Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson

Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson | December 5, 2005
       
The common wisdom in many circles (most located in certain cities on the East and Left Coasts) is that religion, in general, is a bad thing, and that in the hands of "fundamentalists," the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and ultra-super-radical-Islamic terrorists, it is inevitably evil. Eliminating religion, it is then suggested or even openly argued, is a sure way to rid the world of evil. The term "religion," it should be noted, almost always refers to Christianity (or a form of pseudo-Christianity) and then, in some cases, to Islam.

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Comments

[Another Steve]

Nice piece Carl. I think it's high time we started telling the 'so called' anti religionists what they really are, i.e. dogmatic fundys intent on ridding the world of dogma: (how dogmatic is that?) At heart they're fundamentalist Agnostics, which basically means they admit to being ignorant and being proud of their ignorance.

Marxism in essence is a scheme for ridding the world of the Seven Deadly Sins by legislating them out of existence. Inevitably it comes down to ridding the world of people deemed undesirable: trying to bring about "the survival of the nicest" what ever that means at the time.

As for ridding the world of religion: you'd have to get rid of the human race and as the article pointed out it would require a fundamentalist religion to carry out that plan. The Marxists have made some impressive attempts in the last 100 years.

[Pazdziernik]

Carl,

Great piece! Every once and a while there is an article that comes along that I not only read but also study. "Is Religion evil?..." certainly fits comfortably into this category. You hit the bull's eye when you wrote: "The problem many people have today is not that they deny outright the existence of evil, but that they deny they could have anything to do with evil." While reading this, I immediately recalled a conversation with a close friend of mine (she is a "lapsed Catholic") who noted to me that although I was trying to be a faithful Catholic, I had an "evil side." And also during our conversation she told me that she has not gone to confession for over 15 years because she had nothing to confess! Kill one's conscience and have it supported in theory by the Marxists and radical secularists and we're all equal, right? It's along the lines of the thinking of the villian in "The Incredibles" movie: "If everyone's a super hero, then no one is a super hero".

[Patrick Coulton]

Someone has made a religion with the
sole dogma that all religions are evil?

I need to look this up in my self-referential
statements dictionary.

[Carl Olson]

Thanks for the kind comments. This article began as a short rant, became a lengthier editorial, and then, at last, a longer piece. I should give much credit for the thoughts about evil to my pastor, Fr. Richard Janowicz, who has shared (in homilies and conversations) many excellent observations about how people think about evil.