People of the book

I'm attempting to undertake a survey of the world's great religious literature, but I'm not sure how far I'll get, considering most of these works lose my respect when they start prattling off about that horrifying brute beast, the Unbeliever. It's all pretty much baseless ad hominem attacks in the vein of "the unbeliever is a fool", "they must die", "did I forget to mention they are fools?", "God will smite them", and so on ad nauseam. To be fair, many of these books have wonderful flights of idealism, agreeable moral perscriptions, poetic passages, hope for humankind and proscriptions on sheer lunacy that masses of people often undertake. But when they start with baseless hatred, they stop having my ear. The principle works thus: if they have such a shitty, shallow undertanding of the motives and goals of the Unbeliever (i.e. me), then they lose my trust in matters I haven't considered.

All these books are excellent as group-cohesion treatises, as glorified pamphlets passed out by glorified salespeople. But as for philosophy, I might decide to stick to books that at least try to make sense, that try to persuade the neocortex without appealing to cheap in-group-out-group distinctions, that do not invoke ritual to broaden their appeal to those who can't be bothered to read the book, or those who can't be bothered to think about what they read. I can see how saying "it is written" once had appeal, when reading was that rare commodity of the powerful and was still in the abode of the mysterious. But these days, any fool can write a book, and any fool can read a book. They're just books. Perhaps the one difference between the holy books and ordinary books is that holy books make more assumptions and resort to scare tactics to bolster their arguments. They would be thrown out of any debating society.

"Don't worry, Mary. I know it's difficult, but just try to memorize the Lord's prayer and John 3:16. It wouldn't hurt to rock back and forth and clack your prayer beads and jump on one leg and bo backflips while you do this."

Lest you think I'm some sort of spite-filled bitter curmudgeon, I'll do a post later where I pick out what is good and noble in the religions of humanity. But I'm afraid it will involve mostly eastern philosophies or watered-down polytheistic religions of Old Europe: the pragmatism of Buddha, the pleasures of Bacchus and the blind eye of Odin.

Consider: "How should I know anything about another world when I know so little of this?"