Says it all really!

Why Faith is a Bad Thing...

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.” ~ Steven Wienberg

Muslim cleric Khalid Chishti has been arrested, and that's a good thing. Why? He used his faith to justify the persecution of someone of another faith, in this instance an 11 year old Christian girl who is unfortunate enough to have been born in Pakistan.

Our noble cleric decided that it was in the best interests of his Muslim community that the Christians are driven from their homes, even if this means tampering with evidence and lying. This means that he added burnt pages of his own holy book, the Qur'an (a crime punishable by death in his own country) to a shopping bag containing ashes and burnt paper carried by the girl.

His own people attempted to dissuade the cleric, but his blind faith allowed him to justify this evil, attempting to corrupt the evidence effectively sentencing this innocent girl to death, either under the (unethical) laws of the Pakistani judicial system, or at the hands of a blood-thirsty angry mob.

Is this cleric evil at heart, or does his blind adherence to his faith in an invisible tyrant enable this kind of evil behavior? Clearly, we do not know the mind of the man, so we can't say for certain that he is or is not a born sociopath, but we can testify to the fact that no matter what, the justification for his actions was faith based.

Pakistan has implemented anti-blasphemy laws, resulting in the deaths of numerous people at the hands of angry mobs, and two assassinated politicians who had the temerity to suggest that the law is insane and could be used by people to inflict harm on others, just because. It's rather like pointing at someone on your own hate list and shouting "he's a communist" with Joe McCarthy within earshot and ducking... Mr. McCarthy will do the rest for you. No more enemy!

The (Many) Problems with Faith

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” ~ Saint Augustine

When a Christian tells me that she has faith, I struggle to see the difference between this and when a Muslim tells me she has faith. What's the difference?

Both believe without evidence. Both resort to their "faith" as justifications for their belief. And both are more likely than not born into a region of the world dominated by their faiths.

So why is faith an argument for religious belief? All religions claim (demand) faith and all hold this as a central tenet to the legitimacy of their belief.

Faith is not enough!

Saint Augustine was describing the now well known theory of Confirmation Bias - the man was truly well ahead of his time.