Christians present their religion as being one of "love," but many people experience anything but love from Christians -- and this includes their fellow Christians, too. As a religion, Christianity doesn't just divide Christians from non-Christians, it creates deep divisions among Christians themselves.
Michael writes:
Years ago my family lived in San Jose, CA, next door to a family from Kansas. This family was very Christian: they attended church every Wednesday and Sunday, held prayer meetings at home, prayed against allowing abortion rights, told their kids to not accept what was taught them in science class, fought against labor unions, and always proudly voted Republican.
Dispite the seemingly insurmountable differences between their values and those of my parents we managed to get along fairly well all the years we were neighbors. We just agreed to not discuss religion or science.
All this changed one Sunday when a large crowd of them showed up for what my mother thought was just another prayer meeting. My mother was in the front yard watering her flowers and started talking to them. That evening she told us that our neighbors and their church group had just returned from a "field trip" to east San Jose to observe the "poor Mexicans" and how they were being punished by God for being born Catholic.
I being the only outed atheist in our family at the time had to ask, Well, if they thought God created them, then why would He punish them for being what they were? Even as a young kid that kind of thinking did not make any sense to me. Besides, I went to school with Mexican kids and knew some of their families. They all seemed happy, well off, and they were always kind to me.
My family and our Christian neighbors continued to live next door to each other in peace, but our socializing had cooled considerably.
I had always been skeptical about all things religious, but this was my first real life experience of how religion can damage one's relationship with their fellow human beings and blind one to the reality of the world we all live in.
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I would actually go a little further than this. I would argue that religion can damage the very essence of a person's moral compass -- it can so damage their very sense of morality that it become practically inverted. Hate and violence become virtues; compassion and love become sins. Even worse, the hate and violence become labeled "love".
How does this happen? The process is pretty simple and even obvious once you see it. All that's necessary is to believe in a god whose commands, desires, wishes, and intentions are treated as supreme -- as above absolutely everything else. When this premise is adopted -- and I mean fully adopted, not just paid lip-service to -- then the suffering of actual human beings becomes irrelevant.
Moral reasoning becomes completely disconnected from human suffering. All that matters is what God thinks about a behavior. No matter how much suffering that behavior causes, it's not the least bit evil or even problematic because God wants it. That's why Christians can go watch "poor Mexicans" and imagine them in hell as a form of entertainment. Their current and future (alleged) plight are all God's will and must therefore be good. What's more, they will in the future be watching those "poor Mexicans" suffering in hell, right?
And if that's the case, how can it be wrong to cause them even more suffering? How can it be wrong to ignore their current suffering instead of alleviating it? Even young children can feel empathy and try to help those in need; many Christians, though, have had their sense of empathy removed by their religion. It's been replaced by a self-righteous sense of knowing what their god wants and being determined to obey.
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