Religion isn't the problem, it's the whackos who make it whacky

Barbara Obrien, who's filling in for Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory has an inciteful piece up. Here's a snippet:

Christianity may be the most dogmatic major religion on the planet, I admit. In most denominations the follower is presented with an elaborate belief system and told he must accept these beliefs absolutely; doubt often is considered weakness. Since the West is overwhelmingly Christian, here even the nonreligious assume this dogmatism is what religion is all about.

But conservative Christianity’s emphasis on a literal belief in doctrine and ancient texts is an aberration among religions and is not even true of all of Christianity. Historian Karen Armstrong argues that a rigidly literal reading of scripture is a relatively recent development.

... faith is not a matter of believing things. That’s again a modern Western notion. It’s only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don’t have it much in Judaism, for example. …

… I think we’ve become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you’d presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They’d have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.

Westerners often cling to an infantile religion focused on a Big Daddy God and the face of Jesus mysteriously appearing on pancakes and cheese sandwiches. And since that's what much of religion in America looks like, it's easy to assume that’s what religion is. That, and the fact that the world seems infested with warring religious whackjobs, makes religion easy to hate. I understand that.

But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane. But religion doesn't have to be that way.

Followers of other religions can be baffled by notion of scriptural literalism. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if science disproved something written in a sutra. He said that he would revise the sutra. Westerners sometimes don’t know how to take this, but even the Buddha told his followers they shouldn’t accept anything he taught them on faith. Believing the sutras is not the point of the sutras, any more than believing in science is the point of science.