To kill for

[supergee]

The other day, I linked to an article about fundamentalist Christians lying in the belief that it would save souls. It included a quote from Steven Weinberg.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

If, as many people do, we define religion as a belief system that includes a supernatural deity, the statement is simply false.

So let us apply Miller’s rule and see what it is true of. To me, the Weinberg quote seems a useful operational definition of religion: any belief that makes good people do evil things, which means that Communism and Fascism are religions.

Comments

[bibliofile]

Over on FB I was talking wtih some folks about whether it's religion that's the problem. (Their position: religion is the problem.) I decided that ideology is the problem.

How do we get people to Just Say No to Ideology? Hah! As if.