Thursday, January 22, 2009

Harry De Boer and His Imaginary Friend

Recently in a letter to the editor of the local paper, Harry De Boer supplied his commentary on peace in the middle east.

Unlike what priests and other Christians expect, I hope you read his actual original letter and don't simply take my word for it. Critical thinking involves checking sources, not valuing blind faith.

I won't take apart his letter word by word or paragraph by paragraph, I want to address the core illogicality of it.

Harry assumes that his religion is the "true" religion and, by some method, is able to logically discount other religions and claim them to be false. It is not possible that all religions are right but it is possible that all religions are wrong. Harry hopes/suggests that Muslims should "come around" and the world will be all better. Surely the Muslims believe that if Christians "came around" the world would be all better too.

How is it that someone (so many people) fail(s) to realize that religion is the problem and, even worse, pretends that their (false) religion is better than someone else's (false) religion? Is Harry being intellectually dishonest or does he lack the desire to think critically?

Peace and stability has not been built with the help of religion, ever - it has been achieved in spite of religion.

Give up your bronze-aged myths - it hasn't helped in thousands of years and it sure isn't helping today.

As an "off-but-on" topic topic..
Harry asserts that Jesus is the "Prince of Peace" - which is easily derived from "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." (Matthew 10:34) ??

1 comment:

C Woods said...

This is great. When I was about 12 and realized people of other religions were just as passionate about their faith as my parents were about theirs, I knew something was "off." Yet, lots of adults still don't get it. At 12 it occurred to me that if I had been born elsewhere, I probably would have been indoctrinated in a different faith. I was already skeptical about the B.S. I was reading in the Bible (which my family read cover to cover, a chapter before each dinner.) It took about 5 more years for me to realize i was an atheist ---probably didn't even realize there was such a thing way back then. It was so liberating to toss all of that superstition out the window.