The Hypocrisy of Religion

I thought I’d take a stab at something that has been bothering me as of late, hypocrisy. You see religion in general and not just Christianity is full of it. People who see themselves as religious hold some values, but fail to understand what those values truly mean. For example, the issue of people who consider themselves to be Pro-Life. That is, people who call themselves Pro-Life as opposed to Pro-Choice. No more has there been such a divisive issue in the last 40 years, than the issue of abortion. People who feel it’s their place to tell women what they can do with their own bodies. Now this issue brings up quite a lot of hypocrisy, not only by the usage of the moniker ‘Pro-Life’ but merely in their ideology itself.

Pro-Lifers are typically conservative republicans who believe that government is bad, too big, and too over-stepping. People like this believe that government should be reduced to nothing more than a sign that says: Here sits the United States. There is nothing wrong with having an ideology, however outright hypocrisy leads to credibility problems, and such is the problem with the Pro-Lifers. Because anyone who believes government has no business telling citizens what they can do with their healthcare, their money, and their education, loses all credibility if they believe that same government should be legislating what a women should be able to do with her own body.


People who hold this view, must not see the irony in electing politicians to congress that view government as an intrusive body that needs to be stopped, at the same time granting it the power to be overly intrusive. That said, it’s not the only hypocrisy with Pro-Lifers.

The biggest problem I have with the Pro-life movement isn't that they have taken a stance against abortion, but rather that their stance is that all life is important, all life is sacred. So then let’s continue to talk about this issue attacking a fundamental part of their ideology, which is that all life must have some value. If you support the idea that life is sacred on religious grounds than you must concede that all life is venerable, because to assert that life has some value because its blessed by God, or created by God means, that to take such a life is to go against God, or to disrespect his creation. After all, if God really did create everyone, and you believe that human life is sacred, you do so because God gave such a life to the world, and respect should be shown to this life. Now there is a point to where I am going with this and it leads back to hypocrisy within their religious ideology.

Now as I have already said most Pro-Lifers are conservative republicans, and part of the typical ideology of a modern conservative is one who believes in the death penalty. Now I won’t go into a deep discussion about the abhorrent nature of capital punishment, except to say that it is most certainly hypocritical for anyone to picket an abortion clinic holding signs that criticize abortion in one moment and hold signs at an execution hailing capital punishment in another. You see never is there more certain an issue of hypocrisy than in the modern conservative party who seeks to ban abortions throughout this country but extend capital punishment to all states.

Pro-Lifers tend to be the poorest Americans living mostly in the southern states, the Bible belt, a place where American Pride seems to be a strong part of everyday life. It is a place where people honor their country with a flag on every porch and a son or daughter from every family in some military service. And it is there where much of the Pro-Life movement is strongest. But in just such a place why can someone so strongly believe in the sanctity of life and be so eager to send their child off to fight a war? It is hypocritical for any person to believe all life is sacred and hand over like a pagan sacrifice their own child, sending it like a lamb to the slaughter. To add insult to injury, a person who believes in the sanctity of human life, but holds no value to those lives of people who are not citizens of their own country are too a hypocrite. The bible, that book the Christians hold so dear and build their faith on, talks a lot about murder and one thing that is clear from Exodus is God’s Ten Commandments. Rules set forth by God himself, given to Moses as instructions for everyone to live by. And one of those rules, plain as day, says: Thou shalt not kill. It does not say, thou shalt not kill, except those of a different color, different religion, or different ideology.

I was fortunate to be born in this country, maybe not with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I always had food to eat, a place to sleep, and medicine when I needed it growing up. Estimates are that 17 million children in the United States of America go to bed each night having not eaten a thing all day. 1 in 45 children, 1.6 million of them, homeless, have no place to live, no place to play, except the street corner or garbage where they go to find food.  1 in 4 children in the United States of America have gone without some form of health care. The estimates are that 9 million are completely uninsured, over 11 million are only insured part of the year, and 3 million simply have no way to actually see a doctor. That means 23 million children in this country at one time or another during a typical year go untreated.

