Category: Religion

Protestors in the video said ‘God created women for men’s pleasure’. Credit: Sky News.

A Birmingham school facing protests around the teaching of LGBT issues has reportedly seen 600 pupils withdrawn from the school today in an alarming escalation which is placing children’s safety and education at risk, Humanists UK says.

Education publication TES today reported that 600 pupils have been taken out of Anderton Park Primary in Birmingham by their parents due to increasing pressure from Muslim demonstrators outside the school who claim teaching about LGBT rights is against their religion. The school has 749 pupils on its roll.

This latest move follows heightened scenes where protestors appeared in a new video criticising LGBT people and women, adding ‘This is so against the word of God… God created women for men’s pleasure.’ 

It has led to officials and MPs including Birmingham Council leader Ian Ward and MP Jess Phillips to call for Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPO) to put in place safety exclusion zones at effected schools, similar to buffer zones used near abortion clinics.

READ MORE

• A short history of Biblical God

Following the latest developments, Humanists UK, which campaigns for inclusive relationships and sex education (RSE), including promoting respect for LGBT people, called on leadership from the highest government level to intervene in the situation, and said it supported the introduction of such exclusion zones.

Protests around LGBT lessons being taught in schools began at another Birmingham school, Parkfield Community School, which teaches about equality and LGBT relationships in its No Outsiders programme. While Anderton Park does not teach that programme, the protestors are voicing their opposition to compulsory relationships and sex education (RSE) which comes into effect next year. The protests have been mainly organised by Shakeel Afsar, who does not have children at the school.

Humanists UK’s Education Campaigns Manager Dr Ruth Wareham said: ‘The recent appalling comments by protestors – including that “God created women for men’s pleasure” – show why all children need education on relationships and sex so that they have the information and advice available to help them lead healthy, happy, and safe lives. 

‘It is crucial that the Government acts now to protect students at all of these schools by ensuring that they continue to receive their education, and that they feel safe to attend school. We also support officials’ moves to introduce safety exclusion zones so that children are not subjected to vile and harmful comments from protestors which send the message that LGBT people and women are not equal.’

Source: humanism.org.uk

The genes that are dominant in any population, are those that are most successfully passed from one generation to the next. Eventually, the most successful genes will be found in almost every member of a population. The same is true of religions. How religion die…

Changing environmental pressures can disadvantage previously successful genes, reducing their transmission to the next generation thus causing them to become less prevalent and eventually to exit the population. The same is true of religions.

Pressures on how religion die

Religions are suffering from adverse environmental pressures in many populations today. These pressures reduce their ability to infect young people and so diminish transmission between generations. The most important adverse pressure is readily accessible global information. It is now easy for young people to discover that:

1. It is OK to have no religion.
2. There are many religions but none can be shown to be true.
3. Religions cause deadly conflicts and human rights abuses.
4. Science shows some religious beliefs are false.
5. Science actually delivers benefits whilst religions only deliver promises.

Other Stories

• How do religions die?
• Pope Francis changes Lord’s Prayer

These pressures will affect some populations and some religions more quickly than others but, in the long run, they will be fatal for most religions in the world today.

Religions will persist longest in populations that suffer deprivation and poor access to essential services, and in populations that restrict access to information or make leaving religion dangerous. But these populations too will eventually change.

The future for religions

I suspect the only hope for long term survival is for religions to morph into something different. Something that satisfies human needs without denying the zeitgeist of the information age. My guess is we will see religions distancing themselves from the supernatural and embracing the natural; we’ll see retreat from outer space towards inner space–our minds, our emotions, and our relationships.

The survivors won’t be the most powerful but the most adaptable. And gods will be conspicuous, only by their absence.

This video is of an interview retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong did with Keith Morrison of Dateline NBC back in August of 2006 on Hell was invented.

A partial transcript of the interview can be found beneath the video link:

Spong: I happen to believe in life after death, but I don’t think it’s got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business, and that’s something people don’t really understand. It’s in a guilt-producing control business. And if you have Heaven as a place where you’re rewarded for you goodness, and Hell is a place where you’re punished for your evil, then you sort of have control of the population. They create this fiery place which has quite literally scared the Hell out of a lot of people, throughout Christian history. And it’s part of a control tactic.

Morrison: But wait a minute. You’re saying that Hell, the idea of a place under the earth or somewhere you’re tormented for an eternity – is actually an invention of the church?

Other Related Story

• A short history of Biblical God
• Was Hell invented by the church to control people?

Spong continue

I think the church fired its furnaces hotter than anybody else. But I think there’s a sense in most religious life of reward and punishment in some form. The church doesn’t like for people to grow up, because you can’t control grown-ups. That’s why we talk about being born again. When you’re born again, you’re still a child. People don’t need to be born again. They need to grow up. They need to accept their responsibility for themselves and the world.

Morrison: What do you make of the theology which is pretty quite prominent these days in America, which is there is one guaranteed way not to go to hell; and that is to accept Jesus as your personal savior.

Spong: Yeah, I grew up in that tradition. Every church I know claims that ‘we are the true church’ – that they have some ultimate authority, ‘We have the infallible Pope,’ ‘We have the Bible.’… The idea that the truth of God can be bound in any human system, by any human creed, by any human book, is almost beyond imagination for me.

I mean, God is not a Christian. God is not a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindi or Buddhist. All of those are human systems, which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition. I walk through my tradition. But I don’t think my tradition defines God. It only points me to God.

