no child in a school should be made to sing religious songs.

Clearly we can make an exception if the compulsory requirment is due to a voluntary request. For example, if one opts to study religious studies at school, it would be expected that you read religious texts.

Similarly there is nothing wrong with a library or museum storing a religious based artifact or text, since the history or critique of that artifact or text is open to all, not just those of a particular faith.

[hr]

"The entirety of these definitions lie outside the gamut of the sRGB color space — such a pure color cannot be represented using RGB primaries. The color swatch to the right is a desaturated approximation, created by taking the centroid of the standard definition and moving it towards the D65 white point, until it meets the sRGB gamut triangle."

[exnihilo]

I wasn't trying to exaggerate, just to understand your point. You're happy for the writings of Milton or Dante, the music of Mozart or Bach and the paintings of Da Vinci or Michelangelo to be displayed, taught and lauded on the proviso that no mention is made of their inspiration, or if it is it's dismissed as ignorant superstition and should be viewed as detracting from rather than illuminating the works?

[Humphrey]

Quoting munchingfoo from 23:54, 4th Sep 2008
Some of these mediums may be propoganda, in which case they have no place within public institutions as part of a compulsory requirement. For example, no child in a school should be made to sing religious songs.

I do applaud your sentiment, no-one wants to see children being brainwashed and I have to say the refusal of some denominations to accept the fact of evolution is very worrying. I am a little worried about the execution. If you say to kids that some songs are wrong because they are religious and they should be allowed to ‘opt out’ of them you automatically stigmatise the works in question, both in and outside the classroom.

What are the consequences?. Well first of all children won’t be singing ‘God Save the Queen’. If I remember rightly our national anthem consists of some nonsense about a sky fairy being implored to rescue a very wealthy old woman. Secondly the poor kids will be denied the privilege of singing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’s at rugby matches, Jerusalem containing some suspect lyrics about building a new kingdom in England based upon the teaching of some lunatic Jew from Judea, and ‘Swing Low’ being about the prophet Elijah being taken to heaven in a chariot. All these would put our children at risk of religious brainwashing. They won’t be going to the last night of the proms either as they would have to listen to some warbley tart singing about the sky fairy’s divine mandate for Britannia rule the waves’.

If we branch out in the wider culture, the censors axe is going to have to fall all over the place. First off I think we should ban the song ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ by the Verve. Whilst one might admire the spirit behind such lyrics as ‘Now the drugs don’t work, they just make you worse, but I know I’ll see your face again’, there is no empirical data to support it and the children who listen to the song may be turned into ‘faith heads’. We should also not just ban the Chronicles of Narnia as religious propaganda, we should also get rid of the film ‘Star Wars’ which its creator George Lucas described as a mix of Christianity and Buddhism, and therefore qualifies as brainwashing.

Lastly the kids won’t be singing Christmas carols like ‘Away in a Manager’ and we should end this evil practice of telling them that a dirty old man in a red costume, who cruelly mistreats reindeer by shackling them to a sky chariot, is going to come from the North Pole to bring them presents. Instead, you could do what the Bolsheviks did in the 1920s, which was to have an Anti-Christmas led by the ‘League of the Militant Godless’ where effigies of Buddha and Jesus were burned, visits for children to atheist museums were organised and special carols were sung to celebrate the end of superstition and the coming of the new workers paradise.

Ok, so I probably got a bit carried away there, but I just want to give some idea of the difficulty of ensuring religious neutrality. It would be extremely difficult in what is still primarily a Judeo-Christian culture, not so much in terms of religious observance but in terms of our constitution our values and aspirations.

[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Normality]

To OP:

1) Word puzzle... ready?

"Dick a eat"

2) Might want to get that Aspergers checked out.

Quoting ThatIsEnough from 02:18, 29th Jul 2008
Such truth is rarely put in such a staggeringly powerful punch. Let this be the year humanity takes an unimaginabley massive step forward and STOP religion once and for all.

[img]http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/2667/1207458295984jpgroflposwu9.jpg[/img]