| dunno001 said: How's about they try coming up with something provable, rather than spewing hate against anyone who's different, and saying that folowing their religion strictly is all that will save you? I swear, some of these nutjobs are doing a good job of pulling religion deep into the land of BS... |
The problem is that it's only the nutjobs who actually fully carry this sense of religion nowadays, to anyone who isn't a firm believer of a certain religion.
While I have a fundamental problem with religion and consider society capable of making its norms without sticking to an old text, for the most part I don't even notice religious people if they don't outright say so (and then I don't really care), or in some debate where our opinions differ directly based on religious teachings of the other party. Any sane believer, or even priest, cherry picks the Bible (when Christianity is concerned). There is a lot of stuff in it that simply can't be taken seriously nowadays (laws and customs of a foreign country from ages ago simply can't be accepted by a society so far from it). Whether this earthquake theory was deduced from the Quran in some logical way or he's just coming up with stuff doesn't even matter in our views.
Society encourages people acting for the common good, not hurting other people, living in peace etc. That's pretty natural, if it were the opposite, who'd want to live in that society in the first place. Good deeds and generally being nice to others don't need to be justified and people are rarely interested in the motives behind them.
But when it comes to something negative, it's normal to check who that person is, why they are doing it etc. And when it's religion, it's got that "don't thread on its toes" warning because it enjoys a certain liberty. This guy's speech probably doesn't enrage the population it's directed to a lot, but we've got the Catholic church being crazy in their speeches lately, and I couldn't go around telling people that stuff without any repercussions, but they can. And then that's pretty much where some religious leader's crazy talk = religion on the whole, and they do drag it down to BS level, which is way below the nonsense level most non-religious people have it on.
