re: "Is There a Way to Dial Down the Political Hatred?"

re: "Is There a Way to Dial Down the Political Hatred?"  (The New York Times, June 11, 2021)

 
As they stand, Christianity and its sister monotheisms have much in common with communism and fascism. They are alike ideologies preaching their own infallibility, demanding absolute blind faith, empowering an elite of holy men whose words and acts may not be contested, anathematizing dissent, rejecting critical thinking, and ordaining orthodoxy over reality.

Humans need stories to bind us, but those stories need not be thuggish ideologies that deny all alternatives. To dictate as the prime command, as both monotheism and modern totalitarianism do, that "Thou shalt have no other god before me" is to reject human and natural reality in favour of blind devotion to sacred deceits pushing a morality unfit for actual human beings or for human society.

If the political and religious ideologies are to deserve respect, they need to respect humans and human values about the mythic fantasies of capricious gods and party leaders.

Let us pray that the religious of both the sacred and political versions will cast aside their claims of infallibility and grow some human values, opening their minds to the reality that they are very often very wrong on very many issues. But it gets worse: the more anciently ascribed their claimed truths are the more likely those claims are to be wrong: wrong about the sun and the planets; wrong about the majesty of evolved life; wrong about justice; and gravely wrong about moral right and wrong.
 

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/god-religion-politics-partisanship.html#commentsContainer&permid=113217686:113217686