Faith. No More!

The problem with faith is that once you use it to justify anything, you can use it to justify everything.

Female genital mutilation. It's illegal in this country, and it's also illegal to take someone abroad from this country to have it done. Bloody well right. Those who practice it, though, say that it is expected in their culture, and will argue that it is required by their religions. It's all about their relationship with their God, and it's nobody else's business.
This may sound familiar to anyone who has paid any attention to the news recently. I don't like a lot of the people who have come out against the wearing of the niqab, and "it makes me feel uncomfortable" is just about the most pathetic, bleating excuse for a contribution to a political debate I've ever heard. But as soon as you admit the argument "It's about my faith" you've lost any possible claim to moral authority.

This is thrown into sharp relief when people justify their adhesion to nonsense in the face of evidence by saying "you don't understand, it's not about evidence, it's about faith." In which case, you can believe absolutely anything and give it equal moral weight and truthfulness. If you accept, alternatively, that some things are taboo, no matter what the faith-based reason for them, then you have admitted something which cuts to the heart of many of the arguments which are used to justify faith based schools and the like.

Morality does not derive from faith. It is imposed on it from without, and often in spite of it.

This means, among other things, that extremist, mine-is-the only-true-faith bigots are actually more rational than tolerant moderates. Morality can only be associated with faith where there is only one faith; if a negotiated morality is acceptable, then it derives from without.

This should be obvious, really. Anyone who has ever read the bible with an open mind will be aware that alongside the "thou shalt not kill" stuff, which everyone can appreciate, is the "go slaughter your enemies and rape their wives and beat their babies brains out" stuff. Yet few who claim their morality to be biblical would argue that the latter exerts moral precedence over the former (even when behaving in the latter manner). Why not? because our morality doesn't come from the damn book, it comes from somewhere else. I would suggest that it is probably from a mixture of hard-wired behaviour and social negotiation, but that's not really important.

What is, is that if you call on faith to justify your position, you have lost the argument by any reasonable intellectual standard. And if you say that religious people tend to be better, because they derive moral standards from their faiths, then you are a liar, a fool, or a bigot.

And as for the veil, by the way, wear it if you want to. But don't tell me that your religion requires it, because if that's not an excuse for genital mutilation - and it isn't - then it's not an excuse for anything else either. You wear it because you want to, and if you have political reasons for wanting to these days, that certainly makes sense. But just because you have individual reasons for wearing it, you have not changed its essential nature. Its purpose and function is to dehumanise women, no matter what any God's mouthpiece says.