The Necessary Limits Of Respect For Religion

Someone said: "I agree with it (your criticisms about Christianity).

(However)
Now imagine if the same was inside a mosque. This shit storm that would ensue of people being beheaded and things burning. Who do you think is more of an evil."

Among the primary reasons
things have gotten so bad in Muslim controlled counties:
The especially religious managed to leverage
more and more public compliance
with their religious taboos.
With more and more compliance,
they felt more and more entitled to it.
They cleverly marketed that compliance (that ... enabling) as "respect".
But it wasn't mutual.
It was a very one-sided proposition.
They were building a sociopolitical power imbalance.
As that developed,
the public felt more and more like it was their civil duty to submit and shelter the uber-religious from having their own insecurities ... triggered.
As a result, ...
The religious became less and less accountable to the non-religious.
They became less and less tolerant of all secular people ... and of all secular ideals (like democracy, equality, tolerance, and free speech).
Inversely,
the non-religious became more and more accountable to the religious.
It became a moral "wrong" to openly question, critique, doubt, or reject religious ideals and religious authority.
It became the duty of all ... to listen in quiet respect, when the religious openly pushed their illogical views and abusive values into public settings.
Even when secular ideals were being openly ridiculed, everyone was supposed to quietly respect it.

As the religious became more and more entitled,
and more-and-more accustomed to people walking on eggshells around them, ...
They became less and less emotionally resilient; making those eggshells crack even easier.
So then people had to walk ever-more gently, with each passing year.
The religious also became less-and-less stoic (less personally responsible for how they felt and reacted to things that discomforted them).
In their minds, ...
It became your responsibility, and my responsibility
not to upset them.

Inevitably, getting their way lowered their happiness in life, because:
They became easier to upset.
Even when there weren't any non-believers upsetting them in ways related to religion, ...
there was often SOMETHING upsetting them.
Their egos became so raw ... so sensitive... that they couldn't even have a healthy relationship with their own family.
Domestic abuse, behind closed doors, worsened in frequency and intensity.
Over time, the public became more and more desensitized to the abuse.
So it became more and more accepted to beat wives and eventually even behead children.
Men didn't even have to hide the violence anymore.
In that cultural soup, it wasn't long before suspected gays were being thrown off of rooftops, and young rape victims were being beaten and honor-killed for the moral crimes of sex outside of marriage.

----
And yet, here we are.
Christianity, as a religious theme, and as a mosaic of diverse cultural ideals,
has progressed.
But that progress had help.
Ironically, a lot of that help came from people who were
helping to raise emotional resilience
by:
refusing to help build,
and refusing to help sustain:
protective safe-zone bubbles for the especially sensitive.
---

This world needs more of what SpongeBob would call "sentence enhancers" (my all-time favorite episode).
This world needs more exercise of free speech; tempered by the limit that:
"each person's rights must extend only as far as where the next person's rights begin".
This world needs more people
who feel totally free
to question authority, and challenge established paradigms.
This world needs more people
who can recognize both rare and common forms of abuse ...
and feel free to call it out.
---
Every facet of human civilization is still a work in progress.
But any of that progress can be lost, in a fairly short span of time, if we are not diligent.
When it comes to Christianity, ...
Many are helping from within.
Many are helping from the outside looking in.
Meanwhile, society, as a larger whole, is still struggling under the weight of it.

---
A necessary driver
of human emancipation
is the ability and the freedom
to laugh at authority.
Every time
someone speaks in public
from the platform of Christian cultural or moral authority,...
They should be prepared
for all the logical challenge
and all the mockery
that the pretense is due.
Sometimes
words are wasted on bullies.
Sometimes, laughter is better at getting the point across.
It can also help embolden the soul from within.
It is, at least often, a valid form of protest. I do not
and will not
dignify
any effort
from any person
to subjugate me, or my loved ones, or my society
to any unscrupulous narrative of power.
I may not be able to prevent it.
But I can always refuse to enable it.
That ethic, in practice,
is how we've come so far.
And it's how we'll go further.

Understanding Religion's Relationship To Human Social Systems