Respect for Religious Belief

I have the strong belief that we are different people, therefore, we can require differences in our religion or spirituality to keep us heading towards being the best we can be. I think respect should be given in that aspect. What you need to feel close to your god may not be what another needs, or another. As long as it is a belief system that keeps the person happy and inspires them to be better people, respect is due. Otherwise what are you portraying in your own belief system? Respect only if you agree? To respect does not mean you have to go along with anothers belief system, nor does it mean you can't speak your mind about what you disagree with. It simply means do all of that if you choose, but with respect. I also think, however, that needs to go both way...which it usually doesn't. Too many people think what they have set up for themselves that works great for the person they are, means it is right for all.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dark Star

I agree with most of this, but you have to keep in mind that religious beliefs often influence political beliefs. The battle we're having over the right to abortion and gay marriage (or gay soldiers being allowed in the military, etc.) are examples of that. The influence of religion on politics in the Middle East should also be quite obvious.

---

Not only that. The enforced torture of the terminally ill is a clear result of Christianity. And the Christian fear of the intemperate mind had a big role in inaugurating and continuing the disastrous drug war that is still being fought and ruining lives on a daily basis. Homosexual sodomy was still illegal in some us states until (i think) 2003 - beliefs that have resulted in this kind of persecution for 1000s of years don't deserve my respect, no matter how dear some people may hold them. Religious ideas and religious morality has been throughout history perhaps the greatest threat to civil liberties, and if you want proof of this, look at the societies that are still run on religious lines. The liberty of others, or God's will - what do you think matters more to the truly devout?

The only way i will respect someone else's religious beliefs is if they keep them entirely to themselves. If someone feels the need to tell me about their beliefs then i feel the need to tell them why i think they are wrong. You cannot bring up something in a discussion and then get upset when someone rubbishes it.

As an atheist -- an apostate, really, who has devolved into atheism -- I have no problem respecting the religion of others. Religious beliefs are not laughable or empty to people like me, and here's why:

I live out in the country, a little over a mile from my hometown, on land that was once the farm my wife grew up on. The wind blows out here, rain and hail fall, snow flies, and the sun bakes us like thin-crust pizzzas in a Domino's oven. We have lived on this three acres of land for a decade now, and are just beginning to breathe life into it. I cannot calculate the millions of gallons of (expensive) water we've poured into the sandy clay here, or the tons of (expensive) powdered manure we've spaded into the ground, or the hours and calories I've expended building retaining walls, shoveling fill dirt, building porches and decks and patios and sidewalks, planting trees (often three or four in the same spot, year after year,) and installing thousands of feet of drip system ... and all the while the elements have tried their very damnedest to destroy what I have built, and more often than not they have succeeded. I can easily understand how perfectly rational men would begin to suspect that something, someone, has it in for them. I've wondered it myself a time or two.

It is actually a short trip from my experience to the unfathomable, self-contradictory mythology of an ancient tribe of militant goat herders that has become modern Western religion. And that trip has produced the bulk of the Western literary canon, beginning with the scriptures themselves. How can we not recognize the beauty of, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God?"

No, it is not difficult to respect religion and the literature that it has wrought. Any other discussion of religion, in my humble opinion, belongs in a different forum altogether.