In the Name Of Religion

This Op-Ed from the Falls Church News-Press (http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1878&Itemid=35) has in my mind a very accurate assessment of what is going on in the minds of the Christianists and what they fear the most: knowledge, ideas, innovation. Here are some highlights:

With knowledge, ideas and the benefits of an equal justice-based civil society for all its participants, religion will not disappear from the species, for the reasons of the boundaries on how each of us experience life in the very personal ways we do. But it will tend to be more inclusive and respectful of the prior evolution of its many forms, and in greater coherence with discoveries of the actual processes that make the universe tick.

Now, when some seek to abort this, to rip certain religions away from this process and to insist they remain fixed in their older forms, we see not the continued enhancement the human condition as the motive, but the assertion of the age-old ways in which religion was used to exploit human vulnerability and send special interests to war.

Fist-pounding, so-called fundamentalism and insistence on the special divine nature of ancient texts or traditions involves, behind its demagoguery, little more than manipulation and coercion. Under this sway, some people, seeking religion’s comforts, are convinced to willfully close off their minds’ access to knowledge, ideas and the benefits of civil society in favor of the fantastic claims and demands of moral bullies.

But it is the task of civil society in light of this to cause such tendencies, and the dangers they bring, to wither away by intensifying the universally-positive benefits of knowledge, new ideas and solutions to many grievances of the human condition through production, nutrition, medical cures and an enhanced distribution of abundance.

Humanity cannot sit on its hands and allow retrogressive forces to rally vulnerable minions to do the bidding of the petty self-interests of a few in the name of religion. It must aggressively challenge them by articulating a better way, not in contrast to the spirit of religion and the answers it seeks, but by better combining the benefits of its progress with those strivings for a better appreciation of ultimate things.