“Religion Must Have Hurt You Personally”
I am a pretty outspoken atheist and I criticize religion often and in some cases extremely harshly. I generally argue against particular religious ideas and lines of “reasoning” rather than arguing behavior (although I do argue against some behavior of particular religious people or groups of people from time to time). Often when I present a particularly strong criticism, a religious person will come along and inform me that, “Religion must have hurt you on a personal level.” The truth is; it hasn’t.
While I was certainly a religious believer at one point in my life, it was never a particularly dominant force in my life. Leaving religion wasn’t all that hurtful for me. My parents, family, and friends may not have congratulated me, but they certainly didn’t ostracize or disown me.
I never had a particularly religious girlfriend who cruelly left me over religion. I never lost a job over religion nor have any religious people attacked me (although I have gotten a few death threats after being vocal).
No, religion hasn’t personally hurt me in any direct way. As a thinking individual, I have studied various religions and think the narrative of most are ridiculous. I think the ideas that religion presents are often poor at best. But I would be lying if I said that my criticism of religion is isolated merely to insufficient reasoning.
The fact is that religion hurts us all. Religion hasn’t hurt me on a personal level, but on a cultural level and on a societal level religion has hurt me and everyone else. I need not even open a history book to see the destructive influences of religion. Whether it is gay rights, opposition to comprehensive sex education, opposition to stem cell research, etc. religion affects us all.
Should we bother to open up that history book, we would see that religious thinking (i.e. belief on faith alone and belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of the creator of the universe) was responsible for the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, the Crusades, witch trials, strong arguments in favor of slavery and against women’s rights, and many more atrocities. So yeah, these things hurt.
The claim that a vocal atheist must have been hurt personally is an attempt to devalue the criticism so that the criticism can be ignored. The reasoning is that the atheist’s criticism is based solely on his or her personal anger and not on any real merit. The fact is that one can be angry and have valid arguments. But in my case, it isn’t a personal issue it is an issue driven by the merit alone.
Filed under: church/state, conversation, culture war, People of Reason, Personal, Religion, Religious Manipulation
