If Only L'Affaire Rick Warren Led To A Serious Discussion On The Bigoted Basis of All Religions

[stopbush]

That would happen in a sane and just world. It's the elephant in the room. It goes way beyond gay rights and women's rights and gets right to the heart of the matter, which is the enslavement of the human mind...and the bigotries that are acceptable to keep belief in imaginary entities the stuff of polite conversation and serious public discourse.

[Warpy]

1. The other elephant in the room

is how those bigots feel about women.

That ingrained hatred of anything feminine is what drives homophobia.

[Deep13]

2. The Abrahamic religions are especially bad at that. nt

[moggie]

5. Particularly Islam

At the moment I'm reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman's Cry for Reason. The treatment of women in the Muslim world, including Muslim immigrant communities in the west, is horrifying. It's not a pleasant read.

[Deep13]

7. She is wonderful.

And yes, Islam is the worst towards women. It may not be fashionable to judge religions against each other. Nevertheless, if ones response to learning his daughter was raped is to burn her alive, it is a pretty good bet that his world view is morally inferior to those who would empathize with the victim.

[Deep13]

3. bing! bing! bing! bing! We have a winnah!

Without a factually wrong belief that god designed sexuality solely for reproduction, the whole argument against homosexuality and reproductive rights falls apart.

[FiveGoodMen]

4. Come on, be fair!

If you're going to insist on facts, then the religious are going to have to give up a lot more than just their obession with certain kinds of sex!

Before you know it, they won't be able to defend their belief system at all! ;-)

[Pale Blue Dot]

6. Yep. I'm terrified to even weigh in with this point.

My blood pressure is already too high.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

8. Unfortunately, it won't lead to anything

Questioning Christianity and pointing out its absurdities is off-limits. It's the one area of society where having an open mind is considered a bad thing (even in liberal circles).

[onager]

9. Funny thing about that asshat...

Like many of his fellow spiritual leaders...spit...he doesn't even know his own propaganda.

I'm spending the holidays in South Carolina and just saw Warren bloviating on TV yesterday.

He said: "In all cultures and all religions for 5,000 years, marriage has been 1 man and 1 woman..."

I learned better than that in Baptist Sunday School. We always had a lot of fun counting up the numbers of wives and concubines collected by the Hebrew kings, especially David, Solomon, et. al. As we got older, the question invariably came up: "Those concubines sound like a really good deal. Why can't we get away with that nowadays?"

Evidently, at one point God was behaving sort of like a celestial Hugh Hefner. Then, like so much in most religions, it all changed.

The "5,000 years" ain't even close to right either, as proven by the brief but interesting history of the Mormon Church.

[awoke_in_2003]

10. Bringing up that point...

even here on DU is a good way to, at best, start a flamewar, or at worst- get tombstoned.