What stereotype pisses you off the most?

opposition to scientific progress on an individual level, it still amounts to philosophical suicide (Ah, this is familiar! I've read Camus as well!)

Really? You think that Abrahamic religions are particularly opposed to scientific progress and that religion is philosophical suicide? Have you never heard of:

  1. Francis Bacon
  2. René Descartes
  3. Gottfried Leibnitz
  4. Louis Pasteur
  5. André-Marie Ampère
  6. John Dalton
  7. Augustin-Louis Cauchy
  8. Michael Faraday
  9. Heinrich Hertz
  10. Pierre Duhem
  11. William Williams Keen
  12. Guglielmo Marconi
  13. J.J. Thompson
  14. Max Planck
  15. Werner Heisenberg
  16. Francis Collins
  17. Gerhard Ertl
  18. Michał Heller
  19. J. Richard Gott
  20. Henri Becquerel
  21. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli
  22. Louis Braille
  23. Enrico Fermi
  24. Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac
  25. Jérôme Lejeune
  26. Georges Lemaître
  27. William of Ockham
  28. Avicenna
  29. Averroës
  30. al-Farabi
  31. al-Ghazali
  32. ibn Battuta
  33. Omar Khayyám
  34. Blaise Pascal
  35. Roberto Bellarmino
  36. Duns Scotus
  37. Ignatius Loyola
  38. Thomas Aquinas
  39. Maimonides
  40. Michel de Montaigne

And several others? It's amazing to me that religion is considered "philosophical suicide", since it seems like people of faith have managed to make a lot of advances in spite of that crippling handicap.

It's no coincidence that women's rights (among many other things) dramatically improved in Europe as christianity began to lose its grasp on the continent.

And you assume that religion was responsable for this oppression of women? You do realize that Islam and Christianity led to vast improvements in women's treatment in the Middle East when they were first founded? I mean, just speaking in terms of Catholicism here, Mary, the Mother of God, is more highly esteemed than any other saint, even the Apostles. And then there's Mary Magdalene, who tradition holds had been a prostitute before her conversion. In ancient Jewish society, it was taboo for unrelated women and men to meet in public. Yet Jesus did that shit all the time. The hijab (a custom which varies from country to country) is seen by many Muslim women as liberating because it allows them to escape the sexualization of women by Western culture. And yet, some people call it oppressive.

If you ask me, most of the oppression towards women over centuries has been a result of the prevailing culture of the time. For instance, footbinding in China, which left many women unable to walk, was not a religious practice–it was done because small feet were considered beautiful in a woman. I mean, impossible standards of feminine beauty are still a problem today–and yet that's a cultural problem, not a religious one.

religions with violent dogma/blood-soaked scriptures

Really? Do you take everything you read literally? I assume that you do not. Then why do you assume that many followers of Abrahamic religions do? We have imams, priests, rabbis to help us interpret scripture. Islam in particular has hadith as a complement to the Quran, commentaries by Islamic scholars whose interpretations may be vastly different. ISIS, al-Qaeda and other violent Islamic groups belong to a single, extremely austere school of Islam: wahhabism or salafism (which, by the way, condemns all other non-wahhabist Muslims to death as apostates). I will not deny that there are violent passages in the Torah, the Quran or the Old Testament, but to suggest that most believers take them literally is disingenuous. There is such a thing as context and varying interpretations.

And if you mean to suggest that Jews are particularly "violent", I would like to point out that they've historically been more oppressed than any other group in Europe, except perhaps for the Romani. And

historically a justification for slavery

Which verse? The one where Noah banished Ham and Canaan and curses them to be slaves to his other sons, Shem and Japheth? And then, thousands of years later, some Christians decided to claim that Shem's descendants became the Semitic peoples, Japheth the Europeans, and Canaan and Ham's the Africans? That verse? Yeah, that's a classic example of a verse from the Old Testament being taken out of context.

LBGT rights

There's nothing in the Gospel about LBGT rights. Personally, I don't think Jesus would be particularly upset by that kind of behavior. I really think he was more worried about the poor. The verses people usually refer to are from the Pauline Epistles. Paul, by the way, started out as a very conservative Pharisee, and many of the early Christians continued following other Jewish teachings, such as those against homosexuality. The other verses usually quoted against LGBTQ rights are from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, part of the Pentateuch. Leviticus was specifically directed to the Levites, who were priests, who were responsable for maintaining the purity of the Temple. So again, context is important.

I won't deny that people have used Abrahamic religion to wrongly justify these things, but I would hardly say that Abrahamic religion interpreted correctly justifies them.

/r/AskReddit Thread