Reasons I Am Antireligious Part 1

I am antireligious. This means that not only do I not subscribe to any religion, but I believe they are all false, destructive, and dangerous. There have been many obstacles and experiences which lead me to this conclusion, which I won't discuss here, but it's been an interesting journey. Raised by my Christian mother and occasionally during my life seeing my fundamentalist Christian father, I was so brainwashed by this religion that I stood in front of the church quoting Bible verses and once gathered a petition to ban all forms of abortion, based on Bible verses.

Ironically, my travels abroad as a missionary to convert Norwegians, Australians, and Belarussians were the first prompts that made me begin questioning my faith. My first deep encounter with a non-Western culture came when I studied abroad in Viet Nam as a college student. Confronted with a culture that had developed entirely differently than Anglo-American society; Vietnamese had a completely different way of thinking about the world, which really stunned me.

I think the point where I ultimately lost hope in Christianity came at a point when I was in Santa Barbara, meeting the chair of the Geography Department in hopes of studying there for my Master's Degree. I was in the library and on the wall was a map of the United States showing the geographic distribution of religion/Christian denominations. It struck me like a lightning bolt, and all of a sudden my experiences abroad made sense: religion is geography. This is also the first argument I will make for being antireligious.

1) Religion is geography.
Basically, most citizens of America are Christians simply because they were born in America. If they had been born in Viet Nam, for instance, they would probably be Buddhist. In Yemen and they would be Muslim. Closer to home, Baptists "rule" the south. Catholicism dominates the Northeast, Mormons reside predominantly in Utah. This makes sense because religion is a part of culture. The only logical conclusion that a Christian could make is of the superiority of America, since we have found the "true religion", and those "other countries" are worshiping "false gods". This question borders on cliche, but let me ask it anyway: How does any religion have the right to say that they are correct and that all other religions are wrong? Where is the support for this kind of statement? And if you don't say that your religion is the only right one, then what's the point of following yours?

2) Tradition vs. Truth
Most religious practices that I am aware of are tradition, not mandates. By mandates I mean something that they were instructed in their holy book. For instance, the Christian Bible was gradually canonized by a panel of men, not "God". These men over time decided which letters, stories, and visions complied with their version of God, canonized those into their Bible, and discarded the rest (examples of rejects are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and later, with Protestantism, the Apocrypha). Now, many books of the Bible were once canonized, but later discarded. This leads me to ask why if, according to Christians, the books were chosen through inspiration of God, there were some which were accepted only to be thrown out later. Were they once holy, but not any more?

In Judaism, the western wall (AKA Wailing Wall) is held almost as a deity to be worshiped, simply because it supports the area where Solomon once built his temple. This is not mandated by their religious texts.

In Islam, women are told that covering their faces and being inhumanely submissive to men obtains respect and blessing from Allah. As far as I know, these particular practices are not mandates.

More to come later.

A good news column :)

From Nick Kristof, NY Times columnist. I freaking love this guy.

NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan

The farm families living in these rocky hills in central Sudan confront every disease imaginable, from leprosy to malaria, and perhaps one-quarter of children die by the age of five.

Yet this is a “good news” column. Karlo will live.

The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of five has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history — compared with 20 million annually in 1960 — Unicef noted in a report last month, “Child Survival.” Now the goal is to cut the death toll to four million by 2015.

Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.

To put it another way, the late James P. Grant, a little-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.

One of the lives saved this year seems to be that of Karlo, an 8-month-old baby boy who lives in a thatch-roof hut here. His older brother, Kuti, had died a few days before I arrived: Kuti was taken to the hospital and tested positive for malaria, but the doctor believed that he probably died from meningitis.

Then Karlo fell sick, and his mother was frantic at the thought that he would die as well. The father, Bolus Abdullah, was more fatalistic.

“Many children die here,” Mr. Bolus explained to me as volunteers with an American aid group, Samaritan’s Purse, drove the family to the nearest hospital over a fantastically rutted road. “But if that’s the will of God, then there’s nothing we can do.”

Yet there are things we can do — and that brings us to the American presidential campaign.

African children like Karlo may actually have more at stake in the outcome of the presidential election than children in the United States. Just imagine if the next president were to wage a serious war on malaria. At a tiny fraction of the cost of the war in Iraq (or a war on Iran!) such a campaign would save millions of lives and be a huge boost to African economies whose productivity is sapped by diseases.

The hospital to which we took Karlo is run by an aid group, German Emergency Doctors, and is run by a husband-wife team of physicians, Karl Eiter and Gabi Kortmann. The hospital, whose “wards” are thatch-roof huts with no electricity, is perched on a rural mountainside to protect it from aerial bombings by the Sudanese government. (Sudan’s main involvement in health care in contested areas like this has been to strafe hospitals.)

