I recently replied to a post by LGs about religion, and therein I answered this very question. Here is the post in full:



While I have condemned all belief in mystical ideas in the past as akin to mental illness and delusion (though a societally sanctioned one), a position I still pretty much take, I will no longer condemn religion itself as evil. You're right in that religion is a powerful tool that people can use to their own ends, whether those ends are good or evil.

What strikes me as the most relevant aspect of religion is that, since its central concepts are not verifiable in any sense that can be measured and observed by anyone, both the strength and the weakness of religion is that, once faith in it becomes powerful enough, nothing in reality can be used to counter that power. People can deny reality because their beliefs are not based on reality, and as such, anything--ANYTHING--can be justified in the name of religion.

Religion has united cultures and made possible the founding of nations, but likewise, it has caused the torture and death of millions and destroyed as many cultures as its created. So, the one good thing about the existence of religion is that it provides us with an X-Ray to see into the souls of the religious. Through the actions of the religious individual in the context of his or her beliefs, we can see exactly what kind of person they are. Those with darkness in them will use religion for dark purposes, but those with compassion will use it for good. The more power religion has, the truer this is, for it's power begins to outweigh (or usurp) the power of the gov't itself.

This is why I believe people are so hesitant to shed religion--it makes others much more transparent. I also think the reason so many religious people use morality as a weapon is that they seem to me to be inherently
insecure people, constantly seeking reassurance from an invisible being to verify that they are doing what is right at all times. They know they are transparent to everyone, just as other religious people are transparent to them. Is it any wonder they want to convert the world? Fear is a powerful motivator, more powerful than love in some--perhaps most--people.

They religious are inherently fearful of themselves and others, and they know it. Otherwise, why the constant need to reassure themselves that love is a good thing? It seems to me that those who love easily do not need this kind of constant (and otherworldly) reassurance.

The same is true of child-adult sex issue. Those who are afraid they do not love their children in the ~right~ way are the same ones who are the most outspoken antis (and very often are religious as well.) Which is why I believe that many antis are, indeed, repressed CLers. They fear themselves more than anything, perhaps afraid that, if they DID engage a child in sex, that the child will grow up despising them and believing they only wanted the child for sex (which, in the current culture, the child might very well do.)

You see, the problem with religion is a cyclical one. Religion has taught us that sex outside of marriage (and, by extention, love, since marriages are only supposed to be in a loving romantic context) is immoral, and so sex and love have become so intricately intertwined in our culture over the centuries that people fear seperating them (or are sometimes unable to do so.) They condemn sex outside of love as shallow, and the religious condemn sex outside of marriage as sinful.

Framed this way, people see sex with children as the basest of sexual acts because children have not yet learned to make this sex/love connection. They may love the person they have sex with, but they don't see the two things as inherently intertwined and aren't likely to feel emotionally harmed if the adult they have sex with say . . . has sex with someone else. Our culture thus fears the erosion of the sex/love connection if children are allowed to have sex, because children aren't likely to demand (or even care about) monogamy, which is, in many people's minds, the very foundation of our culture.

THAT, in a nutshell, is the reason why I think adult-child sex is seen as manipulative and evil and why children are taught to feel traumatized by it. And so, the culture, having been taught by religion to fear the erosion of the sex/love connection, clings to the same superstitious ideas which generated that connection in the first place, namely through religion (which is how it becomes cyclical.)

In my mind, fighting for youth rights goes hand in hand with fighting the entire concept of the sex/love connection as primarily put forth by religion. We are fighting for something here that is much bigger than just allowing children to have sex and be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies--we are fighting the very foundation of Western culture. THAT'S why we are so despised--through an introduction to sex, we teach children to eschew the old value system, whether we like it or not.

I happen to think it is the inevitable direction of the evolution of our culture. We must learn that sex and love are not dependent on one another and that there is far more to the idea of a family than just a man, a woman and their children. The future I envision will be made up of groups of people living together, some of them occasionally drifting off and forming up with other families, but essentially being together because they WANT to be and not out of necessity.

In this future, a child will have the same right to choose their family as anyone else, once they have the ability to voice their opinion on the matter. Love will be love and sex will be sex--you will be able to have sex with whomever you like, whether you live with them or not (because you'll always have the power to leave if you don't like the situation and join another family.) Likewise, you can decide not to have sex if you don't want to.

In this situation, the very foundation of society will be a return to what Morris Berman calls a horizontal [mobile] culture (as opposed to a vertical [fixed] culture,) and children will be taught that from their earliest days so they will always be aware of their power and ability to change their situation.