Dr. Valerie Tarico On Ugandan Atrocities: A Perversion of Religion or a Part of It?

Here's what she wrote:
Today’s Seattle Times had an editorial finally about the horrendous anti-gay movement that has been spawned in Uganda by American Evangelicals. Unable to make sufficient homophobic headway at home, evangelists have been heading to Africa, with their literally perfect Bibles as proof that God hates gays. Ugandan leaders found God – the god of the evangelists—and passed a law condemning gays to death. Those who refuse to out them to the authorities get prison time. (In the face of international outrage, the law now only mandates life in prison rather than hanging.)

The Seattle Times editorial was titled, “Uganda and Gays: A Malicious Blasphemy.” The newspaper waxes eloquent about all of the good being done by loving, good-works-doing “selfless” evangelicals in the rest of the world and claims that the message brought to Uganda is, as the title says, malicious blasphemy.

So, the Bible contains malicious blasphemy?? I suppose the newly converted Christians in Nigeria who are exorcising demons out of children with acid, beatings, and hot coals, are engaged in blasphemy too? I suppose the newly converted Christians in India who burned Hindu teens as witches also were engaged in blasphemy?

My tenderness and bitchiness, compassion and aggression all are ME. I find it ironic that anything evil done in the name of religion is a “perversion" or blasphemy -- and anything good, that's the real deal. It's an argument I hear over and over in response to my articles on the Daily Kos and Huffington Post.

The falsehood is patently obvious. It's like saying that selfishness and greed are a perversion of our humanity, and altruism is what humans really are all about. Get real. Ask any biologist whether dogs are affectionate or predatory and they will laugh at you: Do bees make honey or do they have stingers?

My selfishness is every bit as real as my generosity. My tenderness and bitchiness, compassion and aggression all are ME. Religion's track record of power-brokering and atrocity is every bit as integral as its history of giving voice to our moral instincts and sense of wonder.

It is not the perversion of religion that is playing itself out in Islamic jihad or Evangelical homophobia and child murder. It is religion, period--once face of religion to be sure, but the real deal. It is the timeless face of god-worship that is tribal and intolerant and willing to kill -- as religion always has been under the right circumstances of time and place.

Can we please stop pretending and making nice? People are being tortured to death, starved to death, and executed in the service of the religious enterprise! Do we ever get to run the numbers? Do we ever get to ask whether all of the fuzzy feel good stuff and the sense of meaning and purpose, and the wonderful creative moral communities that religion produces are worth the price?

Because the price is what we are seeing in Somalia, and Nigeria, Uganda and elsewhere: people starving, children burned with acid (I dare you to look at the pictures), gays slated for execution, doctors murdered, politicians and mullahs who commit us to holy war.

Both good and bad consequences of "faith" are the direct products of the agreement we make with each other that it's ok to believe things on paltry evidence, the kind that would never stand up in court, the kind that would never guide the surgeon's knife. It is our willingness to entrust ourselves to authority, sacred texts and our own intuitions, unaccountable to reason and evidence, unaccountable to universal ethics like the Golden Rule. Faith gives us mysticism and murder.

Isn't it time to move beyond belief to whatever the next stage of our spiritual evolution may be?

Link.

14 comments:

busterggi said...

Part of it.

Just look at who's promoting the hate & how they're justifying it.

John said...

It's a perversion of what Paul and Jesus taught. Paul said of God:
"Vengeance is mine I will repay. Rather if your enemy is hungry feed him." We are to leave room for God's wrath. Vengeance belongs to the Lord. He will judge.

Judgement day is at the end of history. Christians are to love their enemies and pray for God's mercy on those who persecute them. He who has no sin cast the first stone.

Manifesting Mini Me (MMM) said...

Valerie writes this, "The falsehood is patently obvious. It's like saying that selfishness and greed are a perversion of our humanity, and altruism is what humans really are all about."

Ironically, I've read where humanists promote this message that altruism is what humans are all really about - "people are basically good - we don't need a God for our salvation". But, the gospel is about acknowledging the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about our need for grace - gracious salvation from being involved in rationalizing and justifying cruelty towards one another and a gracious God providing a Way to turn and repent from it. Using the divine to hypocritically justify taking our aggression out on one another is what Jesus referred to as "the sons of hell".

Jesus provides Himself as the One we can confess and act out hardened feelings so as to intervene upon the human inclination to justify perpetuating cruelty upon one other - including scapegoating........

3M

Exploring the Unknowable said...

People are not inherently good and people are not inherently bad. There is nothing special about us. But, we will do good things and we will do evil things.

What I find interesting is that religious folks are quick to point out that we need God in our lives to do good, but they never identify the fact that people with God in their lives have shown no statistically signifcant difference in being morally superior. But, a good person will do terrible things if they believe God has deemed it necessary.

As Sam Harris put it, there are plenty of softwares in our brains that make us do terrible things, and religion is the most potent form of that software. It eliminates the conscience and bypasses reason, and that's why it is beyond dangerous.

The only possible hope that humanity has of moving on toward a global civilization of peace, liberty and freedom is once we (everyone of us) recognize that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING special about any of us; we are all equal and we must not place enmity between one another for any reason.

