This thread is wonderful with some of the best posts I've read on a2k.
I found an article by Karen Armstrong with some very good thoughts on religion's propensity to focus on alienating issues while overlooking the basis of most religions: compassion.
Here are a couple of passages from her article:
Quote:..."religious leaders often concentrate on marginal issuues: Can women or gay people be ordained as priests or rabbis? Is contraciption permissible? Is evolution compatible with the first chapter of Genesis? Instead of bringing people together, these distracting preoccupations actually encourage policies of exclusion, since they tend to draw attention to the differences between "us" and "them."
She goes on to say,
Quote: "There are some people, I suspect, who would feel obscurely cheated if, when they finally arrived in heaven, they found everybobdy else there as well. Heaven would not be heaven unless those who reached it could peer over the celestial parapets and watch other unfortunates roasting below."
She doesn't let those of us who are secular off the hook:
Quote:"The history of each faith tradition represents a ceaseless struggle between our inherent tendency to aggression and the mitigating virtue of compassion. Religiously inspired hatred has caused unimagineable suffering around the world. But secularism has had its failures too. Auschwitz, the Gulag, and the regime of Saddam Hussein show the fearful cruelty to which humanity is prone when all sense of the sacred has been lost."
To me, the saying,
Quote:"Hate the sin, love the sinner"
represents the exact problem of most religions. That is not compassionate, it is prejudicial.
Nathan Lane
