Racism Part 3a: Religion

The parallels between Mormonism and Islam

I’m going to start by defining my own religious prejudices to which you’ll no doubt add as we continue this discussion and the ones that are not obvious to me become more apparent to you.  I was raised a Methodist of the evangelical/social justice kind rather than the fundamentalist.  Yes, the same church as George W. Bush (we’ll get to his History Major).

What’s the distinction?

The ‘Method’ in ‘Methodism’ is a fundamentalist Protestantism that led to a schism with the Church of England.  About the same time many English colonies in America practiced African Slavery.  These poor heathens weren’t even Christians and needed to be evangelized and taught about Jesus and the word of God.

As a result of the effort by the founding fathers of Methodism, many of them became members of the Church which has contributed to it’s ‘liberal’ positions.  The particular Church where I went to Sunday School and was in the Children’s Choir until the age of 14 is now overwhelmingly Black and Latino in participation.

That’s not why I became an atheist.  My disagreement with Christianity is about free will and supernaturalism.

As weak as they are I believe what my lying eyes tell me.  I believe in the scientific method.  If it’s not duplicatable and predictive it doesn’t exist.

Nor do I believe that humans are born in original sin, that some Platonic Ideal of a chair reflected as a wall shadow diminishes our worth and we have to be redeemed by a supernatural force greater than us so we look more like a chair.

A chair is anything you can sit on.  There is no Platonic Ideal.  There is no God and no ‘after life’.

This is the one chance you get, best to make the most of it.

Next- About Mormonism

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