It is a travesty that in a country where so many people enjoy living their lives with seemingly no cares in the world, so many children through no fault of their own do not have the things they need to live. We live in a consumerist country where people spend, spend, and spend again. They buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have. They visit all you can eat restaurants and engorge themselves into a bigger waist line, and then throw the remaining food into the trash can as if from some inexhaustible source created just for them. They return to their fancy homes and watch reality shows on their wall-sized big screen televisions, depicting the same type of grossly inarticulate excuses for human beings they are themselves, doing tremendously embarrassing or overly ridiculous acts of stupidity all in the name of money. They go to bed at night, secure in their gated communities, and filled with a sense of accomplishment for escaping such a horrendous day, where they were approached by a homeless person, received a latte with cream instead of soy, and had to wait in line at the check-out because an elderly lady counted out the change she had in her purse to purchase a can of cat food, she plans to eat because it’s cheaper than a can of tuna. Tomorrow he or she will wake up, with no cares in the world and repeat their day over again.

The hypocrite who believes all life is sacred but allows anyone, especially a child, to starve, live on the street, or to be without healthcare, has no business declaring them self to be Pro-Life.

• If you are Pro-War, you are not Pro-Life.
• If you are Pro-Death penalty, you are not Pro-Life.
• If you believe it is ok to save the life of an unborn fetus, but allow a child to starve, you are not Pro-Life.
• If you believe the slogan “You’re on your own,” fits your ideology, you are not Pro-Life.
• If you are okay with wealthy people getting wealthier, and poor people becoming homeless, you are not Pro-Life.
• If you are unwilling to help sick, disabled, and elderly people unable to work or support themselves, you are not Pro-Life.
• If you are against Universal Healthcare, you are not Pro-Life.
• And if you are against abortion even in cases of incest, or the rape of a minor, then you are a religious hypocrite, and not Pro-Life.

Matthew 19:14 but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” 

Jesus Christ, the man for whom a Christian’s entire religion is based, said that children are considered holy, they belong to God. Pro-Lifers claim to love all life, but they clearly set higher value to some and a lower value to others. If the basis for the argument against abortion is truly a matter of protecting children, than such an argument should apply to all children equally, however those who call themselves Pro-Life do not see it as such. For these people they are not so much Pro-Life or even Pro-Children, but rather Pro-Fetus.

As an atheist and a humanist, I too believe life is precious, but I am unwilling to place a higher value on the life of an unborn child, as opposed to a person on death row. That is because, even if the person on death row has committed terrible atrocities, I know the knowledge contained in his brain, the experiences he has had, and the life he has lived is still worth more than the life unlived by a bunch of cells in the uterus of a woman.  Now I’m sure I’ll get plenty of hate mail, and I’m okay with that, but the statement is one I hold to. A child, who is unborn, is not a person, because a person is someone who has lived, and a fetus has not lived. Although, it is easy to claim that life begins at conception, or even when a child could conceivably live on its own outside the womb, the reality is we are products of our own minds. We all live in a world of our creation, perceiving the world around us through the environment in which we build our experiences from. That is to say, we build our lives, one experience at a time, as we move throughout a day. We are literally the products of our own experiences. In effect, a person’s life is a blend of those experiences over time. But a fetus has had no experiences. A fetus has no perception of time, or the passage there of. To argue that a fetus has value merely because it is alive is to devalue that which has lived.

Hypocrisy isn't isolated to Christianity of course; it exists in all religions, but none so more than a religion where its followers like to refer to their religion as: The religion of peace. Of course, I’m referring to the Islamic religion, which of course is the farthest thing from a peaceful religion you could have.

It is hypocritical to refer to your religion as a peaceful religion when your own holy book the Al-Qur’an says things like:

“Those who reject our signs, We shall gradually visit with punishment, in ways they perceive not.”

Anyone reading that would know it to mean, reject our teachings and you will be punished in ways you cannot even imagine. To claim peaceful intent is highly hypocritical when the book for which your entire religion is based upon, pronounces punishment, not for an actual crime, instead for an idea, a thought. To continue, it is widely taught and known that Islam requires that the punishment for apostasy is death. It’s highly suspect when a religion punishes someone for something considered a crime, based not on established law, but merely on religious doctrine. Worse still, that punishment is death, not for committing a crime anyone with either sanity or at least some moral sense would consider worthy of death, but instead based on devotion or the lack there of, to their religion. It’s a little akin to a gang whose members join for life. No one with any sense would ever claim that any gang displays a peaceful intent, so it is both hypocritical and disingenuous to continue to refer to your religion as one of peace.

