IS RELIGION A GUARANTEE OF MORAL BEHAVIOR?

(This post was originally published in February 2009.

I made some revisions and am posting it again.)

My answer to the title question is an emphatic NO!

I’m not saying all religious people are immoral. The examples I give below represent a very tiny percentage of the religious community. What I am saying is:

Being a believer is not a guarantee of moral conduct.

"Morality is not determined by the church you attend or the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey." ---as stated on The Immoral Minority blog.

Societal health:
A study by the Journal of Religion & Society (2005) concluded: “Higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies... Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional.”
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism came up with similar findings. High levels of atheism are strongly connected with high levels of societal health: low homicide, poverty, infant mortality and illiteracy rates, high levels of educational attainment, per capita income and gender equality.
In a 1999 study, George Barna, found the percentage of people who have divorced as follows:
Jews = 30%
Born Again Christians = 27%
Mainstream Christians = 24%
Atheists/agnostics = 21%

While I don’t personally believe divorce is immoral, many religious groups think it is a sign of moral weakness.
Ron Barrier, Spokesperson for American Atheists commented: "These findings confirm what I have been saying these last five years... It stands to reason that our families would be dedicated more to each other than to some invisible monitor in the sky. With Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage... Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage."
James Veverka, in "The moral hypocrisy of the Bible Belt," remarked: "We hear an awful lot from conservatives in the Bible Belt and on the TV about how we all should be living. Certainly a culture that teaches the conservative religious values of the Christian right must have clean living written all over it... It doesn't. Far from it... Joining its history of Biblically correct bigotry and discrimination, it is an area with the highest divorce, murder, STD/HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy, single parent homes, infant mortality, and obesity rates in the nation. As a region, the Bible Belt has the poorest health care systems and the lowest rates of high school graduation."

Sex and religion:
James A. Haught: “Western religions have spent millenia inflicting shame, guilt, repression and punishment upon human sexuality... The West presents... a long chronicle of religious hostility to lovers -- for no rational reason... Every censorship effort, every attempt at sexual repression, still comes from religion.” (“Sex and God: Is Religion Twisted?” Free Inquiry, Fall 1997)
Episcopal priest Raymond Lawrence wrote in a national United Methodist journal: "The churches are in danger of evolving into havens for the sexually suppressed or, worse, communities of profound hypocrisy." (Quarterly Review, summer 1985)
Dan Barker, former evangelical minister and current co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation contends that when religious zealots spend so much time thinking and preaching against sex and homosexuality, they become obsessed with it, and eventually they cannot control their sexual urges.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, another co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation) wrote Betrayal of Trust, Clergy Abuse of Children (1988), which chronicles hundreds of cases of sexual abuse by priests, ministers and rabbis in the U.S. I can't help but think that her husband Dan Barker (above) was right.
When an avalanche of accusations against priests, for sexual misconduct, hit my local area, the newspapers were filled with letters to the editor blaming the church for not allowing priests to marry. However, priests who like young boys are not interested in adult women. Others were saying that pedophiles were joining the church to have easy access to children. But one psychiatrist who had treated some of the perpetrators wrote an article that made more sense to me. He argued that men who were Catholic and knew they had a problem, chose to become priests because they thought that if they prayed enough, were pious enough, read the scriptures enough, they would be cured. We see how well that worked.
I was astounded to learn that some bishops were directing priests to deny communion or even recommend excommunication to church members who were openly pro-choice, while at the same time pedophile priests were merely slapped on the wrists and allowed to move to other parishes.


The news media have covered extensively the sexual scandals of Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggert, all three ministers who were either morally bankrupt or, at the least, hypocrites. Thus I will not go into the details here. However, suffice it to say they preached often about moral weakness and sin, then did exactly what they were preaching against.

