An Interesting Sermon

Despite my not being terribly religious, I attend religious services about once a month at my parents church.  This week the pastor gave what I consider to be a rather interesting sermon.

The sermon was based on Jesus' instructions to his followers to love their enemies.  The pastor used an anecdote about a Jew who went out of his way to befriend a leader of the KKK.  What ended up happening was that the leader converted to Judaism.

Aside from this, the sermon stood out as an example of bravery and integrity.  The pastor gave a frank admission of some of the evil things that are done in the name of religion, including scriptural depictions of an angry god and His orders to commit what we would consider war crimes.  I don't see how we can disentangle God from those parts of the Holy Bible, and I suspect that the pastor is struggling with this as well.

To me it seems like a faith that is backed up by nothing more substantial than wishful thinking, in a sense.  This is not entirely the case, as the pastor and many similarly inclined leaders of various churches make bold stands for what they consider to be right.  They are quite willing to face unpleasant aspects of the world and even their own traditions.

One of the things that he mentioned was that if religion were to vanish from the face of the earth, then half of the wars and fighting would go along with it.  I'm not sure if this is the case.  While it is definitely true that some conflict is caused by religion, I think it might be somewhat less than half.  In any case, I think that the main harm that religion does is from it leading people to believe things that aren't true.  It isn't so much war as faith healing that needs opposition.  It diverts people's attention from effective, evidence based medicine.

This brings me to another subject.  In the Christian religion people are instructed to love their enemies.  This is, quite frankly, not a moral requirement that unbelievers typically support.  In my own philosophy, there is no requirement for us to love or help anyone.  Granted, helping people is generally seen as something desirable.  It is good to encourage people to help others, but requiring people to help others is another matter.

The reason why I am reluctant to assert a moral responsibility in this regard is that when we say that there is a moral obligation we mean that the action is worthy of blame.  Blame is inherently harmful, so if we want to do this we should make certain that the values that we want to uphold through this method cannot be obtained by means that are more humane or efficient.  That is, if we have a better way of accomplishing what we want to accomplish, we should use that instead of assigning blame.

Of course, to a certain extent, that is in line with the message of the sermon.  Rather than looking for ways to harm the KKK leader, the Jew looked for ways that he could persuade him that his actions were not the best way of obtaining his values, to say the least.  Too often we try to win arguments when the long term success of our ideas depends on winning supporters and followers.