Women Have The Right To Stand Up To Oppressive Religions!

                                                                             

Author and atheist Sam Harris hits it spot on in his masterful book, 'The Moral Landscape' (p. 63):

"Because religions conceive of morality as being obedient to the word of God (generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward), their precepts often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in the world. Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality etc. without ever feeling obliged to argue these practices actually cause suffering. 

They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm."

Examples reflecting the last points exist in abundance, such as the RCs' excommunication of  an American nun (in Arizona)  for saving a 27 year old mother’s life at the expense of her fetus’. Her moral choice was either to let the birth occur and see both mother and infant die, or prevent the birth (because of the mother’s blood pressure complications) and save the mother.

The Vatican's distorted morality (the same that forbids artificial contraception as "mutual masturbation") demanded that both mother and infant perish rather than allow the lesser of the beings (the fetus, not yet a fully formed person) die to save the more advanced being.  But  this is exactly what Harris meant when he referred to the "pious uncoupling of moral concern from human suffering".

To her credit, the nun chose the higher morality not dependent on simple obedience to an archaic God-concept. Realizing both lives couldn't be saved she chose to save the mother's.

In a similar way, another courageous woman - Brittany Maynard - realized that she already had a death sentence from brain cancer, but she had the power to circumvent it having the "last word". Thus, Brittany chose to end her life as a still sentient being rather than descend into a totally vegetative state lacking any life quality - with excruciating pain to go with it. Hence, Brittany's choice to end her life manifested a greater morality .  This morality rejected the suffering of merely existing in a debased vegetative condition based on the specious presumption  of "sanctity of life" demanded indiscriminately for any and all conditions.

Examining Brittany's choice one can see in retrospect that it was highly moral while the religionists attacking her exuded a morality that was "flagrantly immoral" because it extended human suffering.

These are extreme examples, to be sure, but lesser examples can also be invoked to show that women have the power (and right) to exercise their own choices - say in the matter of artificial contraception or abortion.

Thus, a Catholic woman with four kids already may understand that another would incur enormous hardship because of lack of resources. She is therefore totally justified in rejecting the Catholic Church's proscriptions against birth control.

Likewise, a single woman given a ''roofie"  in a drink by some low class renegade, and who later gets pregnant, is fully justified in getting an abortion. Her pregnancy occurred against her will, not her choice, so she is not obligated to endure the biological suffering and hardship a nine-month pregnancy will induce. 

Other single women, who may work in Catholic institutions (schools, hospitals),  have the right to demand FREE contraception as specified under the Affordable Care Act.  The argument that the institutions' "religious liberty" requires that no contraception be a part of any health plan is nonsense. This also extended to the Hobby Lobby fracas, irrespective of the decoupled SC decision.

As the Obama Administration has persuasively argued:

“The owners of Hobby Lobby aren’t entitled to exemption for their business based on their individual religious beliefs”

Or, as the Philadelphia-based federal appeals court pithily put it:

“Businesses do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously motivated actions.”

It is also important to note the Court has never recognized a for profit corporation's "religious rights" under federal law or the Constitution. 

As far as the Catholics' claim, it is also detached from reality- since workers at Catholic institutions are under no obligations to adhere to Catholic dogmas.

The bottom line is that once women - of all faiths or none- see that religions' moral precepts have nothing to do with maximizing well -being in the world, they will be charged to act under their own consciences. This is their right and it trumps any "pelvic proscriptions" the religions may have on offer!

The Younger Demographic Abandons Religion - It's About Time!

As I've noted in earlier blog posts, religion is distinct from the belief in a transcendent Being. While the endless search for the latter is likely rooted in the brain, i.e. the brain’s orientation and association area(OAA) ,  see e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/peeling-back-layers-of-religious-brain.html

religions are cultural-social creations, arising from particular ethnicities and geography.

That is, while the brain and OAA engender the God-concepts which we embrace, these concepts are not dependent on having a religion.


Religion - by contrast- is an entirely human artifact generally contrived for the purpose of control of a population via mind viruses.  Religion has been described as a "reaction to the experience of the transcendent" - and this may carry more truth than all the religious books one could ever read in a lifetime. It means that at some phase religion short circuits itself by inveighing against the natural instinct for spiritual self-discovery in most humans. It means that religion's warp and woof is to filter out the transcendent so its power implications are dispersed into assorted secondary human channels or  "media" (e.g. priests, popes, rabbis, ministers etc.)  as opposed to being allocated to the individual to exercise on his own. (Which would allow him to become too much like the ancient Gnostics).

Thus, religion FEARS too much self-autonomy, independent thought and questioning which is why it often retains an absolutist stance regarding the nature of the transcendent- and has historically held out assorted punishments when it beholds any transgressions of concept, or "belief", i.e. for heretics:















Heretics undergo torture at the hands of the Inquisition, for their rejection of basic Catholic tenets.

The mind virus basis for most religions (except the impersonal) was first articulated by biochemist Jacque Monod in his book Chance and Necessity. On page 155 Monod observes:

"The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will ensure the promotion of the idea itself. Its promotion value' bears no relation to the amount of objective truth the idea may contain."

He goes on to note (ibid.):

"The might of the powerful armament provided by a religious ideology for a society does not lie in its structure, but in the fact that if this structure is accepted, that it gains command".

And indeed, we already detect this playing out on the national stage as a group of powerful religious interests, as embodied in 'Hobby Lobby' - seeks to have certain contraceptive provisions in the ACA overturned by the Supreme Court so that they do not have to comply. As Justice Elaine Kagan noted in one of her ripostes, "What next? Will another religion choose to reject vaccinations? Another choose to reject sex education? Where does it end?"

But this is the point given that the most powerful and insidious memes- mind viruses are those dedicated to the spread of religious beliefs.  The most pervasive as well as pernicious are those that hijack political or social power  using what Monod, for example, calls their innate "infectious power", or how easily they are spread.  (One reason one must always be wary of proselytizers in any form! They all clearly seek to enhance the "propagation value" of the virus)

All of this is why it's so gratifying to now learn that of those aged 18 to 35, three in 10 say they are not affiliated with any religion, while only half are “absolutely certain” a god exists. These are at or near the highest levels of religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the 25 years the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.

In fact, the numbers could be even more favorable, and they might be closer to 4 in 10 unaffiliated with a religion. Why? A clue is provided by columnist Tina Dupuy, who  observes. “When it comes to self-reporting religious devotion Americans cannot be trusted. We under-estimate our calories, over-state our height, under-report our weight and when it comes to piety—we lie like a prayer rug.”

So 'Muricans are too chicken shit to divulge their real leanings and predilections in many polls- namely those bearing ultra-sensitive topics like weight, religious belief etc.. So what's new?

Anyway, even more satisfying is that e very piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent.

If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and “nones” equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. All of which is terrific, except that I will likely not be around to see it.

How did this turnaround from specious religious faith happen? Perhaps many reasons, including the emergence of the "New" atheists prepared to take on religionist bullies where and when they see fit - as opposed to cowering. And also the overreach of the religious politicos - as in the 2012 election with assorted nitwits talking about "legitimate rape" and other nonsense.

But it likely began even earlier. Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, the authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.”

Nowhere is this being played out more than in the arena of abortion and contraception, and one can see again how the religious will likely overplay they their hand with this new round at the Supreme Court. Whichever way the Court rules, the non-affiliated demographic is likely to grow and that is a good and healthy thing for this nation!