Recently the embassy in Libya was overrun by Islamic terrorists and innocent people were killed. Now it is easy for those not responsible for this attack, or the attacks on 9/11 or the attacks throughout the world in the name of Islam to condemn them as anything but the work of religious extremists. The problem is even if that is an accurate assessment, it does not change the fact that they are Islamic extremists following the text found in the holy book they all consider the word of God. There are Christians who wake up every Sunday morning and go to church, they pray and they lead productive lives. There are also Christians who dedicate their lives to bombing abortion clinics, and picketing, and murdering doctors, and whether they are extremists in their religious views or not, and they are, they are still Christians. An extremist Muslim is still a Muslim. In a modern Christian world, Christian extremists who harm others are a rare occurrence, but even if it wasn't, no one has ever declared Christianity as the religion of Peace. It is abject to regard Islam as a religion of peace, when truly peaceful religions like Hinduism exist in the world.

If Muslims who truly wish condemnation of the extremism within their religion to appear as repudiation, they must stop calling their religion a religion of peace and start calling it what is it. It is a relatively young religion whose members are mostly dominated by ignorant, angry, violent, oppressed people for whom violence and religious dogma are ways of life. Christianity has had the advantage of hundreds of years of progression through modern society. Christianity has had the advantage of going through its dark ages, something Islam has not. The difference is that Christianity was at the time, on par with the rest of the world around it. When Christianity evolved, so did its followers and much of the world. Islam is behind everyone else in the world. They are an archaic religion living in a modern world trying to apply archaic law to civilization.

During the dark ages, there was no option for those who wanted to seek something more civilized, Christianity was it. But Muslims have that option; any Muslim can seek out the modern world and leave the old one behind. The problem with that religion is the same problem Christianity had a thousand years ago, to do so is certainly punishable by death. The problem isn't really with those that don’t; they are merely following the religion as it was taught to them. The problem is with those who do leave the archaic nature of their religion behind them, continue to practice what they consider to be the peaceful parts, and condemn those who continue to act out those parts that are violent. Because of this it is not the contention of the extremists Muslims that their religion is a religion of Peace, but rather peaceful Muslims who lead peaceful lives.

The problem with Muslims is they want you to believe that somehow there are really two Islam’s, the peaceful one and the violent one. Muslims like this would have us believe that water that is hot is hot water and water that is cold is cold water, and although this certainly serves as a way to describe the temperature of the water, the state of the water has not changed, it is still water.

Muslims that declare their religion peaceful would have us believe this because a majority of peaceful Muslims live peaceful lives. That is all fine and dandy except that all Christians read the same Holy Bible, except some of them pray and some pray and blow up clinics. The so-called peaceful Christians are simply those who refuse to accept the violent parts of the Bible as anything more than nonsense, story, or lesson. In much the same way, Muslims who live peaceful lives do so because they ignore the nonsense in their own holy book, where the extremists do not. Of course, there is hypocrisy in that as well. Because if you do not follow the teachings of your religion as they are written and intended, then why do you follow it at all? A Christian, who isn't very Christ-like, isn't likely to actually gain acceptance into this heaven they all so want to get into. Just like a Muslim who condemns the violent Jihadist ways of his religion isn't likely to get his 72 virgins. Look if you are only following some of the stuff in your religion, you’re not a follower, you’re merely auditing, and if you choose to ignore much of the text of your holy handbook, you are just using the Cliffs Notes.

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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No Taxation Without Representation, or How The Republicans Intend To Steal The Election With Voter ID Laws

I haven’t blogged in a while because of how I have been feeling, but I thought it would be an interesting topic if I talked about the Voter ID laws going up in more conservative states around the country. The thing about the voter ID laws that gives me quite the chuckle is the fraudulent way in which these laws have been marketed to the American people. Being told that Voter ID laws are needed to stop the problem of voter fraud, a problem that really doesn't even exist.  With over 146 million registered voters in this country, in the last three elections there were just over 2,000 cases of alleged voter fraud. I say alleged fraud, because only about 400 of those cases actually involved voter registration fraud.


Now conservatives will have us all believe, that in order to stop this terribly troubling statistic, in 37 states around the country they have imposed laws that require some kind of photo ID to be shown when trying to vote. Of course what they won’t tell you is that this law is really designed to prevent the elderly, disabled, and poor voters, most of which are minorities from having any say in this next election. These classes of people, who have the most to lose if Romney/Ryan gets elected, have been disallowed their right to vote by virtue of a law that is unconstitutional. Let me say this again, because it’s worth noting. Voter ID laws are unconstitutional.

We often hear people refer to some things as privileges, as opposed to rights. You will often hear a parent or police officer say driving is a privilege not a right, but you’ll never hear them refer to voting in this way. That is because voting is a right, not a privilege.

