MYTH:
“You
Can’t Talk about My Religion!”
November
2006
FACT:
“Yes I can.”
Religious people tend to think of their religions as, well, sacred.
Because of this, they may try and tell you that you have no
right to
criticize — or even ask honest questions about — their
faith. Here are
some totally valid counterarguments to use against their totally
invalid protests.
When
they say
_________
---> You say _________
1.
“My
religion is my
business!”
Response: Like
anything
else, your
religion would
be “your business” if
you kept
it to yourself. But most religious people don’t.
Very often, they
will criticize others
for not acting in accordance
with the principles of their
faith, and are also in
the habit of supporting politicians
who have
similar religious principles. Now, since politicians make laws,
and these laws would bind everybody,
this makes
“your religion” everybody’s
business. If you are going to pass some law that you can only
support
with “evidence” from your religion, and you also take
the position that the
millions of other people who would be bound to follow this law
“can’t
talk about your religion,” then you are arguing that these
people
should be bound by laws they have no say about. If you think
back to
the fourth grade, you’ll remember that this is the whole
reason the
American Colonies revolted against England in the first place.
(NOTE:
Even if you don’t talk
about your
religious beliefs, they are still
everyone
else’s business if you vote
based on
them.)
2.
“The
Constitution says we have
Freedom of Religion!”
Response: That’s
certainly true, but it doesn’t
mean what you
think it means. As
is the case with Freedom of Speech, the Constitution says you have the
freedom to practice
whatever religion you want, but
that doesn’t
mean other people aren’t
allowed to criticize
you for doing so — if it did, then that would infringe upon
those
people’s Freedom of Speech, and remember that laws are only
valid up to
the point where they interfere with other laws (for example, if your
religion said you should kill people, then that would not
be protected by the Constitution, because we also
have laws against killing people). It would indeed be
horribly
unconstitutional if the government
made your
religion illegal,
but if another citizen
simply criticizes
it, then that’s not the
same thing, because you are still allowed
to practice
your religion no matter what the other person says. If,
however, you
use your judgment and decide
that what the other
person says is a valid
criticism…
Well,
that’s the point of Freedom of Speech.
3.
“Okay,
even if you are allowed
to
do so, it is just plain rude to tell someone that their religion
isn’t true!”
Response: Maybe
so, but
it isn’t any more
rude than you
are being. You see, if you identify yourself as belonging to
a
particular religion, then that means you are also
identifying yourself as not
belonging to any of the
many other
religions in the world — which
is equivalent to saying that all these other
religions are not true. So, when someone says that your
religion is not
true, that person is only doing
the same thing to you
that you are already
doing to all those other
people — plus, you
were the one who started
it, since you picked your
religion first,
and then the other person criticized it afterwards.
4.
“It’s
not like
I’m hurting anybody!”
Response: Are
you
sure? Even
if you are not one of the religious people who use their religion as an
excuse to treat others badly, there are still any number of good
arguments in favor of the idea that you are hurting
people.
There are many examples about which you probably agree with
me:
when
practitioners of Santeria sprinkle poisonous mercury around their
babies’ cribs because their
religion says
that it keeps evil spirits away, or when Christian Scientists refuse to
take their sick children to a doctor because their
religion
says that you should never use
medicine, or when Snake
Handlers force their children to pick up poisonous snakes because their
religion says
that the snakes will only bite bad people, most people agree that these
things should not be permitted under the law. But what about
the more
subtle ways that being brought up with a particular religion might hurt
a child? If your religion says that sexual thoughts are
sinful, and as
a result of this, your child eventually has to be in therapy because
they developed emotional problems as a result of having the sexual
desires that science says are normal and unavoidable, is this not a
medical condition that they have to spend time and money to try and
fix, just as much as if they had mercury poisoning or a snakebite?
Or
if the general faulty reasoning that is necessary to maintain a belief
in most religions makes a child worse at thinking, and as a result of
this, the child doesn’t do as well in school as they
otherwise would
have, and ends up going to a worse college, and having a worse job,
then in the long run isn’t that even worse
than being bitten by a snake?
5.
“Criticizing
a religion is
discrimination, the same as being prejudiced against a race!”
