You may or may not have heard about this, but when I heard about it, I couldn't decide what I thought about it. Either watch the video below or, For a transcript, follow this link.
I am at most an agnostic, and I actually kind of find that I agree with the people who are doing this. If you have read any of the parts of the Bible or Qu'ran or Torah, you know that there are lots of things that contradict both the views of society and the views of other pages in that text.
Overall I've come to two conclusions:
1) Tucker Carlson was extremely biased when giving this interview and seemed to disprove the theory that MSNBC is made up of ridiculous liberals.
2) I have to wonder why we think that holy texts are so 'holy' and I think that trading these sacred texts for pornography is a great way to bring to light the way in which we should view 'holy' texts.
Do you think that this is appropriate. If not, fill me in.
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Tucker Carlson... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE
ReplyDeleteI think what that college student is doing is kind of stupid. On one hand, I can't disagree with the idea of pointing out the problems with taking religious texts literally, as they are filled with some brutal things and contradictions that can be used to justify all sorts of actions. But calling them the equivalent of smut or 'way worse than smut' is inaccurate, I think. The bible is full of a lot of bad things, but that's not all that's in it.
Various definitions for smut/ty:
"(writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire"
"an offensive or indecent word or phrase "
"characterized by obscenity"
While the bible has incest, war/violence, concubines, polygamy, etc, it's not so devoid of content that it has no literary or artistic value, and it certainly doesn't only contain offensive/obscene material. I can't say it's the most highly moral book in the universe, but saying it's worse than smut is ridiculous. There is no aspect of pornography that is not smut. (Although that's not to say that pornography has led to worse things than the use of religious scripture for justification of actions has.)
A more powerful message than "this entire book is valueless and in bad taste to the extent that porn is holy in comparison" would be, "a lot of the things in this book are incompatible with how modern society's morals have changed, and it's important to acknowledge the flaws in the scripture and not take it verbatim." Not only would the second message be more accurate, but it would make the college student look a bit less like an attention-seeking, arrogant person. While he knows his stuff a lot better than Tucker Carlson when it comes to how morals are created, I think the way he's choosing to criticize Christianity serves no purpose more than to make atheists laugh and religious people angry, which ultimately changes nothing, only acting as a sort of snide cheap shot. It's really hard to get other people to acknowledge your side of an argument if the first thing you do is insult their core beliefs outright.
That was a great post. I write a lot of posts about how people take part in ridiculous hyperbole based rhetoric instead of actually conversing. By condoning this and calling it a "great way to bring to light the way in which we should view 'holy' texts." I was taking part in such rhetoric. Thank you for pointing out the contradiction that I made to myself and thank you for helping me realize that this atheist is not helping the cause of atheists, merely causing a muck
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