The roots of religious bullying

Atheist Revolution blog has a post up about how hard-core Christians in the US strive to enforce their own religion's taboo system on the whole society, including on non-believers.  Examples of this would include the laws against homosexuality and interracial marriage which existed until fairly recently, and the current efforts to ban abortion.  We are so used to dealing with this problem that it is easy to forget how strange it is.  As the post points out, if you dislike red cars for whatever reason, you are free to not buy or drive a red car, but trying to stop everybody else from having red cars would be so weird and intrusive that it would not even occur to most people.  An individual's personal preferences are relevant only to that individual.  Why do hard-core Christians try so doggedly to force everyone to live by theirs?

Oddly enough, the Bible itself provides a rationale that could serve to justify such bullying, but modern-day Christians never use it.  The Old Testament is full of cases where God destroyed a whole town or tribe (or, in the case of the flood of Noah, the whole world) because "sin" was becoming widespread.  If you believe that God will destroy your entire city once the number of red cars being driven there exceeds a certain hard-to-define limit, you might indeed be justified in banning them for everybody, to save the whole city.  But again, Christians today never seem to bring up this point.  Perhaps it makes God sound too obviously irrational and thuggish.

They do sometimes argue that their taboo system represents objective morality, and that saying "if you don't want to drive a red car, don't drive one, but don't stop me from driving one" is just the same as saying "if you don't want to commit murder, don't do it, but don't stop me from doing it".  But this is a bad argument since it merely highlights the difference between taboo and morality -- murder causes objective harm to someone other than the perpetrator, whereas driving a red car does not.

In reality, of course, the true reasons for behavior are often different from the stated ones.  An obsession with dominance and status, and with asserting dominance over others, is characteristic of members (especially males) of almost all primate species, and humans are just one more primate species.  We can see this throughout human history, as conquerors or socially dominant groups have told subjugated groups, you must salute our flag instead of your own, you must speak our language instead of your own, you must worship our gods instead of your own.  It's a way of asserting dominance by forcing others to explicitly express their submission.  As a dominant group in the West for centuries, Christians have been accustomed to behaving this way without getting any push-back.  Now that they are losing that status with the rise of secular government and the spread of non-belief, the hard-line believers feel the same kind of agitation and distress and anger as a dominant chimpanzee who feels his status within the group eroding.  Hence the growing desire to force non-Christians to perform symbolic expressions of submission by making us submit to their taboos -- the more arbitrary the better, since there are reasons for banning murder that have nothing to do with religion, but forcing non-Christians to submit to the taboo on, say, abortion clearly means they are being subordinated to Christian dogma specifically.

Christians are not the only ones who do this, of course.  The bizarre outbursts of rage and violence by Muslims against non-Muslims who draw cartoons of Muhammad reflect their alarm at realizing that the unquestioned dominance Islam has long held in the Islamic world does not apply everywhere or to everyone.  The unbelievers must be forced to express submission by conforming to the Islamic taboo.  On the other hand, some religions don't produce such behavior -- I've never heard of American Jews demanding that civil law ban eating pork for everyone in the US, for example.  It seems to be a matter of believers being accustomed to holding a dominant position.  Christianity was overwhelmingly dominant in the US for most of its history, a position which has been eroding for only a few decades now.  Muslims in Europe are mostly immigrants, or descendants of immigrants a few decades ago, from Islamic countries where their religion held similar sway.

Non-believers and secular-minded Christians should keep in mind that this kind of religious bullying has much in common with the screeching and stomping of a chimpanzee trying to intimidate other chimpanzees.  That's not to minimize the problem -- apes are dangerous, especially when enraged by a perceived challenge -- but it does help to put it in perspective.