Dr. Eiter ordered a blood test for Karlo, and it came back positive for malaria. He gave Karlo a medication that is almost always effective against malaria here, artemisinin combination therapy, costing just 50 cents for an entire course of treatment.

Saving children’s lives in rural Africa or Asia, where millions die of ailments as simple as diarrhea, pneumonia or measles, is achingly simple and inexpensive. The starting point is vaccinations and basic sanitation.

“We never have all the vaccines that are required,” Dr. Eiter said.

For years, the rationale for opposing foreign assistance has been that it doesn’t work. It’s true that humanitarian aid is devilishly difficult to get right, money is squandered and the impact of aid is often oversold.

But President Bush’s record underscores that other policies are difficult to get right as well: Iraq is a mess, and social security reform and immigration reform both failed. Mr. Bush’s greatest single accomplishment is that his AIDS program in Africa is saving millions of lives.

That makes it all the more stunning that Mr. Bush’s proposed budget for 2009 cuts U.S. funding for child and maternal health programs around the world by nearly 18 percent.

Fortunately, all the candidates are saying the right things about malaria, AIDS and support for education in Africa (although John McCain is fuzzier about commitments). You can compare the candidates’ positions on global humanitarian issues at www.onevote08.org.

Voters should remember this: A president may or may not be able to improve schools or protect manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but a president probably could help wipe out malaria. Compared with other challenges a president faces, saving a million children’s lives a year is the low-hanging fruit.

Karlo, bouncing in his mother’s lap, underscores the hope. With the medicine, he recovered quickly and was sent home from the hospital after a few days. The news here is simple and giddy ... he’s alive!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html?hp

defense budgets and communism

Alright, readers: today's blog will cover two topics. That's right. I heard two things today that burned me up, and I have to discuss these now. But briefly, since I just got a new job today and I must go celebrate.

First topic of discussion: On KPBS's "Citizen Voices" today, I heard a libertarian say that some of the things Barack Obama stands for are "like going back to communism". He then went on to say that we fought communism for so long, and now we're going to forget about that and return to communism. Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to pick apart arguments to reveal their fallacies. I'm a bit of a rhetorician.My first beef with this argument is nitpicky: we were never communist per se, so we cannot return to it. However, there are two deeper assumptions underlying this statement, the assumption that all communism is bad, and the assumption that we should have nothing to do with it. Furthermore, I think what the person was discussing was socialism, not communism; they are two very different things, and I think the person was confusing them. An ad hominem logical fallacy occurs when somebody criticizes an idea by giving it a name that is designed to invoke fear or disgust, rather than actually discussing intrinsic characteristics. In other words, it is name-calling, which is not a logical argument. Therefore, saying something is bad because it is "communist" is not logical. Taking this one step further, what the person said was not logical because it assumed that "all communism is bad" is a non-disputable notion.

Now, turning to the second assumption of this statement, that we should avoid communism, he forgets that we've already adopted many socialist policies that few would discredit. I kind of like having publicly-funded libraries, schools, utilities, roads, humanitarian programs, and public transportation. Looking at this argument from another direction, I kind of like the interstate highway system that we adopted from Nazi Germany, and VW Beetles ("People's Car", in German), which were developed by Adolph Hitler himself. I would also like publicly-funded healthcare, along the lines of what's already in place in Canada, England, France, Sweden, Norway, and half the rest of the developed world. If they do it, why can't we?

And this brings us to the second topic that I want to discuss before I go inebriate myself, the report from the BBC covering China's increase in defense spending. Apparently the U.S. is quite worried about the fact that China increased its military spending 18% this year. China will now be spending $59 billion. Waaaaaait a second.... This worries the U.S.? The country that spends nearly 9 times that amount annually ($481.4 billion)? Does this not sound extremely arrogant of the U.S.? Before China's announcement, the U.S. held the place of the biggest spender on defense in the world: it spends more annually than the rest of the world COMBINED. I'd love to hear an argument in support of this. As a side note, the U.S. sends $2 billion annually to the current government in Colombia, which is now being heavily criticized from the world for its murder of a rebel group leader.

Why are we in so deep with our fear of "socialism"/"communism", and how did we get so deep into our defense miseries? I would argue that one reason is because we don't teach geography in high schools. Every place outside our borders becomes a mythical fairy-tale land, full of dragons that want to eat us. And scary people that have a different religion that want to bomb us. Our children are also not taught some of the policies that other countries have in place, to test what's good and bad about them. I sincerely believe that if we were more conscious of the rest of the world, we would be less arrogant in our foreign policies.

Running out of time. Gotta go.

edit: $2 billion is the amount given by the U.S. to foreign militaries in sum, while $500 million is the amount given to the Colombian government.