Guadalajara Reporter - A fundamental problem with religion

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A fundamental problem with religion

Written by Kenneth Crosby
Saturday, 05 April 2008
Jan Salzman’s piece in the March 29-April 4 Guadalajara Reporter unintentionally illustrates a fundamental problem with religion: because it is based solely on faith, which means belief in the absence of evidence, believers and their religious authorities choose what they believe in – the books in the Bible were selected from a larger number by early church leaders – and change it from time to time, often when it is politically expedient to do so. Thus the Catholic church decreed that after all it was not the Jews, who are still with us and constitute a politically potent force, who killed Christ, but Romans, who are extinct as a political group and can’t object to being labeled Christ’s killers. There have been endless changes in what believers are to believe. Many Christian leaders accepted or even advocated slavery, which is condoned in the Bible, but few do so now, choosing instead to ignore what the Bible says about it. (There is a sect that seeks to “restore” government that strictly and literally conforms to the Bible, including possession of slaves and stoning of adulterers and homosexuals.) Leaders of the Mormons (Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints) received a revelation reversing the Church’s endorsement of plural marriage at just the time that prohibition of polygamy was required for Utah to become a state (though the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, not to be confused with the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, maintains that plural marriage is still God’s law). More recently, during the period of civil rights fervor, Church leaders eliminated the Mormon dogma holding that Black people are descendants of Cain and therefore cannot be accepted into the Church. Ms. Salzman “yearns for the time when each faith tradition removes the historically false narratives from its ritualized celebrations,” but there are profound disagreements among faiths as to what is historically false and true. She writes that “all of us are the faces of God, and it will become a wonderful world when we all treat each other with that in mind,” but by “all of us” she obvioiusly does not mean Muslims, Hindus, and others who are neither Christians nor Jews. She has to ignore the fact that fundamentalist Christians, strong supporters of the Israel that they believe necessary for the second coming of Christ, hold that Jews, like all others who do not accept Christ as their personal savior, are condemned to hell, and the fact that the Catholic Church, whose current position concerning who killed Christ she applauds, maintains that it is the only true church of the god that she worships as a Jew. It would surely be a better world if the religious dogmas that divide and demean us did not exist. Kenneth Crosby, San Antonio Tlaycapan