Paula Kirby has written a fabulous and thought provoking article in Today’s Washington Post. Paula, like myself, is a former Christian, so she can view this from all sides. Here is how it starts …
Is freedom a religious idea? As John McEnroe would have said, “You cannot be serious.”
If you value freedom, you should flee from religion as the antelope flees the lion. Religion is the very antithesis of freedom, insisting on our complete subjugation to the unachievable demands of an invisible but supremely powerful overlord. Think of Islam, whose very name means ‘submission’! Think of Christianity, which claims it is disobedience that brought original sin into the world, with all that entails in terms of suffering and injustice and even earthquakes and tsunamis. Imagine! To claim that human obedience is so imperative that the purposes of an omnipotent deity and the very fabric of the planet, if not the whole universe, depend upon it and can be catastrophically disrupted at the first whiff of rebellion – and then to claim that such a religion is the source of human freedom!