Once we realize that our frailties are our responsibilities and our progress can only be actualized through us working together. My grandmother (a fervent Christian) said to me the other day in response to a topic concerning some of the world's problem that she was looking forward to the day when God "would come and fix everything."

What a terrible attitude to have. It removes the responsibility from us to take ownership or our problems and do what is necessary to fix them. Religion gives her that license. These such licenses are a cancer to our society.

Manifesting Mini Me (MMM) said...

Hi Anthony! You wrote this: "People are not inherently good and people are not inherently bad. There is nothing special about us. But, we will do good things and we will do evil things.

What I find interesting is that religious folks are quick to point out that we need God in our lives to do good"

I disagree that we need God to 'do' good -- but when I decide what is 'good' my definition may not be a good fit for someone else's notion of 'goodness' - I think we need God in order to know that we are loved, inspite of our fallibities -- from there, we have the potential to be open to the inspiration to be gracious and kind to others.

ttyl,
3M

goprairie said...

MMM: You misrepresent the message of humanists. The idea is not that humans are inherantly good, but that they can be just as good as anybody without a god and that ethics are instictive and part of human nature and not given by god. Neither a god nor a religion is required to lead an ethical life. However, in these cases of violence, a god IS needed to justify terrible violence. In a nature without religion, humans would only be violent to fight over scarce resources. I might do you harm to get the limited food from you for my family. In these cases, there is no benefit to the persons doing the violence, so there would be no cause for the violence if not for the harmful religion that gives them motive. That makes the religion inherently evil. That people will do terrible things for their god that they would never do for merely their own selfish gain points to religion as a core source of evil and violence and immorality.

Manifesting Mini Me (MMM) said...

So, GP, what are you saying? That by eliminating ppl of various faiths, whitewashing the landscape so to speak, will eliminate this POE??? Scapegoating and justification of cruelty is a secular problem as well as a religious one because it is a human one..

Manifesting Mini Me (MMM) said...

GP wrote, "I might do you harm to get the limited food from you for my family. In these cases, there is no benefit to the persons doing the violence,"

So, let me get this clear - you would harm me to get food from me for your family, BUT getting the food would be of no benefit to you? Okay.....whatever you say....

Hey, I bet you never considered this --- How about blessing the little amount of food and sharing it with one another??? Nah, that wouldn't be as humane as justifying harming me for food, now would it???

Steven Carr said...

Dr. Tarico has misunderstood what the Seattle Times is saying.

It is saying that religion is good, but it is perverted by religious people.

It is not the religion that is the problem, it is the religious people.

And I think we can all agree with the Seattle Times here.

And disregard the words of people who claim you can judge a tree by the fruit that it bears.

This is the wrong way to approach matters, as many Christians will tell you.

First you judge the fruit, and then say what tree that fruit came from.

In that way , a good tree will be guaranteed to produce good fruit.

Anonymous said...

I know nothing about the subject, but somehow I doubt it has anything to do with religion. I mean Africa does have the biggest problem with AIDS of any place on earth, so I figure it has something to do with a radical attempt to get that under control.

goprairie said...

GP wrote, "I might do you harm to get the limited food from you for my family. In these cases, there is no benefit to the persons doing the violence,"

MMM: So, let me get this clear - you would harm me to get food from me for your family, BUT getting the food would be of no benefit to you? Okay.....whatever you say....


GP: You totally missed the point. I am saying that without religion, the only reason instinct gives us to fight is over limited resources, and fighting for the limited resources provides BENEFIT to those who win the fight. In the violence done for religion's sake, done for GOD, in THOSE cases, there is not benefit to those doing the violence, other than glory of their god. That violence is of no benefit to anyone. Belief in god is the cause for the violence.
An example is the bigotry against gays. Gay people harm no one. They are not harboring any limited resource. Therefore, their lifestyle if not of consequence to anyone. But they are bullied, denied rights, even beaten and killed for religious reasons. If we were just humanist, we would not care about a gay lifestyle as it hurts no one. Bring the violence-advocating bible into the picture, and suddenly poeple care about something that does no one any harm, to the point where violence is done. That is wrong.

Anonymous said...

"If we were just humanist, we would not care about a gay lifestyle as it hurts no one."

As I said, I see no evidence that this African country is acting on religious grounds. It is just atheist mythologizing and hysteria. They are reacting in fear to the AIDS epidemic which they think has something to do with homosexuality. And as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been proven that it doesn't. The drammatic rise in AIDS since the 80s has been paralleled with a dramatic rise in homosexuality. Nobody has really studied this in a scientific manner and disproven the link.

goprairie said...

the answer to AIDS is condoms, not imprisonment or death. seeing no evidence? only if you have blinders on and want to justify it for them.

Manifesting Mini Me (MMM) said...

GP wrote, "I am saying that without religion, the only reason instinct gives us to fight is over limited resources, and fighting for the limited resources provides BENEFIT to those who win the fight. In the violence done for religion's sake, done for GOD, in THOSE cases, there is not benefit to those doing the violence, other than glory of their god."

Wow, same result, different justification!! Hypocrisy allows for double standards. Hope the extra years you gain justifying harming others for your own survival will bring you peace -

At any rate, good luck.

3M