Morality and politics:
I know our lawmakers cannot be perfect and I don’t expect them to be. But when they campaign on moral issues, then disappoint us, then they are hypocrites.
U.S. Representative Mark Foley (Catholic & Republican) who was known as a crusader against child abuse and exploitation, resigned following a scandal involving teenage male Congressional pages. His replacement, Tim Mahoney (United Methodist & Democrat) ran on a platform of restoring morals to Washington. What did he do? He had a two-year affair with a former staff worker. Just about the time that hit the news, it was discovered that he had been cheating on that mistress with a second mistress. Larry Craig (Methodist and Republican) who repeatedly voted Nay on gay rights issues was caught in an airport restroom, apparently soliciting men for sex.

Religion and crime:
There have been many notorious criminals who were church members. You may remember a serial killer who called himself BTK (Bind, Torture and Kill) in Kansas. David Rader, who killed at least 10 people, was a Deacon and the Congregational President of his Lutheran Church.
David Ludwig, the Pennsylvania teenager who killed his girlfriend’s parents was a home-schooled Christian. Mark Chapman who murdered John Lennon had been described by his friends as a “Jesus freak.”

One of the evilest Christians I know of is Fred Phelps, the preacher who pickets and disrupts military funerals. He physically and psychologically abused his wife and all of his children. The only reason he is not in jail is that he convinced his sons that if they told the truth and he was put on trail, that they would go to hell. Phelps is convinced homosexuals are responsible for all the evils in the world. (His son Nate's blog, A Journey to Reason, tells much of his journey from his father's home to atheism. Read his speech to the American Atheists HERE.)
In a report from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (1997) approximately 80% of the U.S. population claimed some affiliation with a religious group and 80% of the U.S. prison population stated a religious preference. Logical, right? But then why, if (at that time) 10% of the general population claimed to be atheist, only 0.2% of the prison population said they were atheists? There are many religious people who argue that prisoners choose to say they are religious because there are benefits to doing that in prison. If that is so, then our prison system is violating the church/state separation provision of the Constitution.

One of the biggest crimes of all, which senselessly kills innocent people every day, is terrorism. Many people don't want to admit that the terrorists are religious people, but that is exactly what they are. They may be of a different religion than those who are shocked by their immoral acts, but as I pointed out in a previous post, Christians killed at least 50,000 people, just as senselessly during the 1st Crusade, and did it in the name of Christ.

Steve Allen: “It is frequently argued that a return to formal religion is the solution to the problem [of corruption.] But the prescription leaves something to be desired, for one finds practically no formal humanists, agnostics, or atheists in the ranks of the corrupt. Most of the embezzlers, swindlers, con-men and thieves... are card carrying members of one religion’s denomination or another that formally pays respect to the Old and/or New Testament.” (Ripoff, a look at corruption in America, 1979)

I repeat, I’m not saying all religious people are immoral. These cases represent very few people among the religious. What I am saying is that being religious is not a guarantee of moral conduct.

William Lobdell: “To the chagrin of evangelical pollsters and leaders, Christians–for the most part–don’t act any differently than atheists. And, in fact, in some categories (divorce rates and racism) evangelicals act worst.”

I know most religious people are good, honest, ethical people. Most non-religious people I know are also good, honest and ethical, yet they aren’t that way because they fear retribution in the afterlife.

copyright 2010 C. Woods

Click on this link for an article by Paula Kirby: "Morality: no gods required."

Click on this link for an article by Austin Cline: "Irreligious People Just as Ethical as Religious Churchgoers"