Response: No,
it isn’t. Prejudice
means you are assuming
that because someone belongs to a certain category, then some other
unrelated thing must also
be true about them, even
though you don’t
really know whether it
is — in other words, you are pre-judging
them (see Frequently Misused Terms
entry for prejudice).
If someone states
that they have a certain belief, and then you
criticize it, that is not
prejudice, because you
are not assuming
that they have this
belief — they just told
you they did!
Someone’s race or gender (and probably
sexual orientation, although this has not been proven) is in their
genes; someone’s religion
is not.
Religion is a set of beliefs
that you decide
to have, and it is crazy to say that no-one can be criticized for their
beliefs,
because that would mean that no-one
could ever be criticized for anything,
since
everything someone says and does is a result of what they believe.
(NOTE: In accordance with our correct definition of prejudice,
1585s are hereby warned that we must avoid assuming
that someone believes a certain thing based solely on what religion
they say they are, since not all members of a particular religion
believe the same things… but once you have confirmed
that someone believes something stupid, feel free to throw down.)
6.
“I
said it’s my fucking
RELIGION! AAARRGH!!”
Response: First
of
all:
it’s
not your
religion; it’s a
religion — you didn’t make it up, and it
doesn’t belong to you. Secondly…
Hey, wait a
minute, maybe you did
make it up! What I
mean by
that is: Are you sure
that the things
you’re saying are actually
what your religion says you have to believe? Who told you so?
Your
peers? Your parents? A religious official?
Since you have never
personally met God, the odds are that the highest authority you have
ever talked to is a religious official of some kind. In
religions where
there is not one ultimate authority figure, religious officials often
disagree with one another — how are you choosing which ones
you believe
and which ones you don’t believe? If you are just
arbitrarily
deciding
based on what you feel
like believing, then how is
that different from having no religion at all? In religions
where there is
one ultimate authority figure (for example, the Pope in Catholicism),
whoever occupies that position at any given time does not necessarily
agree with the previous person who occupied it — and since
you probably
believe that God does not randomly change its mind all the time for no
reason, how do you know which one of those people actually believes the
same things as God?
Lots
of religious
people are
simply mistaken about what their religion “really”
says — for example,
many Christians are under the impression that they are supposed to
believe that December 25th is literally Jesus’s birthday, but
in fact,
when the Church established the Feast of the Nativity in 350 CE, they
firmly declared that they were simply agreeing
to observe
the birth of Jesus on that day, since they didn’t know the
real date, and
that it would forever be considered
a sin
to believe that he was actually
born on that day, since the real
date was supposed to remain a mystery! (And if you're a
literalist, be advised that the December 25th date actually contradicts
the Bible, since, although no date is given, shepherds definitely
wouldn't have been “keeping watch over their flock by
night” in December.) Nobody in the Catholic or
Protestant Churches ever formally reversed this (and even if they had,
what would the difference be? Either he was born on that day
or
he
wasn’t), but most Christians have got it totally backwards,
just by
mistake (by all means, if you don’t believe me about this, go
ahead and
look it up).
Strangely,
many religious
people get mad when
others
point
out things like this. For example, if you tell a Christian
that
something in the Bible is a mistranslation (the 3rd Commandment, for
example), and that people can even prove
this
because we have
copies of the original Hebrew version, they might say that you are
“criticizing” or even “making fun
of” their religion. But shouldn’t
they be thanking
you? After all, if they
believe
that the Bible
is really the word of God, and that God originally said it in Hebrew
(or, technically, said
it in Aramaic to someone who
then wrote it down
in Hebrew), shouldn’t
they want to believe the thing that God actually
said, instead of believing a mistake
that some lazy translator made hundreds of years later? If
you’re going
to tell someone not to “talk about your religion,”
you should probably
make sure first that it really is
your religion,
right?
Of
course, asking this of these people would assume
that they
possess the ability to apply rational
thought within
the boundaries of their irrational
thought (like how movies that require suspension
of disbelief
are still supposed to have internal
consistency).
But apparently, they either don’t
have
this ability, or choose
not to use it, or a
combination of both. Sadly, many religious people just
believe whatever they want and then call
it their religion, in an attempt to erect a magic rhetorical forcefield
that makes it immune to criticism. And when they get sick of
believing
something, they just change it, and then act like the new thing was
what they really believed all along. Religious beliefs are no
more
“noble” than any other variety of stupid belief,
and are entitled to no
more courtesy.
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