Freethinking for Dummies

Coexistence?

A dear friend of mine posted some disturbing videos from Indonesia of people being stoned to death for one religious offense or another on her Facebook profile to highlight the terrible violence that religion continues to inspire. She changed her profile photo to

I found what I consider to be a much more accurate version of the Coexist sign above,

*by http://dailyatheist.deviantart.com/. Used with permission.

I’m not a graphic artist, but I’m sure if I had the talent I could come up with other signs that contained more “truthiness” that the Coexist one.

Of course, the Coexist message represents something to strive for and as such it serves its purpose well. If religious coexistence was a fact, we wouldn’t need the logo in the first place.

While I fully support efforts for peoples of all faith to coexist, my feelings, as I said in my response to one of the videos, is that to coexist we must see each other as fellow humans, not as believers and unbelievers and until we can throw off all vestiges of religions, that can never happen. As long as people allow religion to guide how they live their lives, the violence and hatred will continue. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but we need to be realistic about just how insidious the influence of religion really is and how very difficult it will be to change that.

February 13, 2011 Posted by James Walker | Religion | agnostic, agnosticism, Atheism, Atheist, belief, believer, christian, christianity, critical thinking, death, fear, freedom, freethinking, God, hate, human, humanism, hurt, Islam, killing, LGBT, Life, misogyny, moral, morality, morals, murder, pain, rational, rational thinking, religion, sadness, skeptic, Skeptical, skepticism, superstition, terrorism, thinking, tragedy, violence | 13 Comments