CHRISTIANS BEHAVING BADLY #17 The Magdalene Sisters

EVIL NUNS

In Ireland during the 1800s, Magdalene homes were set up as places of refuge for prostitutes and “fallen” women. They were named after Mary Magdalene who repented before Christ. As the 20th century approached, the homes were taken over by nuns, who, instead of making the homes places of forgiveness and compassion, brought them under the strict and cruel dogma of Catholicism and turned them into institutions worse than prisons. Prisoners had rights. Magdalene inmates had none.
In 1996, the last Magdalene asylum was closed in Ireland. It is almost unimaginable that such a misogynistic and horrific institution survived for so long, and it is almost inconceivable that women had been treated so badly by other women.
Irish girls were not instructed in sex education, yet were condemend to a miserable fate if they were poor, had been raped, had a child out of wedlock, or were “too beautiful” or flirtatious and thus might be in “moral danger.” Of course, abortion was illegal and a mortal sin. Many girls were rejected by their own families and given over to the “mercy” of the Catholic Church. The women were locked up to “scrub away” their sins by working 10-hour days 6 days a week for no pay in insitutional laundries run by nuns. The church earned money from local hotels and univeristies to do their laundry with what amounted to slave labor.
For an estimated 30,000 young women, life with the Magdalene Sisters was harsh and miserable. Some victims were kept for a few years. Many stayed for the rest of their lives.
The plights of these women seemed amazingly similar to the treatment of women by the Taliban. The Magdalene Sisters perpetrated a form of religious terrorism directed at women. Perhaps their positions of power and their own fear of sexuality resulted in their depriving their charges of any freedoms.
In Ireland, the Catholic Church was so powerful that no one questioned its practices. Women who escaped or were released didn’t speak about their experiences because they were too broken, ashamed, or afraid.
Researcher Dr. Frances Finnegan received documents from one of the religious orders at a time when they thought themselves invulnerable. Much of that research resulted in the 1998 documentary “Sex in a Cold Climate” which, in turn, inspired the 2002 fictionalized version “The Magdalene Sisters” based on the lives of four women in the asylums. (The DVD of The Magdalene Sisters includes both the documentary and the fictionalized version.) Although the film is set in the 1960s, the stories on which the film is based happened in the 40s and 50s.

Critics claim the film portrays conditions much more brutally than the reality could ever have been.
Inmates watched nuns eat buttered toast and bacon while they breakfasted on porridge. As punishment, they were beaten, their hair cut off, and they were frequently subjected to humiliation. They were not allowed to speak while working and were forbidden to form friendships. They were isolated from the outside world. Their names were changed and they were denied any contact with or knowledges of the fates of their illegitimate children. Many were sexually abused by priests.

Filmmaker Peter Mulian said, "In any oppressive regime, you take away people's ability to think once you take away their ability to express themselves. The church is a pretty sophisticated organization. It simply didn't serve their purposes to educate these women. They held them with fear, guilt and shame - its oldest and vilest weapons. The methodology they applied is shared by torturers all round the world. The prisoner's self-esteem is taken away, you deny them education, you deny them access to the outside world, you deny them communication to one another, you don't allow friendships to form and you take away their identities and give them new names. It is about breaking people down.”

Writer Fiachra Gibbons writes, “Every...‘Magdalene’ I've talked to says...the reality was more brutal [than the film.]”
"It was worse in the Magdalenes, much worse than what you see. I don't like to say it, but the film is soft on the nuns," says Mary-Jo McDonagh, who spent five years in a laundry in Galway. After being molested by a neighbour, she was spirited away early one morning by a priest and told she had "brought shame on her family". McDonagh eventually escaped to England after she was farmed out as a servant to a cousin of one of the nuns.
Often children born out of wedlock were placed in orphanages. At age 17, many of the female orphans were placed in Magdalene laundries, not for any sexual misbehavior, but because the nuns didn't know what else to do with them ---or maybe just to acquire more free labor. One woman had worked beside her own daughter for more than 20 years. Knowing the mother had pined for her daughter the entire time, the sadistic nuns had not revealed their relationship. The daughter was told only after her mother had died.
It should be noted that the actions of the nuns were entirely contradictory to the tenets of the faith in whose name they claimed to act. Accounts of Jesus say that he pardoned, showed kindness to and frequently spent time with women caught in adultery, whereas the Magdalene Sisters forced such women into brutal work for their salvation and pardon.
Predictably, The Magdalene Sisters film outraged the Vatican. Victims of Magdalene Asylums have received no closure in the form of recognition, compensation, or apology, yet many ---brainwashed with an eternity in hell for even thinking of questioning church authority ---remained devout Catholics. However, some of the women highlighted in the documentary film have wisely abandoned the church.

Sources:

In God’s Name by Fiachra Gibbons

The Magdalene Sisters

Wikipedia

The DVD (including Sex in a Cold Climate and The Magdalene Sisters) is available from Netflix. Read more about these films on the Internet Movie Database

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW on Religion

SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

English dramatist, critic

(1856-1950)

• "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

• “Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”

• “Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.”

