The Negative Side of Religion

Until his death, I corresponded with a secular Israeli friend who was completely devoid of any religious feeling. In the early months of our correspondence, I wrote him that if I had to be someone on the margins of society--a prisoner, a prostitute, a drug addict, an unwed mother--I would rather take my chances with secular people than religious ones.

While religious people are often generous to the poor, that generosity not only fails but often turns into its opposite when someone lives in a way that challenges the received wisdom of the religious. Think of the Magdalens, the unwed mothers who were virtually imprisoned as slave labor in convents. Catholic reform schools were often brutally cruel.

Religion, it seems to me, often functions to improve the treatment that members of the ingroup receive from each other but worsens the treatment that "outgroups" receive.

I was heartened last week to hear a sermon by Father James Nero when he said that God's love is available to all people of good will and that while Christiand don't have to abandon our faith to follow someone else's, we should listen with respect to other people's religious experiences because God loves them and reaches out to them too.