Tuesday, October 12, 2004

On Religion and Tolerance

How can I stress tolerance and at the same time seem to be lambasting religion all the time? It is simple: Religion ought to be a strictly private affair. I do believe that freedom ought to find its limits in the freedom of others. Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently. Freedom is NOT to be allowed to act as one wishes on the cost of someone - or everyone - else. Dogmatic Religion is the opposite of freedom. Religious fanatics tend to deem themselves as the sole possers of divine and absolute truth. Needless to say that there is no principal limit to the numbers of competing divine and absolute truths. And all the holders of this divine and ultimate but yet utterly unprovable and contradictory knowledge consider themselves superior, consider others who do not believe in the same "truth" as lesser beings. In the best cases those poor souls are pitied and looked down upon, in the more extreme and everything but rare cases they are not considered humans anymore, not considered worthy to live, to exist and done away. It is interesting that the book religions which allegedly preach love and mercy are the most sucsessful instruments of dehumanization in the history of mankind.

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