Conservative Religion: Bondage and Discipline of the Spirit

Last week, terrorists shot up the offices of a satirical French magazine that has run pieces perceived as being critical of Islam and Mohammad. Conservative Christians have of late returned to their book burning tactics of old, and are themselves far from innocent in the "killing people we can't get to comply" category. Buddhist monks in Myanmar have become violent and attacked Muslims, despite belonging to a tradition that expressly prohibits violence. It's to the point where you almost couldn't blame somebody for thinking that religion does more to increase violence than to work for peace. The problem is that the only way to hold such a belief is to work very hard to ignore the teachings of the founders of the great religious traditions and instead focus only on a subgroup of practitioners of those traditions.

The problem is that fundamentalists of all stripes care very little about the historic teachings of their tradition and prefer instead to focus on the teachings of modern day leaders who distort the original teachings of their tradition beyond recognition. Why and how that happens - and how such practices feed into the same kind of nonsense on the Atheist side - are the focus of today's program.