Amendment XV:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Amendment XIX:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Amendment XXIV:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reasons of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

These three amendments to our constitution simply state that no one can be denied the right to vote for any reason, whether it is by color, sex, or class.

Amendment XIV:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The fourteenth amendment considered the amendment which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law prevents the federal government or any state from enacting laws which grant rights to specific people and not others.

Furthermore, this was already decided by our Supreme Court in 1966. In Harper v. Virginia board of elections, 383 U.S. 663:

"We conclude that a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax. Our cases demonstrate that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment restrains the States from fixing voter qualifications which invidiously discriminate."

I’ll make a couple points I hope are as interesting to you as they are to me. First, Photo Identification in this country is not free. You must pay a fee or tax in order to have one. It’s considered a privilege, not a right. That is the difference between rights and privileges, privileges always cost you something, and rights cost you nothing, provided you are a citizen of this country. When a state requires a person purchase an ID for any reason, they are stating that any benefits that come as a result of having an ID are also a privilege.  For example, getting the ability to drive is a privilege afforded to you by having a driver’s license, a form of photo ID. However, things that extend a privilege are not a requirement to having a constitutional right, that is, you are not required to have photo identification in order to be granted the freedom of speech, or the right to bear arms, or the right to a fair trial. Now some of you may have read that and thought to yourselves that buying a gun most definitely requires a photo ID. Purchasing a gun is not a right, only having the right to own and use one (putting aside a previous argument I've had on the subject), and in no state is it required to have a photo id if purchasing a gun from a private seller. So the reality is that rights and privileges are considered separate entities and protected from one another.

Second, requiring that any citizen pay a fee in order to vote violates a principle on which this country was founded, and a reason why the original thirteen colonies went to war with England: No taxation without representation. Now, although the circumstances are somewhat different, in many ways they are quite similar. When the thirteen colonies concluded that they were being unfairly taxed, indeed without having a representative to speak for them in parliament, the slogan took off and helped to incite a revolution. Today a similar battle is taking place. People are being denied the right to have a representative to speak for them in congress, or the white house because of a tax that is being imposed on them. A principle on which this country we all live in, for which the founders fought for their freedom, and many died to give us all is being subverted by a right-wing agenda that is only concerned with further deepening the pockets of the wealthiest 1% of this country on the backs of the everyone else.

I often hear republican rhetoric which I find myself ignoring most of the time repeating things like, Criticism is un-American, if you criticize the war, you are saying you hate the troops, or saying that anything that goes against the opinion of our government is anti-American.  Of course, if any of these piss poor examples of Americans even understood the founding principles of the United States, they would know that none of that is true, and nothing is more un-American than subverting its constitution and founding principles in favor of taking away people’s rights, giving corporations a monetary stake in elections, and allowing the wealthiest 1% of people the ability to decide policies which affect the other 99%.

Under these new voter ID laws, citizens who want to vote in elections are required to have a photo ID. Since in no state in the country are photo IDs free, you must pay to have one. Since you are required to pay for an ID before you may vote, this means that any citizen who wants to vote in one of these states is now required to pay money in order to vote.

I want everyone to really understand what that means, because I've already discussed the differences between privileges and rights. If you want to exercise your constitutional right to vote in an election you must pay a fee to do so.

Now setting aside the many reasons why a citizen might not have a photo ID for a minute, one of the biggest reasons may just be the fact that it’s because it costs money. Now for someone who makes decent money, or needs to be able to drive to work, or have one for some other reason, this is just a tax they pay because they want the privileges it grants them. But for some people, the people who are on food stamps, or disabled with an inability to get to the DMV, or just an inability to afford a $30 fee for a photo ID, for which they have never needed it before, the cost may just be too prohibitive.

These people are the people who are most affected by laws that prohibit their ability to have meaningful lives in this country. That means the 1% who are trying to fix this election to grant themselves tax breaks and loopholes that give them more money can only do so by increasing the tax on the middle class and poor, and reducing the benefits of being a citizen of this country, benefits that only help you if you are one of the 99% who don’t consider themselves wealthy.

Simply put, the people who will be most affected by not voting in this election will be most affected if Romney/Ryan win by virtue of unconstitutional voter ID laws.

