I don't hate religion

I’m temporarily putting my ceaseless, grinding financial worries on the back burner to show my neglected website some lovin’. In anticipation of its 10th anniversary (which will arrive in a blast of angels’ trumpets in August 2009), I’m trying to spruce things up a bit. Because my webmaster skills haven’t improved since my last big site overhaul, changes will have to be minimal and primarily cosmetic. As a starting point I’ll make the site searchable (via Google) and I’ll install a few purdy new banners on various pages. I also went ahead and reworked my religion quotations page, splitting all the quotes into relevant subcategories, such as Women and Religion, The Bible, Thoughts on God, Separation of Church and State, and others (the changes will be reflected within the next week or so).

In doing this huge task, I really started to notice the pervasive negativity twirling through nearly every crevice of my religion quotations page. All the quotes are there for a reason—it’s not like I’m suddenly turning my back on them—but I wanted to take a minute to explain why I’m not the vitriolic, hate-mongering creature that is perhaps implied by the quotations.

To do that, I should first explain my own religious views. Actually, I won’t reinvent the wheel; I did a decent job of explaining the subject in an old blog entry here.

Basically, I’m agnostic—I don’t believe that anyone can know whether god does or does not exist. And I’m a pagan in the sense of not belonging to any organized religion.

This doesn’t mean I’m anti-religion. I actually believe religion can be a great thing when it truly brings a person a sense of happiness and contentment. And I believe it’s capable of doing remarkable things, such as motivating people to be charitable and forgiving.

But.

It has a dark side, as many things do. And that dark side? Wooo, baby, it kicks some ass. It’s a force to be reckoned with. And it gave birth to all these feral little monsters who have been running wild for centuries. Sometimes they work in tandem with (or are driven by) cultural mores, personal bigotries, misguided ignorance, and countless other realities of history. For example, we all know that the conflict in Northern Ireland wasn’t merely a case of Catholics hating Protestants and vice versa. But all too often these monsters existed solely because of religion: because corrupt dogma and corrupt leaders bowing before an all-too-often maleficent god decided that witches had to be burned, inquisitions had to be conducted, bombs had to be detonated, and abortion doctors had to be killed. Religion in and of itself has spawned a jaw-dropping amount of atrocities and injustices.

In deference to that reality, and perhaps as a backlash to the increasingly pervasive presence of evangelicals in America and the weakening wall between church and state, I choose to highlight the dark side of religion on my quotations page. There are some positive quotes in there, sure, but the majority of them focus on the negative, because those are the quotes—eloquent, moving, and powerful as they are—that resonate with me most deeply.

Yes, I’ll readily admit that some of the quotes are unnecessarily antagonistic, a bit like a bratty child thumbing his nose at his teacher and yelling, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!” Why did I include them? I don’t know. They made me smile.

So, basically, I just want it to be on the record that I’m not anti-religion. What I’m against is religion’s dark side; I’m against people who commit atrocities in the name of god, the bible, and religion. I’m against the intolerance and bigotry inspired by religion. That’s my stance in a nutshell.

Anyway…I know I haven’t been writing in my blog very often lately, and I never even got around to mentioning the holidays (they were swell; Christmas was lovely and New Year’s Eve was an easygoing evening with friends in Lebanon, which culminated in us attending the city’s infamous and cheesetastic Bologna Drop at midnight) or mentioning some of the fun things I’ve done lately, like meeting up with five friends for an Indian dinner on Capitol Hill and finally checking out the Annie Leibowitz and Ansel Adams exhibits at the Corcoran Gallery with Angela. I guess I just haven’t felt like writing because I’ve been so preoccupied with money worries and hunting for another part-time job that won’t turn me into a roman candle of stress, it’s been hard for me to pull my head out of my own ass. It’s all I’m thinking about, which means it’s more likely to leak into my journal and blog entries and emails to friends. Who wants to hear me whining? It’s boring and it’s getting old. So I’ve been pretty quiet on many fronts—writing and emailing especially—but hopefully when my life gets back on track both areas will reawaken.


song heard most recently before posting:
The Post War Dream—Pink Floyd