An atheist praises a religious group

A lot of the time I write very negatively about religion, mainly because there is a lot of negative to write about religion.

The thing is every now and then a religious group does something good, and that needs to be applauded much as I disagree with religion as a whole.

So who has prompted this admission from me? The Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, those pacifists who tend to pick the right side of history for their moral stands – as they have done once again.

The Quakers have set up an underground rail-road dedicated to getting gay people out of Uganda, and into countries where they won’t be arrested by their government and possibly murdered by their neighbours.

Other people have tried to do this sort of thing before, and run straight into issues with fraudsters and scam artists just stealing the money, making it difficult at best to keep such projects from collapsing.

The Quakers decided to accept the risk of being ripped off and are trying to help people anyway.

They are one religious group to whom I cannot apply the term “whited sepulchre.”

America’s religious right likes to claim moral superiority over everyone else, while doing things like brandishing AR-15 rifles and handguns to protest in favour of sending child refugees back into a war zone.

When the loudest voices crying for Christian values scream hate, hate is what we come to understand as Christian values.

All too often people who talk of heaven do not recognise that heaven couldn’t be heavenly if it was full of bigots.

Meanwhile it is the Quakers who quietly show true morality, not through loud protestations of faith, but by quietly doing what they believe needs done.

It is groups like The Quakers who show the image portrayed by the religious right, is an inaccurate reflection of those values.