See here is the problem. Many citizens of this country believe they live in a democracy, however this is not the reality of the situation. In fact, we live in a republic. That means we elect people to represent us, and they decide how to run the country. Most citizens are often disenfranchised by election results as they come in when watching them on their favorite news network during election night. This is because the popular vote which is often shown can be vastly different than the results shown per state, and this is solely determined by our choice to build this country on the principles of a republic. The Electoral College which is made up of state delegates decides who actually wins elections, not the citizens, something most people are often confused about. And this is where things get hinky, because if this country decided its elections purely on the popular vote, even with voter ID laws in place, republican ideology would be unable to overcome the vast number of liberal and moderate people who believe in common sense and being good as opposed to being ignorant, morally questionable, and wealthy. That’s right, wealthy. Because 99% of the United States is not made of wealthy individuals, nor will it ever be. The majority of people in this country are middle class or poor citizens, and although you can always count on a few bible bashers to vote ideology over common sense, the vast majority would overwhelm them.

So wealthy individuals throw tons of money to buy votes, and when they can rig elections anyway they can. This isn't the first time they have tried to rig elections. They have been accused of trying to rig voting machines in many states over the last 12 years, and even though it’s pretty clear Al Gore won Florida in 2000, George Bush was granted a victory by virtue of badly designed voting machines, voting cards, and a conservative court system. Now although I can’t speak to the ruling by the Supreme Court, by every account the voting machines in minority districts in Florida were the ones affected by the bad chad situation due to the punching mechanism that required a tremendous amount of force to punch the cards, and no feedback as to whether they were actually punched. The cards used were also approved by Katherine Harris, the republican Secretary of State for Florida at the time. The cards were aligned incorrectly so that when a person placed the card in the device, the names did not match up correctly to where they were punched, making some votes invalid completely. Are we to believe that coincidentally the poorest districts in Florida, those with minorities, and mostly elderly registered democrats were given these machines, but all other districts that routinely vote republican were given electronic voting machines that not only allowed a person to vote by a simple push of the button but were given feedback to guarantee the person they cast their vote for was in fact the person they voted for.

You decide for yourself. Ask yourself what a person with a whole lot to gain and nothing to lose will do to ensure they continue to gain, or stand to gain even more should they win an election? Ask yourself if you want to live in a country that values disassembling our constitution? Because should the Tea party republicans be granted a republican white house, and republican congress that is exactly what they will do. Ask yourself what category you fall in: poor, middle-class, minority, female, disabled, elderly, homosexual, young, sick, dying, atheist, intelligent, and good. If you fit into any of these classes of people and you vote republican in the next election, you are voting against your interests. Even if you do not agree with some of Obama’s policies, and you fit into one of these classes of people, voting for Romney/Ryan is like shooting yourself in the foot with your own gun, after you load it and point it at your own foot. I’m going to break it down in simplest terms anyone can understand, no lies, no nonsense. If you vote for Obama and you fit in one of these classes of people, nothing gets worse for you the day after the election or in the next four years after, things only get better. If you vote for Romney/Ryan and you are not healthy, white, and male with more money than you could spend in ten lifetimes, than things will only get worse for you in January and in the next four years. But vastly worse than fucking up your own life, you will fuck up the lives of your children. Education will go down, but costs will go up. Social Security which you are paying into right now, will become insolvent as early as 2016, and by the time you are ready to retire you better hope you stashed away a lot of money and remain healthy because you will be paying for all those medical bills and medications out of pocket, or you will need to get the money from your children who will now have less money to support their families because the economy has been deliberately tanked to broaden the gap between the upper and lower class citizens. I say this because the middle-class will be utterly obliterated.

If you think everything I have said is bullshit, vote republican, but ask yourself this: Is it worth losing the benefits you enjoy now as a citizen of this country, even if by the smallest chance I’m actually right?

I often joke that what we don’t need in this country are voter ID laws, but instead Voter IQ laws, which seek to impose laws that require people who want to vote must be able to pass a simple test on subjects like science, economics, social studies, you know all that shit you learned in school. Now the ridiculousness of my idea is as ridiculous as imposing voter ID laws, except that my idea makes a whole lot more sense than theirs.

If the answer to the first question on the test is anything but C, then you fail and can’t vote.

Question 1: Choose one. Elections are decided by:

A. God
B. Magic
C. None of the Above

Ok, that one was too hard, let’s try another question.

Question 2: If you choose an answer at random what is your probability of being correct?

A. 25%
B. 50%
C. 60%
D. 25%

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor. – Thomas Jefferson

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.—Plutarch

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on. – Warren Buffet, 2010

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