• “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”

• “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

• “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”

• “Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party.”

• “Morality consists in suspecting other people of not being legally married.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.”

• "Old men are dangerous; it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world."

• “A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”

• “Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't.”

Today is George Bernard Shaw's Birthday.

He was born 153 years ago on July 26, 1856.

LET THERE BE LEGOS™

I recently discovered The Brick Testament website which features Biblical stories illustrated with Legos™. The Bible Review chose the unusual art for the worst Bible art award in 2002 while Stuff chose it as the best combination of toys and God's wrath in 2005.

The Brick Testament made it into Rolling Stone magazine's Hot List 2005 (10/06/05). "It's filthier than Hustler. It's more violent than The Sopranos. It's pretty impressive for an illustrated Bible made entirely of Legos™." Rolling Stone goes on to say that the artist creates "strangely compelling pictures online and occasionally publishes his work in glossy, coffee-table friendly books ---if incest, gang rapes, beheadings, bestiality and wholesale genocide are your idea of parlor chitchat."

The Biblical tableaus are designed in Legos™, then photographed with a digital camera by The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith, the son of an Episcopalian Sunday school teacher. East Bay Express (10/26/05) reports that at age 13, Smith decided to reassess his boyhood superstitions. "I didn't start out with the goal of questioning my religious beliefs, but eventually got around to it... Belief in God just didn't make the cut." About reading the Bible cover-to-cover for the first time while studying philosophy at Boston University, he says, "I must say I was pretty shocked." Smith is now an avowed atheist.

Spin magazine (February 2002) described the Biblical scenes as "alternately childlike, disturbing, and hilarious." Smith is quoted: "If there's an unspoken intention to the site, it's to have those who believe in an all-loving and merciful, family-values-supporting God be confronted with the barbaric, heinous, and grotesque stories from the divinely inspired book their religion is based on. Plus, it's a cool Lego™ project..."

To answer the question, "Is he really a reverend?" the website's reply is: "Most ministers, priests, or other religious clerics would not actually use 'The Reverend' before their own names, for to do so would be presumptuous and rather vain. The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith is not an ordained member of any earthly church, and is widely regarded as being both highly presumptuous and extremely vain."

Smith says he sometimes receives complaints from people upset by his depiction of sex in the Bible. He adds, "No one has ever complained to me about the far more prevalent depictions of violence."

The artist adds ratings to each scene: N=nudity, S=sexual content, V=violence, C=cursing. The Bible Review (8/14/02) says, "Genesis, it seems, is least appropiate for children. Paul's letters come next."

Spin says to ignore the ratings "if you wanna see Lego™ Adam giving it to Lego™ Eve from behind."

Note: click on the "press" link at the top of the The Brick Testament website for more press coverage and the "about" link for more information about the site.

To see other amazing art created from Legos™, go to:

35 AMAZING PIECES OF LEGO ART

WEB URBANIST

THE ART OF THE BRICK®

or, search for "Lego art" on the web

JEWS BEHAVING BADLY #2 protecting abusers

In my attempt to show that being

religious is not a guarantee of moral

behavior, this post is a part of my series

of reports featuring the bad behavior

of religious people, past or present....

Look for other posts showing the

bad behavior perpetrated by members

of other religious groups.

HIGH INCIDENCE OF CHILD ABUSE IN

NEW YORK’S HASIDIC COMMUNITIES:

Joe Diangelo, 28, says that when he was seven he was taken by his father to a mikvah (bath house) to find the place packed with naked men and boys. “I was in the tub, and I had my back turned, and somebody raped me while I was in the water … I didn’t know what happened. I couldn’t make sense of it...” Diangelo never saw the man who abused him. Today, monitors are posted by the bath to prevent sexual activity, but as a child, Joe was on his own.

Joel Engelman, 24, says his abuse came at the United Talmudical Academy. He was eight when he was called to the principal’s office. When he arrived, he says, Rabbi Avrohom Reichman told him to close the door. “He motioned for me to get on his lap, and as soon as I got on the chair, he would swivel the chair from right to left, continuously. Then he would start touching me while talking to me. He would start at my shoulders and work his way down to my genitals.”

