WHEN THE ALLIES OF RELIGION SAY, "IT IS GOOD" AS IF THE VIOLENCE DOES NOT MATTER
"The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history," Steven Pinker.
When a corporation or a business is shown to be harmful and malevolent we don't then say, "It is good for all the people involved cannot be bad. Some good people must be there." You say it is a bad entity regardless of the good people in it. You slam the organisation and treat them as individuals. You do not encourage or validate their involvement in it. This is not done with religion. No charity even gets a free pass. Nothing does. Only organisations that act like religions or claim to be. Religion is not a magic word that exempts a corporation or organisation from the rules that apply to deciding if the corporation or organisation should even exist. If it is bad ENOUGH it should be disbanded. If religion A is worse than religion B then religion A has to go. That is the principle. The other reason is that malevolence is hidden and disguised so on the basis of untrustworthiness you should break open the exit door and encourage people to use it. How good is religion when it depends on its supporters and allies lying and having double-standards?
A secularist has to treat each religion not as a religion but as a system or organisation. To treat it as the divinely originated thing it claims to be is not secularism. It is not equality.
The allies and the patriarchal and political framework have more to do with the power of religion than religion itself. Religion will fall like a house of cards without them.
Ideologies define what a particular community is. Then they find a few people on the fringe. This grouping then will be made out to be typical of the larger community.
See how this works with Christianity.
The pope and the clergy are the fringe members. They are made the speakers for the church the only representative voices in matters of faith and theology and morality. A socialist ideology will accept that and start to get the Church out of society as it does not like what its real teaching is.
The pro-life fanatics who bomb clinics and call abortion providers murderers are regarded as the real representatives of the faith by those ideologies that want them to be.
People who won't take the religion seriously will be regarded as typical and representative of Catholicism by secularists and agnostics.
More often than not, ideologies empower the church from inside and out.
Take LGBT ideologies. The Church will pick the worst self-appointed spokespersons as representative of LGBT to which it objects to on sexual morality grounds. The liberals will pick nicer people who may say loads of nice things about the Church and thus the vicious harm done by the Church is enabled.
Religion clearly depends too much on ideologies. Even if it were not an ideology itself, it is not a good sign or a good reflection on it that it needs ideologies to empower it. You never hear it complaining.
