Questions…

Should we respect a person’s religious belief when they refuse a blood transplant? We don’t respect it when they’re threatening their life by trying to martyr themselves with a semtex vest.

At the end of the day life must come before religion.

Let me tell you about my mum, she has a disorder, it's called politeness. When she gets cold-called, about a kitchen or somethin, rather than tell them to get stuffed like I would, she lets them talk her into getting her units measured (4 the kitchen). So even though she doesn’t want the service, a bloke comes round, she then has to put up with him in her house, measuring etc. All because she can’t just tell people to get knotted. This is why I answer the yellephone as much as possible, she is far to polite. She criticises me for my ranting on about the evils of religion, she thinks its rude, in a quasi blasphemous sense, and I cant discuss my philosophical position in her presence, which is partly why I write everything down instead. To her, politeness is the highest virtue, to me the lowest, as it gets in the way of truth.

It’s because people are so polite that they let preachers get away with spouting crap in the streets, when it should be considered a public health hazard, or when JWs come to the door and the polite let them in to get bamboozled. (I let them in to bamboozle them but that’s beside the point.) It’s with polite interest that people in the earliest days of xtianity listened to Paul of Tarsus in Greece or Rome, when they should have kicked him out. The Romans should have got more lions, it don’t see how history could have got any worse. Anyway, its just frustrating when tolerance is just throne about without people thinking about whether it is deserved, or whether a greater evil will result from the withholding of the lesser evil of intolerance of faiths. Think about it, is it just to tolerate intolerance, it is a historical fact that religion, particularly monotheism is inherently incapable of tolerating other views, with the exception of wishy washy Unitarianism or C.of.E, is it logical to permit something that not permissive, to include the exclusive?

Will you not be allowing something to grow and threaten the freedoms you bestow blindly to all faiths. Is it an acceptable risk to let for e.g. Islam flourish in a pluralistic secular democracy when given half the chance it could take away the pluralism? Isn’t it and xtianity’s ultimate goal not to cover the globe? Secular allowance of religious freedoms that are applied to all faiths equally may sound fare, but will it not finally turn a democracy into a theocracy, like the xtian right would like to do to the USA? Isn’t tolerating all without exemption threatening all? There many faiths or ideologies that cannot suffer or allow the practice of anything else. In the UK it is illegal to distribute racist material, as it is considered a threat to the public, is that the case in the US?, not as far as I am aware. The KKK still exists, and many other minority extremists, should civil rights include belonging to a faith that would deny those rights to its members? In England women are legally all equal, except in Moslem communities, were I have seen them treated as live stock. The government dares not interfere, even when girls are shipped to Bangladesh, their passports are taken away and they are made to marry a gay thrice their age for some political union, like its the dark ages. This is not snobbish western superiority over foreign customs; civil rights apply to all, whether nations in the "styx" or insulated faiths in the midst of civilisation recognise that fact. If we all agree on what is fundamentally right, why allow exceptions?

Religion should not be treated as a cort blanche excuse to ignore what the likes of Voltaire, the suffragettes or the abolitionists fought so hard to achieve. Were the revolutions of France and the US for nothing? Was the Magna~Carta a waste of ink? Did are grandparents give there lives in WW2, just so barbaric evil could continue in another form? I consider it an insult to the best of humanity that has gone before to allow faith to take away what we, the lucky ones were fortunate to get though an accident of birth. We should spread are good fortune around, give it to countries who have been unlucky, were their pioneers didn’t win.

Why are the progressive improvements not always recognised as such? Why are religions trying to turn back the clock in countries in the west that have come so far? Only 600 years ago, it was against church policy to let non clerics learn to read. It took so long to recover the wisdom of the ancients and then surpass them. Yet the Baptists or evangelist would have us hark to a golden age of religious security that never was, "return to god" etc and stifle scientific inquiry not tethered to the bible. Have they forgotten what is what like under the puritan or catholic tyrannies? Clearly so, history as Ford said is bunk, at least in America. Europe hasn’t forgotten, which is why religions are weaker, politically.

Religion harks back to cultures that precludes civil rights, equality and modern justice, how can it be smart for the modern nations to tolerate pockets of the past when it’s not going anywhere, and slowing the rest of us down? You either live in the present or don’t, religions worship there ancestors, deified or not, can we look at the ages past and honestly day we'd rather live there, when medicine didn’t exist, no rights, hygiene, or TV? That brings me back to the blood transfusions, a modern technique that has saved countless lives, yet is interpreted by some as a taboo from religious doctrine, are they nuts? Is it a sensible thing to judge the present by the standards and "understanding" of the past, especially regarding new things that are beyond the comprehension of the ancients that made up these rules? How can you apply morals of 3000 years ago to today, are the Torah laws applicable without moderation? No Jew I know thinks so, they try to improve upon the past without losing it’s essential meaning. Although I think most modern Jews wouldn’t recognise their ancestors in Sinai as anything other than cruel and barbaric based on what they considered appropriate behaviour at the time, there comes a time when you replace so many parts, it is longer the original object or concept.

We have to except the world has moved on, to deny progress, is as bad as denying the past, like creationists do, they want to live in a narrow passage, of 500bc to 200ad, in a country most haven’t been to, in a world long dead. They need to wake up before they start burning people again.

A moment of madness is one thing, an aeon of madness is another.

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