This happened frequently over two months. He told no one for more than a decade. Four years ago, he told his parents. And a year ago, when he heard that Reichman had allegedly abused several other boys, they confronted Reichman.
When the school heard about it, they gave the rabbi a lie-detector test. He failed miserably. So they told Joel, ‘This guy has to go.” But a few weeks later, a religious leader from the school approached Engelman’s mother to ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was the molestation?... We found out there was no skin-to-skin contact, that it was through clothing....On a scale of 1 to 10, this was maybe a 2 or a 3, so what’s the big fuss?” The school reinstated Reichman.

Both Engleman and Diangelo were raised as strict Hasidic Jews, and both fled their upbringing for the same reason.

Four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn have been sued or arrested for abusing boys in the past three years. That’s a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she met dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes says he has 10 active sexual abuse cases involving Orthodox Jews. He says the Jewish leaders — like Catholic bishops — try to handle these affairs internally, through a rabbinical court. "You have no business taking these cases to religious tribunals," Hynes says. "They are either civil or criminal in nature. Or both. Your obligation is to bring these allegations to us and let us conduct the investigation."

One of the problems with such abuse is that in isolated religious communities, instead of reporting the abuse to the police, it is reported to religious authorities, as was also done in the Catholic church. When it is handled by the religious community that wants to avoid bad publicity, it is usually covered up and never resolved.

For more information:

Abuse Scandal Plagues Hasdic Jews in Brooklyn
Hasidic Jews join the kiddy-fiddlers’ hall of shame
Sexual Abuse of Kids in Hasidic Jewish Community

JEWS BEHAVING BADLY #1

In my attempt to show that being religious

is not a guarantee of moral behavior,

this post is a part of my series of reports featuring the

bad behavior of religious people, past or present....

Look for other posts about the bad behavior

perpetrated by members of other religious groups.

Rabbi Morris Talansky of Long Island, NY, was charged with assaulting his dentist in an argument over fees. After the case was thrown out, the rabbi, carrying a Bible, wept and said, "I'm grateful to the Almighty and my attorney and the judge." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his resignation after Rabbi Talansky testified last year that he paid the politician $150,000 in cash over 15 years while Olmert was minister of trade and mayor of Jerusalem. Talansky, who was a victim of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, is currently being investigated by federal authorities, who are considering indicting him for allegedly bribing Olmert in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

David Silverman, 23, of Rockland County, NY, is accused of luring three girls, ages 14 and 15 who he met on My Space, to a porn set in a warehouse, giving them alcohol, photographing and filming the resulting orgy with two friends who are now both fugitives in Israel. By the time he was arrested, he had dismantled the porn set and erased his hard drive, but officials were able to recover his files. Silverman says he has returned to his Hasidic Jewish lifestyle and is refusing to even look at the evidence, claiming it is too offensive. Psychologists aren’t buying his claim that he cannot assist in his defense on charges of statuatory rape and child pornography because of his religious devotion. His lawyer admitted that a plea may be the best course. “A lawyer I am. A magician I am not,” he said.

Two teenaged boys claim they endured years of sexual abuse at the hand of Emanual Yegutkin, a principal of a private Jewish school in Brooklyn, NY. The boys were abused between the ages of 7 and 17. Neither boy attended Yegutkin’s school. Yegutkin also worked as a lifeguard at a summer camp and was a ‘rising star’ in the Jewish community. His arrest is the fourth in the Orthodox Brooklyn community in the past three years.

You will find more abuse in the New York Hasidic community in a future post: Jews Behaving Badly #2

Initially, I learned of all of the above stories from reports in the March 2009 issue of Freethought Today, published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

For more information on these reports:

‘Graft’ rabbi off hook in doc assault
Olmert foe listed as Madoff victim

‘Perv’ Twist, ‘Occasional’ Hasid
Hasidic Jew Charged With Rape and Child Pornography Remains in Jail
Hasid ‘rapist’ fit for trial

Teen sex rap for principal of Bensonhurst private school