In Reply to: Re: interesting point of view from the Australian newspaper posted by The Coniuratio on August 16, 2006 at 15:16:27:
According to my interpretation of the article, the reporter self-identified as an agnostic, not an atheist as you claim. Although she says her parents were atheists, she is clearly an agnostic based on her statement: “God may or may not exist; I don't presume to know.” What you assume to be obvious is not so.
Your statement: "I think this is a murderous ideology, not a religion" could just as well apply to Christianity and Judaism as it does to Islam. More outrageous, however, is your comment: "When you consider that Judaism was the first religion to preach the sanctity of human life and to magnify the value of each individual being in the eyes of his creator--hence, equally, in other human beings, you have to admit to the benefacts of religion on our thinking." If your assertion is right, and I don’t concede it is, then it is only right insofar as it applies to other Jews, but certainly not to the goyim. That is probably one of the weakest arguments I’ve ever heard for the benefits (not “benefacts” as you wrote) of religion on society. Perhaps you've forgotten just how violently bloody the Old Testament is. Not even the Jews themselves were safe from their capricious, vindictive, murderous God. So much for sanctity of human life.
As for your hyperbolical claim that “It was Christians who pushed for the freeing of slaves. It is only the western countries that decry this savage method….” you seem to forget that in the U.S. and the U.K, to name just two, it was Christians who greatly expanded slavery in the first place. Furthermore, not all slavery abolitionists were Christian, and some who identified as Christian worked outside of and sometimes against organized religion. Many slave masters justified slavery as biblical, and they were supported in that position by religious leaders. Your comment that “only western countries…decry this savage method” is also misinformed. There are many products on American (and other western countries) shelves that are produced by indentured workers, very often children, who are in effect kept as slaves because they are never able to pay off the terms of their indenture. But that form of slavery is perhaps more subtle, and most often “over there” so it is easy for us in the west to consume away without our consciences being pricked by the unpleasant realities that brought those consumer products to us.
As far as I’m concerned, religion is just another form of slavery, for the religious person is not truly free, but enslaved by a dictatorial ideology .