Compassion Forum? Oh, FSM!

I've lived in America most of my life, so this sort of blending of morality and theology is nothing new to me. In my newspaper, I get a section entitled "Faith & Values", the implication being that they are sort of one in the same - or at least similiar. They are neither. John Stuart Mill, writing about his father, explained that one of the problems with religion is that it allows for genuine moral character and caliber to be exchanged for piety and ceremony. As an outsider to the whole religious fervor in the States, I'd have to say that he is spot on. Time and time again, it is explained to me through the teevee, or the internet, or amongst the people in my town how people who don't think exactly like them are not moral people. The hubris and the arrogance of this, of course, is the implication that they are good people on the basis of nothing more than what they think the status is of the veracity of a collection of works written and re-written over the last 2 millenia. Or not even the veracity! Sometimes it can come down to one's particular parochial brand of interpretation (The old SoBap joke comes to mind).

Theirs is a small god. Theirs is a god that bears their own prejudices, their own hatreds, their own fears. As George Bernard Shaw once wrote, no man believes the bible says what it means but rather that it means what he says.

I for one, am sick of it. I am sick of hearing, time and time again, that I am not moral unless I profess adoration to this small god of theirs. When I refuse, or when I have the temerity to point out that maybe, just maybe, if there is a god and if we really are all god's children, then maybe we should spend less time hating our brothers and sisters then I am blasted as a bigot, as a heretic, as...you guessed it...immoral.

So I'm sorry if this seems a little undeserved, but it does rake at my sense of fairness. I'm tired of morality being subsumed under the banner of religion, especially when religion can be implicated in some of the worst atrocities in human history. That's not necessarily a dig at religion, but when I look around I don't tend to see religious people being the best among us. I see people being people, some good, and some bad. On the whole, there seems to be very little correlation between how good one is and how often one attends church, or to what brand of church.

That's my .02.