The Daily Evergreen

Published: 04/20/2009

I have met many people who turned away from their faith because they could no longer endure religious hypocrisy. Religious morality is really an anachronism that has become ethically bankrupt.

First off, religious morality should have outlawed slavery from the very beginning. Instead, it took thousands of years to end slavery, happening only after universal declarations of human rights and capitalistic free labor made it unfashionable.

On par with slavery is the mind-boggling denunciation of condoms by the Pope. This is equivalent to a death sentence for people in Africa who are struggling to contain AIDS. For people dying and suffering, it is hard to see the logic of why they should reject safe sex. The Roman Catholic Church has indirectly condemned thousands and thousands to death for an absurd notion that contraception is somehow wrong. Stopping disease, unwanted births and the need for painful abortions through contraception are undeniable social benefits.

The irrationality of denying contraception brings me to the next point – overpopulation. The world is in need of definite and immediate population reduction. The earth and its resources are under heavy abuse and religions continue to promote an absurd and short-sighted policy of promoting the numbers of their flocks by high birth rates. I think we have killed enough species, cut down enough forests and exploited enough resources. Every thinking person examining our current predicament should see the logic of advocating population controls everywhere.

Then there are women, women who have been oppressed and marginalized in nearly every religion across the world. If there is any traditional enemy to women, it is religion. The lack of women in any kind of equal leadership role throughout history exposes religion as a patriarchal invention to legitimize male dominance and power.

This is true for Judaism and Christianity and is especially true of Islam. In the Old Testament, women were basically considered the property of men with few privileges. In the New Testament, women were ordered to submit to men. Women were also blamed for the fall owing to Eve having been tricked by a nasty snake.

In Hinduism, women were once encouraged to practice sati, a tradition that required women to commit suicide after their husband’s death. Women were clearly no more than men’s property.

In Islam, “divinely” inspired religious morality in Sharia law allows adult men who are 45 years old to marry children who are no more than 10 years old in Saudi Arabia. This is in accordance to a strict interpretation of Sharia law, called Wahhabism.

On Oct. 27, 2008, in Somalia, Islamic fundamentalists executed a 13-year-old girl who had been declared guilty of adultery after she had been raped by three men. Her name was Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow. She had innocently reported to the authorities she had been raped, and for her “crime,” she was taken into a stadium before a crowd of 1,000, buried to her neck and stoned to death by 50 executioners. It makes me physically sick just describing it.

Religions have also misconstrued human nature, freezing their understanding of who we are from barely enlightened ancient societies. This has caused blindness and ignorance to the natural occurrence of homosexuality and the fluidity of sexuality in general.

Finally, because I am out of space, mutually exclusive religions have historically aggravated human conflict. While science has become universal, religions remain geographically constrained because they all disagree without any available evidence to conclusively resolve their claims.

Religious morality went bankrupt long ago for being out of touch with human need and understanding. For religions to be relevant, they have had to constantly update their moral positions, contradicting their claim as a solid foundation.
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