Zealots of Religion

I am not a good person when it comes to the whole religious thing.

There are several reasons for this, but what I hear in the news and what motivates a lot of the current events certainly doesn't help. I understand the basic tenets of most religions, and I understand the appeal of it to most people. No one likes not knowing things, not knowing why things happen, and religion allows for an easy answer to allay those fears. Whether it is total fiction or the old standby that "God works in mysterious ways", many are comforted by having an answer.

There is nothing wrong with that.

And on paper, broken down to the very simplest of rules, religion is meant to give good directions: be a good person, don't harm others, you get the idea. Once people get involved in running it, then it loses that goodness.

For me personally, I have not had much exposure to religion. Ray was raised a Christian Scientist, but is not practising and is by his own admission, agnostic. My mother was nominally raised Jewish but openly is an atheist. Harry was raised Methodist in a very casual way. My maternal grandmother held seders and professed a belief in being Jewish, but that was as far as that went. My paternal grandparents were Methodist but Pop-pop could really care less about all of it and my grandmother was entirely motivated by "what would the neighbours think" when it came to religion.

I am never destined to be a big believer in any one religion. I like little bits of different ones, and I enjoy the history of them and I like to read about them all - mostly I find it mystifying that anyone believes any of it that strongly. I am too pragmatic to fall into the dogmatic side of it; and too much a scientist and a questioner to ever have blind faith.

As a whole, religious people don't bother me. Keep it simple and keep it to yourself. People who prosthelitize are annoying and the idea that out of so many religions and their countless subsects, it is the height of unforgivable hubris to say, "Mine is the only right one and the rest are wrong". If you love diversity in people, you gotta love all of the diversity in people. How can you be so prejudiced against so many different groups? Of course I say that about humans - how can anyone hate people because of skin tone, eye colour, physical features, but there are inordinate numbers of people who do blindly hates others for just those reasons. People certainly disappoint on that level.

But any religion has its nuts - in polite society they are called zealots; but there is very little to distinguish them from the truly insane. Anyone running around gunning down others, resorting to terrorism, living in cloistered away secret societies clearly must recognise on some level that they are taking this to an extreme. Well, maybe not - certainly they are all able to justify the worst behaviour under the guise of following God - but to do these things... I don't know. I don't understand it at all.

There are some religions that I don't understand at all. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Southern Baptists... these are strange groups. And that is the more "mainstream" ones. And maybe they really aren't so bad in and of themselves, but then you get these little offshoots that are just scary.

I'm currently reading a book called Under the Banner of Heaven. It is about a fringe group of Mormons that broke off from the LDS (the Church of the Latter Day Saints) and is still practising polygamy to a ridiculous point. You can pretty it up all you want and I personally don't particularly care if someone wants to practise polygamy - I think marriage to one person is a lot of work so marrying two seems like way too much work! - but when one old guy is marrying every 12-year-old he can find, that is nothing more than pediphelia.

Am I wrong?