Faith-based hatred

Science writer Clay Farris Naff wrote a marvelous essay in the Huffington Post, in which he makes a case for his belief that "at this historical moment it is in religion that hatred finds its most powerful and all-consuming expression."

Naff cites these examples of faith-based hatred:

• The notorious Westboro Baptist Church, whose members picket funerals of U.S. soldiers because "God hates fags." And God also apparently hates Jews.
  
  
• Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur have published a new exegesis of the Torah in which the prohibition "Thou Shalt Not Murder" applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew."
  
  
• One Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub went on Egyptian TV to assure viewers that "The Jews are our enemies. Allah will annihilate them at our hands."
  
  
• Apparently, God also hates President Obama, according to preacher Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church.

(By the way, Obama is not the antiChrist. Pat Robertson says so. He says the antiChrist is probably a Jew who lives in Israel today.)

Naff says:

If you suspect, as I do, that religion evolved as a human trait that conferred advantage on groups by increasing solidarity in the competition against other groups, then it's all too easy to see how hatred would become an enduring feature of religion.

The vast majority of conflicts have at its root some kind of religious reason. People have been cherry-picking their respective holy books for reasons to hate, and reasons why our in-group supposedly is superior to all other out-groups.

Think of how peaceful the world would be if, in a triumphant moment of rationalism, we got rid of organized religion. Instead of all kinds of "us-versus-them" reasons to hate, we just follow the universal ethical rule to be kind to all people. Will that day come?