Freedom Requires Religion?????????
Earlier today, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave what the media is calling a major speech. He voiced a lot of far out opinions geared for high powered pandering to the religious conservatives who've been jumping on the Huckabee bandwagon. So given the stakes and his target audience, it's no surprise that he said some stuff that has seculars all over the country rolling their eyes. This remark in particular:
"Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone," he said.
NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.
NO.
As a secular humanist, I'm used to passive discrimination from politicians as they go about their holy duty of making themselves more popular. But what I don't like is when they go out of their way to proclaim 1984ish gibberish as truth.
I'm going to break down this particular remark sentence by sentence. I want to start with the last one, "Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
The thing about that is, how many people have died because of somebody else's faith? Hmmmmm, let's see. The Salem Witch Trials come to mind. But no, that's too far back. I have a more recent one --- how about Dubya? Did you know that "God" told him to invade Iraq? Tens of thousands of civilians paid the ultimate price for that one. Or we could talk about all them Islamobafasssscists! that Bush hates so much --- would the Taliban not be the perfect example of religion causing freedom to perish?
How about the Pope's stance on contraception? Isn't that religion restricting people's freedom? Ditto, abortion. Ah, but it's ok, cause the role of religion is create a set of rules to dictate one's behavior, like a required set of morals.
Wait, what were we talking about?
OH YEAH, FREEEEEEDOM.
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Let's move on to another sentence in Romney's brilliant speech.
"Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God."
This is, at best, an opinion written in pretty language, but I don't outright disagree with him. Though I would say that freedom can do a lot of things besides that. For me it's great cause it let's me say whatever the fuck I want to. I very much love the fucking First Amendment. Don't you fucking love the First Amendment? Fuck yeah, I know!
I've never "communed with God" and honestly I don't even know what that means. For a lot of reasons, I don't believe He exists, though I do try to show respect to my friends who do.
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The next bit to address is "just as religion requires freedom".
I agree. I would only say that he's lucky that no one single religion is dominant enough to outlaw others, as occurs in countries like Sudan and China. Although I would say that as an atheist, there are rights I don't have; for example, I'm basically not allowed to hold public office in a lot of areas of the country. There's something very unfair about that. But that speaks more to the extremist political behavior of individual Believers than the laws that govern them.
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Lastly, "freedom requires religion".
And this is where the shitstorm blows brownest.
Freedom does NOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT require religion in the LEAST bit. In fact, it's just the opposite; I'd say, "freedom exists DESPITE religion".
For example, I'll bring up the fucking First Amendment again. If the Bible was the law of the land, I couldn't say the word fuck at all. Or shitstorm! Or cunt nipple pussy damn. Ok, maybe nipple.
The point is that religion's inherent self-righteousness, it's need to decide what's right for you, is instinctively contrary to freedom. The more power a religion has in a society, the less free it is. The Bush administration is perhaps the perfect example I can think of that hits close to home, though I don't think it's possible for a non-atheist/agnostic to quite understand what I'm talking about.
At the risk of offending some, I'll take this a step farther.
Little kids taught to obediently believe in something before they're old enough to ask intelligent questions about it doesn't sound like freedom to me. It sounds like brainwashing, which is an extremely dangerous enemy of freedom because it stops people from exercising it before they even know they have it, let alone understand its significance. The age of consent for sexual intercourse is 18 in most states, but the age at which a child's mind can be drowned in dogma is approximately zero. Obviously it's the role of the parents to decide, as it should be, but the fact is that by determining their kids' religious habits before they're fully equipped mentally, they prevent their kids from exploring spirituality on their own, or at least in the way that no-good, insolent, atheist bastard-children like myself are allowed to recklessly invent and question everything without any feeling of oppression caused by previously-instilled dogmatic boundaries, running totally free, only respecting logic and whatever morals I picked up along the way. And I picked up plenty on my own, enough that I can look many a "Christian" in the eye and know that in my short lifetime I've already done more to help my fellow man than they ever will.
Therefore I present myself and other secular humanists out there as living evidence (and nonliving evidence, 'cause he's in Heaven now) that freedom absolutely does not require religion. Not even morals require religion.
Mitt Romney, don't take this the wrong way, but ur full of shit! LOLz!!
P.S., Hating on Rudy Giuliani for tolerating illegal immigrants while you yourself were hiring them to do landscaping at your mansion totttttttally cracked me up the other day.
More Grey area??? Although I
More Grey area???
Although I disagree with some of your logic, Jake, the statement that "freedom only exists with religion" is completely bogus. These kinds of statements show the underlying theme of religious fundamentalists who have forgotten everything their religion stands for. Much of the arguments you use, Jake, outline the extremes of religion; within the religious right, so called "republicans" today, send their kids the Jesus Camp (great documentary) and preach a shift from democracy to a theocratic dictatorship. These people praise Bush for all the "good" he's done by bringing "born-again" religious philosophies into the government. They have quite a following, and that scares me. I hope the sane people, who are either truly religious or atheist, to join together, get out and start taking an active part in their government before these nut-jobs move from destroying everything good in faith and religion (2 very different things) and continue on their campaign to take over and destroy this country.
There's nothing like a sunset to prove how genuine is life...
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