Monday School: Double Standards

Welcome back to the first Monday School of 2013! Still your go to place for “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Now I have an interesting lesson for today: Do double standards apply to all people or just the ones who don’t think the same way we do?

It’s easy to point a finger and blame someone of creating a double standard, but it’s a lot harder to point that finger at ourselves. Truth is we’re all guilty of doing this, but I’ll get into that later. I’m not here to point out every double standard that occurs, that would take forever to write so let’s just start with the ones that I would like to discuss today: religious double standards.

To emphasize my point, today we have a video presentation:

Personally, I like the part in the video when both cancer patients flip off the narrator.

One reason why this video hits home with me is because I’ve read or heard someone use these double standards to excuse themsevles and find excuses regardless of the situation. It’s an act of cowardace to show shame towards one person and none towards another who does the same thing merely based on what they believe. these kind of double standards occur all the time and people assume they can get away from it cause they have God on their side. Well there are a lot of religions that claim to have God on their side. They all can’t be right, but there is good a chance they all could be wrong.

Honestly, I think it’s hard for anyone to avoid double standards. We value different things and beacuse of that people will often react to different behaviors based on what they know about the person whether their reasoning is correct or not. Just because someone is a preist doesn’t automatically mean he’s a nice person. Countless other priests who were arrested for raping altar boys are proof of that. Good and bad people will come in all shapes, sizes, colors and yes creed. In order to avoid your own double standards, we have to apply the same morals to each person and not show bias towards our own kin. It’s easier said than done, but is necessary if you want to see the examples of bias shown avoided in the near future.

Imagine there’s a young child playing a musical instrument very badly. If that person is a neighbour you don’t like, you’ll likely want that person to stop playing that terrible sound as soon as possible. It’s giving you a headache and has been going on for hours. But if that horrid sound is coming from your child, you think about how s/he is just learning to play, so you accept it and think nothing of it. We are all guilty of this kind of bias and until we learn to control it or just put up with others a lot more than we normally can, then conflicts will continue to arrise from this, especially from those who are religious and biased to their own.

One such terrible double standard would be the use of free speech and organized religion. I’ve seen cartoonists make fun of Christianity and Jesus often, offering good parody and mocking people’s faith for a good laugh. I don’t personally approve of that kind of direct mocking but it goes on because these artists have a right to express themselves. Our constitution guarantees it. I’ve seen countless cartoons on facebook, t-shirt hell and countless other sites, but never have I seen people hurt from riots or violence against this kind of bias towards religion.

Yet when someone draws a comic of the prophet Mohammad, suddenly that person has commited an offense and people take to the streets to protest and call for that cartoonists death. Fatwas are issued and the result is violence and riots. To me this is an enormous double standard. I don’t see anyone protesting the mockery of Jesus Christ, yet those same people will cry bloody murder if their prophet is mocked in a cartoon. Their outrage doesn’t change a simple fact, the cartoonist’s work is still protected free speech. No matter how much people complain, riot or protest nothing is going to change that. Free speech is free speech. If someone wants to bad mouth Mohammad or worse, make a statement that he never existed and is a fraud… that too is an opinion, one that is protected by our laws.

Getting back to the subject at hand, atheists and countless non-believers are often treated unfairly because of an opinion about them that just isn’t true. Religious people often accuse Atheists of being immoral, but despite the fact that non-believers take up almost twenty percent of the population in the US, less than half a single percent of incarcerated prisoners are atheists. Either atheists are better at getting away with their crimes or we are not the immoral heathens that our religious opponents claim we are. People are capable of being moral and good without God, and the fact that less than a percent of us are in jail is proof that our image is being falsely tainted by people who are creating a biased and terrible double standard.

Another example from the video I can’t help but comment on was the part about the Christian who commited murder. I’ve seen this double standard presented often when people were commenting on an act of mass murder when it’s commited by someone who was Christian. I’ve seen someone state that the guy in Colorado who shot up the theatre last July or that dude in Norway that gunned down many more people were not really Christian, just crazy people who don’t represent their faith. If that person were a Muslim, not only would those same people get angry at what happend, but they’d call that person a terrorist, or an evil doer despite the fact that they would never use such bias if the attacker were their own. People seem to forget that Timothy McVeigh and the IRA were also Christian and just as capable of committing acts of terror. This kind of terrorism was never confined to one religion, so it’s time for people to stop acting like it is.

I’m willing to admit that everyone has their own double standards as it’s just another part of human nature. The belief that what you do is right and others doing it for different reasons are wrong is clearly an issue of self-centered egotism. Everyone does it, even myself. Those of use who are open minded enough to realize that have a much, much better chance of avoiding it. It’s entirely possibly to leave the ego in check and judge everyone with the same standards rather than paint the issue with our own bias.

The problem with this is people who refuse to be more open minded don’t seem to really care why other people behave the4 way they do and simply mock anyone who does something that isn’t done for their God. Meanwhile, free thinking atheists are capable of rising above their bias and seeing things for what they are rather than what they want them to be. Then again, that could just be me submitting to my own double standard.

Comments?

Peter