Privileging religious whiners

The BBQ Pit
81

This thread today seems relevant, but hardly a surprise unless you are willfully blind to relationship between religiosity and bigotry in the U.S.

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=861940

Again, it’s not a question of condemning religion per se. There are many tolerant religious people who have modified their faith to accord with modern secular social standards of tolerance, they have held their beliefs up to rational examination on their merits, and changed what they believe to be wrong in prior dogma. The problem lies in the fact that religion is still widely used by many other people as a shield to hold their bad ideas free from examination and criticism, to represent hateful bigotry that originates in the minds of men as piety.

Aside from bigotry, perhaps a more concrete example of religion privileging terrible ideas is the evidence-free assertion of the existence of a soul, a doctrine that underlies Catholic opposition to birth control, including condoms - something that has led directly to a vast number of deaths.

82

Catholic opposition to birth control is comes from the idea that that the purpose of sex is intimacy and making babies, and artificially separating the two is perverse. The soul doesn’t enter into it. Anyway, everyone’s moral code is based on evidence-free assertions.

83

Nonsense. Value judgments are not ultimately objective truths, but they need not ignore evidence. For example, if we were to say that we value sentient life, we could seek out evidence about what forms of life are sentient, and that would not include a zygote.

The assertion that we value “souls” is utterly evidence-free because there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of souls.

I apologize for my ignorance over the particular irrational Catholic justification for its policy of opposition to condom use that has killed probably hundreds of thousands of people.