srehn's blog

One meme common to many religious groups is to try to get people who aren't in the religion to obey its rules.  Working from the idea that a religious person thinks his or her religion is true, it's obvious that they'd think it's good to obey the rules.  They think good things will happen.  If they want what's best for other people, they'd want them to obey the rules too.  The problem is that they don't seem to understand the basic flaw here: other people don't believe that the religion is true (obviously, since they're not members) so they don't think these good things will happen.

This is one of the most infuriating memes from an outsider's perspective and one that makes it very difficult to live side-by-side with a religious community without conflict.

Examples:

Proposition 8: The campaign for California's recent law banning gay marriage was largely financed by the Mormon church.  But then, Mormons wouldn't marry someone of the same sex (would they?) so the law must be intended to keep other people from getting married.  The usual dogma that it "protects" marriage is spurious and only said to distract from the point.

Abstinence-only sex education: This one has even been enshrined into US law lately.  The idea that kids will be taught about sex, but not taught anything about condoms, birth control, or the other practical safety-related information they need to know is promoted by many religious groups (particularly Christians, but this one is very broad-based).  The fact that most people who eventually do get married will have had sex first regardless of what kind of sex ed they they had is the first red flag here.  The further research that people who only had abstinence-only sex ed are far less likely to use a condom when they do, nearly inevitably, have sex would put the final nail in the coffin if this were a science-based proposal.  It's not.

Blue Laws: Laws denoting what you are and are not allowed to do on the holy day of one religion (usually Sundays and Christianity, respectively, in North America) are sometimes called blue laws.  Can you buy beer on a Sunday at your local liquor store?  If you're in the midwest or substantial fraction of other states, probably not.

Pictures of Mohammed: One of the rules of most forms of Islam (and it is NOT a single religion by most definitions, whatever the proponents say) is that followers can't depict Mohammed.  The idea is to prevent idol worship by preventing the idolized person from having a physical form you can point to (which obviously worked so well...).  This would only be mildly strange on its own, but the sheer venom and violence shown by Muslims toward other people who depict their "prophet" is obviously an attempt to keep other people from disobeying their rule.

Respect the Koran/Bible/Torah/<Insert Holy Book or Object Here>: Many religious people get offended at disrespect toward an object their religion reveres, regardless of who owns this object.  The recent "Everybody Burn the Koran Day" is an example of the sheer stupidity that comes out.  Granted that the people behind this are idiots who were doing it for bigoted reasons, the fact remains that they were threatening to destroy their own books on their own property.  Who cares?  (Quite a lot of people actually, but they shouldn't.)

Indoctrinating Children: Teaching your religion to credulous children falls into the same category here.  It may annoy some people that I point this out, but it's true.  Nobody is born religious; it's something that happens to them along the way.  This almost always starts by telling kids to obey the small rules (dress up for church, say your prayers, etc.) before they're old enough to have any sort of opinion on the matter.

What's wrong with all of these?  They're affecting people other than those who believe in the religious ideas that the rules came from.  They're forcing one group's rules onto another group.  That isn't the sort of thing a free society should do.