Religion: how to be on wrong side of almost everything...

God-belief has lead people to be on the wrong side, on the immoral side, of so many issues that I have to say I'm truly surprised anyone still clings to it.  By simply looking back at US history alone, it's and easy task to list one after another of cases where Bible followers have made their stand in wrong camps.

Slavery, an institution clearly supported by the Bible and defended openly on that alone, was from our beginnings an issue that nearly tore the country apart.  Our founding fathers and every administration through the Lincoln years - that's 88 years worth of struggle - fought long and hard to eliminate slavery by every reasonable means available; and yet, there it stood, supported to the last by religion.  Moreover, the lasting attitudes of the slavery issue, the racial hatred generated, remained an issue long afterword... into the sixties and throughout the years of the Black Civil Rights Movement.  Its foul attitude continues even today and can be easily seen in signs carried by far right wing Tea Party religious fanatics.

As an aside, I'll mention that it especially surprises me that black Americans, a race so directly downtrodden by slavery, are so easily able, as if  they were blind and deaf to what the Bible says their God stands for, to dismiss completely that which is openly touted - that slavery is moral and right - yet blacks by the million remain loyal Bible followers.

But to continue... slavery and racial hatred aren't the only issues which have seen religionists take the wrong side against reasonable morality.  Religion has been on the wrong side of nearly every American socially moral question.  Witch hunting, for example, the fair treatment of Indians, and consider a woman's right to vote, an issue of the early twentieth century that was dearly fought against primarily on religious grounds.  Men were, according to the Bible, meant to be the dominating sex. And that hasn't changed in the scriptures.  It still stands. The notion remains in the Bible, true, and is still practiced by some Christian sects even today. Take another issue, and an old one, that religion stands resistance to teaching evolutionary science. Beginning with the Scopes Monkey trial, this issue represents a clearly religious lead division between intellectualism and dogma - an issue where religion once again takes a very wrong side - the side that says learning and knowledge are NOT good things - as if stupidity were a virtue.  Gay rights is another issue where religion would, if it could, severely restrict the freedom and liberty of some individuals only to selfishly satisfy their own religiously planted, Biblical supported, ideological thinking - and of course to satisfy what God wants.  It, too, is a case where Bible references are called upon relentlessly in support of ideas that are unjust and unfair.  And the same is true for abortion rights where, for entirely religious reasons, a woman's right to decide on what she may do with her own body would be denied.

All of these issues have had strong religious support in the past, and still do.  Yet, religion has not been and is clearly not as morally correct as it claims itself to be....and  this has caused reason derived morals, burdened by religion all the way, to take the lead in establishing better ways.

So why do people still follow religion when it is clearly so obviously and consistently wrong?  How could they... how do they take pride in calling themselves believers of God, followers of Jesus or believers in scripture-given morals?  I wonder, will they ever catch on?

.Religion: how to be on wrong side of almost everything...