Reza Aslan on The Daily Show

[Saxmoof]

It's true, "religion" doesn't do anything. People do things, and credit/blame religion. If someone does something good and credits religion, it's misplaced. They should credit themselves. If someone does something bad and uses religion as an excuse, it is again misplaced. They should own up to making the decision themselves

There's this sort of tap dance that goes on whenever there's an act of religious violence, if someone kills someone for religious reasons and cites the verse backing them up people who defend religion will say, "well that part's not supposed to be taken literally" firstly, how do you know that? and secondly, this person clearly did take it literally! Those same people will quote the Qur'an verse, "if anyone kills a person it would be as if he killed the whole of mankind; and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind" whenever there's a killing in the name of Islam, ok so now it's peaceful people apparently do in fact take the Qur'an literally and derive their values from it

As Reza says in the interview, peoples interpretations of scripture are wildly subjective and every verse has a contradictory verse somewhere else, the only fair way to judge the moral output of a religion is to look at what people do in its name, i would argue that the sum total of all of these things throughout history is negative - i'm not sure why this is given that religions have some good things in their texts aswell, in theory a religious society could just as easily become a compassionate and peaceful one, but for whatever reason that doesn't happen

 Instead, how about being honest and saying "This is an ancient book that has a lot of history of our religion. But we've changed the way we do certain things, so not all of it is still relevant." Is that too much to ask? I'm not telling them how to run their religion. Actually, I am. Do what I say please.

I really think that religion would lose all it's attraction if people took that approach, which is probably why you want them to run it that way . There's something about having a universal, set in stone moral code that imo is the main appeal of religion (that and eternal life, which is some bonus) and that's incompatible with being able to take a step back and say "most of this just doesn't make sense anymore"

I will comment on a couple of things, starting with the above.  Although I think you are right that some people are "naturally" more compassionate than others, I think that religion does sometimes get people to be nice to each other in ways that they otherwise would not.  Many churches, for example, run soup kitchens for poor and homeless people, and I think some of the people involved in that do so out of religious devotion.


If you think about it logically, it makes sense that if religion is powerful enough to motivate someone to kill someone else, it is powerful enough to get someone to ladle up some soup for someone.  Of course, one is going to have to ladle up a whole lot of soup to 'make up for' killing one person, but that is just going to get us to the issue of whether, on balance, religion is more positive or more negative in its effects on people's conduct.

This makes a lot of sense, i was worried i was being contradictory by only focusing on the negative aspects of religion, but you can accept that religion can cause people to act compassionately while at the same time not using that to write off all the bad things religion causes in people - which, on balance, i don't think is excused by the good

I believed homosexuality was wicked and bad, and that was solely due to religion

The gay stuff alone invalidates the argument that people insert their values into religious texts rather than derive them from them for me. I can't think of any non-religious reason to be against gay people, sure there'd still be homophobia without religion but it would be more of a sort of visceral feeling of unease from some people at the sight of gay couples kissing etc... people wouldn't then make the leap to saying that it is immoral

Back to one other point in your post.  Most Muslims do not have their own TV show or web site, so how the hell do you expect them to be "speaking out" against anything, such that you are going to know about it one way or another?  There are Muslim groups who have denounced violence done by other Muslims, but that sort of thing does not get much news coverage, so you are not going to know about it unless you look for it.  And even then, there is very little coverage of such things, as such things do not sell newspapers or get people to watch TV shows, so there is little to be found, but not because most Muslims are okay with groups like ISIS; most are not okay with ISIS.

Totally agree, I don't think you mean me when you say "how the hell do you expect them..." but just in case, I didn't say anything like that