Religion is often used as the “end-all cure” for ailments in the black community.  Is your man cheating? Just pray about it.  Depressed? It’s all in your head; prayer will cure you. Can’t seem to get yourself out of a rut? Just bow your head down and the Lord will hear your cries and make your situation better.  While religion is a basis for many black households, it can also be a deterrent to taking the necessary action towards self-sufficiency.

In the olden days of slavery in the United States and the Caribbean, Christianity was used as a tool to keep slaves docile while their humanity was stripped away. Actual bible quotes were used in manipulating slaves into thinking that God wanted them to obey their master and be cheerful while doing it. Slave master’s cruel actions were deemed as the “Lord’s work.”  Jesus was depicted as the “white savior” who would eradicate hardship and once he returned to the living world, circumstances would eventually change for the better.

Interestingly, the expansion of Islam in Africa was due to the spread of Black Africans throughout the Arab world.  In Islam, dhimmis or protected persons and individuals who didn’t practice Islam were forced to become slaves.

In 2017, the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions respectively consider the man as the “leader” of the household. Although inputs from women are “encouraged” and allowed, the male figure in a family is often consulted first when challenges arise, allowed to inherit larger portions of a property when loved ones die, and his decisions are final – and therein lies the problem.

Although women have rights in the aforementioned religions, their rights are often stifled, their needs are denied, their respect is lowered, societal expectations are used as narcissistic tactics to manipulate them, and their quality of life is diminished.  Religion has caused women to become doormats.

When a heterosexual couple experiences infidelity in their marriage, women are often blamed and told she must stay and continue to be married at the detriment of her livelihood; it isn’t often that men are heartened to stay with their cheating wife. Men are encouraged to have as many sexual conquests as possible while women are deemed as sluts for the same action. Women were just recently allowed to drive unaccompanied in Saudi Arabia while men have been doing so for centuries.

African-American women have suffered too long with the “Superwoman Syndrome.” It is no wonder that men and women of African lineage are exploring and implementing the tenets of alternative religions such as Wicca and African Spirituality into their daily lives.  We were not bred to take the brunt of abuse, become eternal cooks, maids, and enablers.

From infancy, Black women need to be infused with ideas of maintaining quality health, superior education, higher-paying positions of employment, adequate economic standing, and sufficient mental health. We shouldn’t be lambasted with quotes from Bibles or the Quran, threatened with damnations of going to a less than kinder place after death because we choose to live unconventional lifestyles or be pigeonholed into what individuals contemplate will be a better position for us purely due to our gender.

Now is the time we dared to become CEOs of corporations, high-powered attorneys, engineers, software developers, entrepreneurs, or whichever career choice is to our liking.

Read below for some thoughts on women, religion, and oppression

a woman doing the most emotional labour for her husband, placing him above her needs, making the most compromises, adapting to him and his ways is so normalised in our community that me wanting to be treated like an equal is considered being too difficult and wanting too much.

“There is no hell where the souls of sinners suffer in eternity”,
Pope Francis was quoted as saying Hell does not exist in a Thursday interview with Italian daily La Repubblica.

Francis said: “after death, the souls of people who repent are pardoned by God and join in his contemplation,
“but those who do not repent, and therefore cannot be pardoned, disappear.”

Other Stories

• Was Hell invented by the church to control people?
• MONOTHEISM AND POLYTHEISM GODS

“Hell does not exist – what exists is the disappearance of sinful souls,” he added.

The Interview

The pope was interviewed by Eugenio Scalfari, a veteran Italian journalist and atheist who regularly muses about faith and religion, and enjoys access to the leader of the Catholic Church.

In the past, the veracity of quotes he attributed to the pope has been called into question, especially after
the 93-year-old Scalfari admitted to never using a tape recorder during interviews.

However, the Vatican has never complained about Scalfari’s work, and Francis has continued giving interviews
to him. (dpa/NAN)

“This is hell,” explained the pope. “It is telling God, ‘You take care of yourself because I’ll take care of myself.’ They don’t send you to hell, you go there because you choose to be there. Hell is wanting to be distant from God because I do not want God’s love. This is hell.”

First of all it absolutely no evidence that monotheism predates polytheism. And we need to talk in-terms of evidence don’t we?And we’ve got to be responsible and rational about this. Monotheism and Polytheism Gods

We need evidence OK, the oldest evidence we have of religious practice is polytheistic. The other things I will say is that religion is a modern category which is very well documented with a lot of study on it.

Religion is a waving standard we impose on people which lies on a behavior by early homosapien, neanderthals, civic cults in Ancient Greece, Islam, Judeo-Christian, monotheism and so forth.

The Abrahamic Religions

And these are not necessary the same categories of experience, but one thing I can tell is all of these categories are socially responsive, they reflect the makeup of the society at that time.

They do things that society want them to do so you don’t get Islam ☪️ before Mohammed, you don’t get appropriate form of Judaism ✡️ and Christianity ✝️ before these religions emerge.

They are historical construct and they emerged in that way for particular reason.

Also Other Stories

• HOW RELIGIONS DIE?
• Is religion dying? A look at shifting demographics.

So the civic religions of classical Greece responded to a civic structure which is basically everyone lived by, so you needed a religion unifying that city.

Christianity and Islam emerged in a very complex situation but they gain power through imperial systems and they responded very well in centralizing religion based around a single God who rules everything and very good allegories of empire.

They do many other things(rather not all things they do) and are also socially responsible. If you want one very good piece of evidence for the idea that religion is social construct, think again about GENDER. This is the fact that almost all this societies we’ve had so far is been MALE DOMINATED or almost every religion is male dominated. That is its because the TWO are responding to each other religion and society