Remember that Christians do not see god as an angry and capricious being. When I was a believer I simply would not have been able to fathom the idea that god would ask me to kill without good reason, or even at all. If you had pointed to god's actions and demands in the past I would have done as any of the other Christians will do: shrug and point out that that all happened a long time ago and it's different now. And so on for any other objections.
I think that going to the extreme of "what if god asked you to kill/rape" makes it easy to forget the point that you are trying to make, which is that religion has the power to get people to suppress their moral/ethical center if they are convinced that an action is "good." Why go with something as extreme as murder or rape? There are lesser examples which are far more common and make the point just as clearly. Easy example: Jehovah's Witnesses are commanded to shun any former member of the faith, even if the person is a member of their immediate family. If that doesn't seem like such a bad thing, keep in mind that there are parents who have been turned away by their own children, and even denied any time with their grandchildren. Or that there are people whose spouses have grown cold and distant, making it clear where their loyalties lay.
Nor does it need to be codified to be effective, as a perusal of the intro forum will likely reveal. People who turn away from religion often experience persecution on many different levels, from direct loss of friendship or contact to being ostracized by family, or schoolmates, or co-workers. Why? Because they're convinced it's for your own good, or because they 'prefer god as a friend' or whatever other religious-based reasoning they use or conditioning they have. I think it was Hitchens or Harris who said that "religion poisons everything." You don't have to kill or rape in order to destroy precious things.
I think that going to the extreme of "what if god asked you to kill/rape" makes it easy to forget the point that you are trying to make, which is that religion has the power to get people to suppress their moral/ethical center if they are convinced that an action is "good." Why go with something as extreme as murder or rape? There are lesser examples which are far more common and make the point just as clearly. Easy example: Jehovah's Witnesses are commanded to shun any former member of the faith, even if the person is a member of their immediate family. If that doesn't seem like such a bad thing, keep in mind that there are parents who have been turned away by their own children, and even denied any time with their grandchildren. Or that there are people whose spouses have grown cold and distant, making it clear where their loyalties lay.
Nor does it need to be codified to be effective, as a perusal of the intro forum will likely reveal. People who turn away from religion often experience persecution on many different levels, from direct loss of friendship or contact to being ostracized by family, or schoolmates, or co-workers. Why? Because they're convinced it's for your own good, or because they 'prefer god as a friend' or whatever other religious-based reasoning they use or conditioning they have. I think it was Hitchens or Harris who said that "religion poisons everything." You don't have to kill or rape in order to destroy precious things.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
