People who believe that religion is needed to keep people's passions in check, never consider just how often such an idea only leads to creating a monster within. How so?
Like Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's, Psycho, we internalize our ideals about morality, and by doing so, we elevate them to the level of what we perceive to be "divine," which has the simultaneous effect of lowering those behaviors that are the corollary opposite to being necessarily "evil."
Like pales of water tied to a single rope, where lowering one raises the other, so to by prizing "virginity" as something as sacred as the Virgin Mother, we simultaneously lower "sex" itself to something that, by comparison, is only the more defiled.
Of course, religions take no responsibility for this, assuming as they do that we can always keep the inner Mr. Hyde in check by focusing purely on the ideas and habits of Dr. Jekyll, even though the whole point of Robert Louis Steven's story from 1885 was to illustrate that the former is largely incapable of being restrained by the social conditioning of the latter.
Why?
Well, given the right contextual cues, and the right operant environments, and certainly the right social support, people are capable of doing the worst of things, and almost always for the best of reasons.
Mobs have all the appetites of men, wrote Will Durant, but none of the restraints.
Consider how often Christians have burned people they "believed" were "witches," and for no other reason than that they "believed" witches existed in the first place. And they believed in witches for no other reason than that they likewise "believed" in angels and gods. Christians likewise lynched black people in the Jim Crow South, and often simply because they were opposed to sharing the same schools, water fountains, or even toilets, as those they firmly "believed" they were better than; and for no other reason than the color of their skin.
This is not to say that Christians are therefore worse than any other mob of people who have ever engaged in wholesale violence, but that Christians are certainly no better, despite the continual insistence by "believers" that they are. In fact, like the Crusades, Inquisitions, pedophile coverup, and even the Christian churches in Rwanda that fanned the flames that lead to the genocide there in in 1994, Christianity can make things worse by licensing those engaging in such behaviors with a "moral" excuse for doing so.
Like Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's, Psycho, we internalize our ideals about morality, and by doing so, we elevate them to the level of what we perceive to be "divine," which has the simultaneous effect of lowering those behaviors that are the corollary opposite to being necessarily "evil."
Like pales of water tied to a single rope, where lowering one raises the other, so to by prizing "virginity" as something as sacred as the Virgin Mother, we simultaneously lower "sex" itself to something that, by comparison, is only the more defiled.
Of course, religions take no responsibility for this, assuming as they do that we can always keep the inner Mr. Hyde in check by focusing purely on the ideas and habits of Dr. Jekyll, even though the whole point of Robert Louis Steven's story from 1885 was to illustrate that the former is largely incapable of being restrained by the social conditioning of the latter.
Why?
Well, given the right contextual cues, and the right operant environments, and certainly the right social support, people are capable of doing the worst of things, and almost always for the best of reasons.
Mobs have all the appetites of men, wrote Will Durant, but none of the restraints.
Consider how often Christians have burned people they "believed" were "witches," and for no other reason than that they "believed" witches existed in the first place. And they believed in witches for no other reason than that they likewise "believed" in angels and gods. Christians likewise lynched black people in the Jim Crow South, and often simply because they were opposed to sharing the same schools, water fountains, or even toilets, as those they firmly "believed" they were better than; and for no other reason than the color of their skin.
This is not to say that Christians are therefore worse than any other mob of people who have ever engaged in wholesale violence, but that Christians are certainly no better, despite the continual insistence by "believers" that they are. In fact, like the Crusades, Inquisitions, pedophile coverup, and even the Christian churches in Rwanda that fanned the flames that lead to the genocide there in in 1994, Christianity can make things worse by licensing those engaging in such behaviors with a "moral" excuse for doing so.
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