A recent study found that racism was more common among those who identified as religious believers. And since religion is a kind of spiritual racism, this should not be surprising.
One of the great lies of organized religion, of which there are too many to count, is that there is a hierarchical order to moral truth and virtue. This lie, however, is so apparent, it goes without notice or objection by those who willingly accept it. And simply accepting such an idea is how the religion robs people of their "free will," even as it claims to be doing the very opposite (which is a means of mass manipulation that both advertisers and politicians have adopted to great applause and destruction).
You see, there are at least two obvious reasons why such a "belief" is flawed, if not outright false. The first is that it presumes that some people are saints and others are sinners, even though assigning such rankings on an infinite scale is impossible. And the second is to mistakenly conflate how we biologically rank different species on the food chain with how we spiritual rank the holiness of souls. Both of these mistakes, which have been completely overlooked by theologians throughout the ages, demonstrate just how man-made our ideas of religion and morality really are.
First, let's look at the idea of ranking people from saints to sinners. Can we really use an infinite god as an infinite moral standard to measure finite moral beings? While Christians by default insist that we can, the real question is, how would such a thing even be possible? Think about it: if God is an infinitely long moral yard stick, than how can any finite thing be said to be better or worse than any other?
To put it in terms of space that we can relate to, think of it this way. Imagine God was infinitely tall, and that the ideal height that humans aspired to was measured agaisnt this infinitely tall ideal. How then could we ever conclude that a dwarf was somehow less perfect than a giant? Both would obviously be equally unequal to an infinitely tall God. Hence, to say that one is more "perfect" in height is not to measure them by an infinite standard of height, but a finite standard that we both design in our own image, and apply with all of our subjective biases and fallibility.
The second problem with ranking people according to their moral purity is that it facilitates a kind of spiritual racism, by decided that some souls are more pure than others. Like the purity of bloodlines sought after in Nazi Germany, the religious quest for spiritual purity was likewise the cause of genocides committed by the Hebrews in the Old Testament. And spiritual purity may be far more dangerous, since the Hebrews not only recorded their genocides for posterity, but boasted about it as proof that God and morality was on their side, much like ISIS and other Islamic extremists today.
Like Herbert Spencer trying to justify his own social-Darwinism by applying the biological ideas of Charles Darwin to his ideas about economics (even though Darwin insisted Spencer's idea of "survival of the fittest" was an incorrect bastardization of his own theory of natural selection), so theologians mistakenly conflated our taxonomy of a biological food chain in a finite world, with ranking human souls according to an infinite standard. But since all souls would be equally unequal to any such "infinite standard" (or unequally equal, if you prefer) this would be impossible.
And anyone who pretends they can use "God" or the bible to distinguish the morally upright from the morally corrupt, is simply a snake oil salesman practicing spiritual racism for their own gain.
One of the great lies of organized religion, of which there are too many to count, is that there is a hierarchical order to moral truth and virtue. This lie, however, is so apparent, it goes without notice or objection by those who willingly accept it. And simply accepting such an idea is how the religion robs people of their "free will," even as it claims to be doing the very opposite (which is a means of mass manipulation that both advertisers and politicians have adopted to great applause and destruction).
You see, there are at least two obvious reasons why such a "belief" is flawed, if not outright false. The first is that it presumes that some people are saints and others are sinners, even though assigning such rankings on an infinite scale is impossible. And the second is to mistakenly conflate how we biologically rank different species on the food chain with how we spiritual rank the holiness of souls. Both of these mistakes, which have been completely overlooked by theologians throughout the ages, demonstrate just how man-made our ideas of religion and morality really are.
First, let's look at the idea of ranking people from saints to sinners. Can we really use an infinite god as an infinite moral standard to measure finite moral beings? While Christians by default insist that we can, the real question is, how would such a thing even be possible? Think about it: if God is an infinitely long moral yard stick, than how can any finite thing be said to be better or worse than any other?
To put it in terms of space that we can relate to, think of it this way. Imagine God was infinitely tall, and that the ideal height that humans aspired to was measured agaisnt this infinitely tall ideal. How then could we ever conclude that a dwarf was somehow less perfect than a giant? Both would obviously be equally unequal to an infinitely tall God. Hence, to say that one is more "perfect" in height is not to measure them by an infinite standard of height, but a finite standard that we both design in our own image, and apply with all of our subjective biases and fallibility.
The second problem with ranking people according to their moral purity is that it facilitates a kind of spiritual racism, by decided that some souls are more pure than others. Like the purity of bloodlines sought after in Nazi Germany, the religious quest for spiritual purity was likewise the cause of genocides committed by the Hebrews in the Old Testament. And spiritual purity may be far more dangerous, since the Hebrews not only recorded their genocides for posterity, but boasted about it as proof that God and morality was on their side, much like ISIS and other Islamic extremists today.
Like Herbert Spencer trying to justify his own social-Darwinism by applying the biological ideas of Charles Darwin to his ideas about economics (even though Darwin insisted Spencer's idea of "survival of the fittest" was an incorrect bastardization of his own theory of natural selection), so theologians mistakenly conflated our taxonomy of a biological food chain in a finite world, with ranking human souls according to an infinite standard. But since all souls would be equally unequal to any such "infinite standard" (or unequally equal, if you prefer) this would be impossible.
And anyone who pretends they can use "God" or the bible to distinguish the morally upright from the morally corrupt, is simply a snake oil salesman practicing spiritual racism for their own gain.
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