The Rude Pundit - You Wanna Keep Harassing Women at Clinics? Then Let's Play

[hunter]

109. Which is filthier? Being a Catholic or being a U.S. citizen?

There's a lot of blood on my hands as a U.S. American -- murder and mayhem and poverty and crushing child abuse that my taxes have paid for.

Clearly I ought to have moved to Canada as a young man and become a mildly agnostic Anglican or something, maybe even an atheist.

Alas, here I am, still a citizen of the U.S.A. and living in a community that is largely Catholic.

You play the cards you are dealt, or you fold and leave the table.

But I ask myself, how can I be the most effective agent of progress? As an insider or as an outsider?



In some religious and family traditions, even within the Catholic Church, children are "programmed from birth to believe." That's not my family tradition, nor is it my wife's family tradition. We're all a bunch of heretics, and quite open about it too.

I believe children of most any faith, agnosticism, atheism will turn out okay if they are raised in a loving, non-authoritarian, non-abusive environment in which honest questions get honest answers from responsible adults.

Authoritarianism is the evil, not any particular religion. People who condition their children to blindly accept authority, to accept unjust punishment, to not question dogma (religious or otherwise) do the most harm, and this has little to do with religion. An authoritarian atheist is as dangerous as an authoritarian Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu, or any other religion you might choose.