There are religious figures that do a lot of good - people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu leap to mind. There are people of faith who care about the world around them, are non-judgemental, and compassionate. These people are exceptions to a rule and not the ones I will be discussing today. The rule is a cankerous, corrupt, cruel and psychotic one it is high time we shucked off forever.
We are into the second decade of the 21st Century. We have learned about the age of the Earth, the age of the universe and are beginning to make our first guesses at the size of the universe. We are making scientific breakthroughs every day that beggar our imaginations and instil a greater sense of glory and wonder of the natural universe.
In spite of this, there is a concerted old guard, who would put a lock and key on your genitals if you're a woman, paradoxically allow you to commit rape if you're a man, that want to burn all the books and throw away our collective learning, all so we can sit in darkened rooms and listen to some so-called 'wise' man make barbaric and grotesque murderous interpretations from one of a number of holy books, written by ignorant people in an ignorant age.
The growth towards a world without religion is inexorable. It is inevitable. We cannot continue to grow as a species, we cannot continue to learn and to evolve, and yet hang onto these antiquated barbarisms. To return to a faith driven society is not to advance, it is to significantly regress.
Religion offers us nothing. It cannot explain the origins of our species or this world, science having long supplanted that role in a far superior fashion. It cannot be the template of law, because it is archaic, cruel and barbaric. Our laws are tempered by social progress and notions of justice that the holy tomes of faith simply cannot equal. It cannot be a moral arbiter. Religion has shown time and again that when it comes to a moral crunch, religion will always side with the genocide program, the slave master, the whip handler, the child molester, the murderous fanatic, the rapist and the concentration camp commandant. How can we gain any moral teachings from such a gang of murderous sycophants?
In the drive to remain relevant, religious organisations have all become more extreme. As their audiences shrink, they latch onto zealots ever harder, and those that remain within the fold face ever harder decisions to become more extreme and stay or say 'enough!' and leave, depriving themselves of something they may value. We face today not the learned collection of wise old men, who represented faiths in decades gone by, we now instead see a growing extremism and militancy that regards the modern world as an evil enemy.
Perhaps they should regard the modern world as an enemy, for the drive to egalitarianism and democracy is completely inimical to a world governed by faith. One cannot exist side by side with the other, and the dominance of one perforce lessens or destroys the other.
As long as organised religion continues its current trajectory it will destroy itself without the secular world lending much of a hand. Its tortuous logic has created ethical gordian knots that it cannot extricate itself from. The Catholic church cannot extricate itself from the simple fact that it will never do anything to report abusive priests. It's belief system, that it is more important to protect the troubled soul of the priest than protect the assumed innocence of the child, binds the organisation into a path where it must allow children to be raped and try to hide that from secular authority. It is the tangled web of belief and policy that drives the larger organised religions. Ethics has little to do with it.
Religions involve themselves in social crusades against targets they have been inculcated to revile. Nowhere is this more obvious than the blatant hatred organised religions have for the freedom of women's reproduction and gay rights. These two areas are the ultimate litmus test for the ethical standard of any faith. That religions continue to wage war against a woman's right to decide if she wants to be pregnant or not, and against the right of homosexuals to live and love freely, demonstrates that they cannot engage on a topic in a rational way. Having an end goal in mind, all they can do is chase after it, with any tactic that comes their way. Many of these tactics are hypocritical in the extreme, or based on painfully obvious ignorance.
So the catholic church demonises gays for spreading AIDS, while ignoring that their own stance on the use of condoms is an evil an order of magnitude greater than anything they (falsely) accuse gays and lesbians of, after all they've never quite managed to accept that lesbians have the lowest rate of AIDS infection anywhere, have they? Born-agains and their lowbrow ilk compare women seeking abortions and pro-choicers generally to the Nazis without a shred of irony. Not once do they stop to recall that the Nazis and the Catholic Church came to an agreement on forbidding abortion. Should the current actors in the drama time-travel back to 1939, it is the born-again you would find sliding on the jackboot and the pro-choicer being sent to the camp, not vice-versa.
We have come too far and grown too much to continue hanging on to these antiquated structures. We certainly should not allow them any kind of stranglehold on social policy. Religion, like myth and legend, do have a place in our history. They are valuable fables that helped our species at a time in its infancy. But we are not infants anymore. These teachings are as relevant as Jack and the Beanstalk or Theseus and the Minotaur, they are gripping tales with an interesting moral, but are not guides on how to conduct our lives or structure our societies. We have outgrown the holy books. We can see that they are flawed, contradictory and simple, or even just intended for people living in a tougher, more primitive age.
While they continue to exert influence over social structures like law and government, we will be continually fighting the ignorant heritage of our species, just to stay in place, while desperately hoping for a better future. But these archaic bodies will not allow us a better future. They cannot imagine it, nor can they champion it. Their only goal is to drag us backwards, backwards and backwards again. They dream of a return to ignorance, where one wise man who can half-read the holy book before him is the law and government. Where no new dreams are dreamt, no new hopes are expressed, and we lock ourselves into a dark box of permanent hatred and antipathy for a prescribed enemy.
We cannot and should not live like that. Be the keepers of folklore if you wish, oh priests, but your place in our law and governance has been over for a while. Your opinions are foolish and based on wanton ignorance. Your source of wisdom and morality is flawed and archaic. We have outgrown you in wisdom, in morality, in tolerance and understanding. We extend the hand in peace you refuse to extend. We love those you have been programmed to hate. We seek to protect those you seek to torture or abandon.
You are no longer our teachers of wisdom and love. You have instead become some of the most heinous exemplars of ignorance and hatred.
0 comments:
Post a Comment