Would a Gay Bishop Approve of this Site? (religioustolerance.org)

Member Name: zebra

Product:	religioustolerance.org
Date:	20/07/03 (301 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some useful information

Disadvantages: It is potentially devisive and may promote hatred in a different way.

I read a review of this web site recently and as it seemed to be an interesting site I thought I would pay it a visit. But unfortunately I wasn?t quite so impressed as the other reviewer.

On the home page is the choice:

You, and I, and everyone else have two options:

Religious tolerance --to accept the right of other people to freely follow religions that are strange to us, without hindrance, or.
To continue living in a world saturated with religious intolerance. We will then experience more religiously-based wars, terrorism, and civil disturbances, as we have seen recently in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cyprus, India, Kosovo, Israel, Macedonia, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, etc. The ultimate cause of the 9-11 terrorist attacks was religious hatred and intolerance.It's your decision to make. What kind of a world do you want you and your children to live in?

Now I think most sane people would agree that if everyone was tolerant the world would be a better place so at first sight this web site seems to be a good thing. However, while its name and stated mission is to promote religious tolerance one rather gets the impression that a very large proportion of the essays are in fact about intolerance and therefore have the potential to cause hatred rather than prevent it

The site, established in 1995, is run by Ontaria Consultants on Religious Tolerance which sounds quite impressive but in reality it appears to be run by one person.
The site has over 2000 essays the majority of which of which are written by one person, Bruce A. Robinson, who owns and maintains the site. None of the authors have theological degrees. OCRT say 'We feel that a formal theological degree would be counter-productive. It would probably tend to bias our authors' understanding of religious matters in a liberal direction.' As a theologian myself I rather object to that statement. In my
experience people who consider theologians to be 'liberal' usually come from a 'conservative' Christian background and I would hazard a guess that the author originally was such and for some reason or another is no longer and is fighting the system he came from - a very normal reaction. Furthermore, I don't think this site could get more liberal if it tried.

In an essay on cults Robinson says: One of the opportunities of living in a democracy is that people are free to believe what they wish and to enter into religious associations with other individuals. This sometimes leads to unpleasant experiences; in rare cases, it can cause death. But that is one of the risks of living in a society which has freedoms of religion, association and speech.

Opponents have accused the site of actively promoting 'cults' including Scientology and in a way it does - under the banner of freedom. However by the same logical argument the author uses why offer the support for cults which might be a bit iffy and then deny people their right to be fundamentalist in another religion?


***Religions and ethical systems***

The home page suggests that there are essays on all the worlds religious system from Asutra to Zoroastrianism. Some of the religions are mentioned but the majority that are dealt with in any depth are controversial ones such as Wicca, Satanism, Scientology etc.

Hinduism, the world's third largest religion is given one page, so too is Sikhism and Judaism although the Judaism section does include several essays on Christian Jewish relations, Nazi holocaust and religious intolerance in Israel. Buddhism is given three brief pages. Wicca on the other hand has about 50 pages. There seems to be a bit of an imbalance here doesn?t there? Satanism has more essays than the major religions and Thelema (the religion founded by Aleister Crowley) has the only two essays I have found on the site written by fol
lowers of that religion. I think the site would be much improved if other people from different religions had written the essays. I wondered why only Thelema had been singled out for such special treatment.

The information on the religions, where any is given is usually factual and often refers to other sources which is helpful but sometimes the information is useless. For example the 'essay' on The Occult as viewed by occultists is to be honest useless. It lists various forms of divination, has a sentence on Religious and spiritual pursuits and has this to say about Magick: This is a list that includes ceremonial magick and many other schools of practice involving rituals and spells. They are used to change the environment, in order to reach the magician's goals.
Now if you had not already guessed by now from some of my other reviews I am reasonably well versed in occult topics and I do not consider this to be a rather useless coverage of what I consider a source of much confusion and intolerance in the world.

***Ethics and Morality***

The dozen most popular essays accessed during the last week of the year 2000 were: Wicca, Naturism/nudism, Religions of the world, Santa Claus, Christianity, spanking children, Abortion, female genital mutilation, masturbation, Buddhism, Islam and physician assisted suicide. Many of the same topics are still the most popular.

This is hardly surprising. Out of the dozen topics several might be seen to be 'sex' related and may well have been accessed for the wrong reasons. But why are there essays on spanking children anyway? I looked at the topic and discovered it to be largely about conservative/evangelical Christians who according to this site seem to be the main supporters of spanking. So I looked at nudism and discovered are some very misleading statements in the section on religious aspects of nudism not least the statement 'The earliest known Christian writings (the
Gospel of Q) did not refer to either;' Speaking as a theologian I was fascinated to discover that a probably non existent Gospel of Q is here being upheld as 'the earliest known Christian writing' According to Robinson baptism in the early church was conducted naked and Wiccans usually celebrate either skyclad or wearing a simple robe. It was at this point I realised that this website is not quite so trustworthy as I first imagined.

The other message I was beginning to get was that much of this website is directed against conservative Christians in one way or another.


***Conclusion***

This site gets a lot of visitors, 5 million hits per week. The author monitors the pages viewed from search engines and I think he provides more information on the popular topics to keep the hits coming. So it is not surprising that there is more information on controversial topics. Some of the information on the site is very well researched and reliable but mixed in with this is some very dubious and misleading information.

The bulk of the site deals with intolerance usually by Christians but other Abrahamic religions are also rather subtly attacked too. The question I would ask is if you want to promote religious tolerance is it better to highlight all the intolerances that happen (the daily newspapers are searched for examples of intolerance) or to show the more positive way of examples of how people can get along.

I think good factual information on religions provides a good starting point to religious tolerance but on this site it is spoiled by dwelling on the unfortunate facts of history and the intolerances of every day. Many neopagans and Wiccans hate Christians because of the 'so called 'burning times' not realising that the majority, if not all, of so called witches were in fact Christians not pagans.

We should not deny the bad things that have been done in the name of religion but try and l
earn from them. It is almost impossible to reason with fundamentalists of any persuasion and highlighting the intolerances is more likely to cause even more hatred towards some groups than anything else. Not all conservative Christians beat their children but I?m sure that some people reading the essay will assume that is the case. Similarly, many people assume that everything bad that is mentioned will be typical of all the people of that religion. This is not the case.

There is some useful information on this site but read it being aware that the author does have another agenda and in spite of all claims to being impartial there is in fact a great deal of bias on the site.

Summary: