True Compassion needs no religion
I don't need any excuse to love science, the teaching of which is my profession, and the thing that I feel holds the best chance for improving life on this planet, bringing us into better awareness of ourselves and our kin the world over, but sometimes something happens to make me love it even more; and today, that thing is a study out of UCSF, indicating that people who identified themselves as atheists or agnostics were more likely to be compassionate to strangers, as opposed to religious folk, who were compassionate, but mainly with those they had an emotional connection to. Pure gold! It shouldn't come as any surprise to most of us that religious people find it easy to be indifferent to the suffering of others when those others are not like them in any way; sure, there are Catholic school kids collecting money for African refugees, and missionaries of all stripes poking their (well-meaning but ultimately True Religion Sale misguided) noses into the lives of cultures of all sorts, but the average Christian sees no conflict in bombing people who don't happen to worship the same Invisible Sky Magician, and religious nuts of all stripes love god and his rules so much (including that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" one) that they proceed to murder abortion doctors, blow up school buses, kill their kids in botched "exorcisms", or any one of a dozen other aberrations that seem very ungodly to the rest of us. Ah, but it makes more sense when we consider that humans of every stripe find it a lot easier o care about people who are like themselves. I usually grit my teeth with frustration when I hear some priest or minister going off about how the Church's business is human salvation, making you a better person, and by proxy, the world a better place; really? Is hating gays and lesbians making anyone (except you, that is) feel better? Does it promote acceptance and tolerance, or violence and division? Is punishing women for using birth control making their lives better? Is keeping True Religion Australia information about birth control and disease prevention from teenagers helping? Or telling people in the poorest countries of the world that they have to keep having children? Do any of those acts qualify as "helping", or are they just the dictums of a group interested in controlling your mind? One of the barbs thrown at those of us who deny the existence of god is that without religion, there is no morality, and despite centuries of pogroms, Crusades, the Inquisition, Northern Ireland, and suicide bombers, they still blather on how religion makes us "moral", confusing morality with blind adherence to outdated rules and prejudices that exclude and diminish people; as pagans, we are certainly not perfect, but ingrained in our philosophy is the concept that your journey, while on a different path from mine, is no less valid, and we try to refrain from judgments True Religion Jeans about whose way is better than whose. In fact, to any educated pagan, the very concept of "which way is better" to pray, or cast, or simply be, is a ludicrous one. We can find example of compassion in religion, of course, but only when tired notions of separateness are set aside; in India this week, the Koovagam Festival was held, a celebration honoring the transgender community there; the myth of the god Aravan, featured prominently in the Mahabharata, contains a part where Vishnu becomes a beautiful woman to reward Aravan, and devotes often celebrate that change in gender. Try to imagine any Christina church not just tolerating, but embracing that community, and endorsing it with doctrine like that; if you want a local example of compassion free from religion, look no further than Missouri, where House member Zachary Wyatt has broken with his GOP True Religion colleagues, in announcing that he's gay, and he's standing up to try and kill a bill that would remove references to any sexual orientation in public school curriculums, unless the material is directly related to reproduction. It's the height of absurdity for the bill's backers to say it isn't anti-gay, since they "won't talk about heterosexuality either"…oh yeah, where ELSE is a kid going to hear or see or read about heterosexual couples? I can only imagine the courage of this man who refused to let bigotry pass on his watch, and out of concern for his fellow citizens has subjected himself to what will no doubt be scathing scorn and derision; meanwhile, ministers are droning on about god's love and hating gay people, like the NC pastor who recently told his parishioners http://www.trjeansaustralia.com/ that "gay behavior", whatever that is, needs to be "squashed like a cockroach", and recommended dads "crack that limp wrist" on their sons and give their "butch" daughters "a good punch in the face." In mind boggling lunacy, he raved dads should tell their daughters they're going to "walk like a girl, smell like a girl, and that means you're going to be beautiful and you're going to be attractive and you're going to dress yourself up." This is the mindset of those reprehensible Duggar fanatics, the one that tells you a woman's job is to cook and clean and pump out twenty babies or so, and look pretty for the men-folk while they do it.