Religion
Attention fundamentalists!
Come get me. I don’t actually care, and if you decide to exact your god’s righteous revenge on my humble opinion you can rest assured that it will be read by plenty of people. Given that I am an attention whore, kind of keen to work out what’s after death and have a big mouth, do your worst.
Right, that’s that dealt with. A nice precursor to something which will probably prove offensive to all kinds of people. But then these people are programmed not to think for themselves, instead subscribing to the press kit for one major religion or another.
So, an opening statement : religion is fucking stuipid. How, in an age fundamentally made of reason, compassion and understanding (allegedly) there are people still preaching hate based on a book written by a man several hundred/thousand years ago – before we’d figured out the earth was round, it orbited the sun or that smoking was bad for you – a time when slavery was perfectly acceptable, where democracy didn’t exist, where women suspected of being witches were burned alive – is beyond me entirely.
This little tirade is a result of the current lunacy going on in the UK regarding religious iconography and where it should and shouldn’t be.
Let’s make it clear – I don’t want my kids taught by someone who has to wear a veil. In exactly the same way I wouldn’t want them taught by someone dressed as a ninja, wearing a superman mask or using Gene Simmon’s makeup on a daily basis. This is no sleight on the lady to whom I refer who has made a pretty decent compromise in offering to remove the veil providing no male colleagues are present.
The issue here is that forcing one gender to be masked is effectively ridiculous, and I won’t go into some of the other more medieval practises that are allegedly part of the major religion referred to as Islam as I am likely to be misinformed and therefore wrong, however gender equality in all things is something the rest of us worked out a while ago. We’ve not quite got it right yet, but we’re working on it. Get with the times.
Issue 2 is this flight steward who is suing BA for refusing to let him/her where a crucifix outside their uniform. Firstly, EVERYBODY STOP SUING EACH OTHER it’s just pushing us faster and faster to be more like the US. Don’t get me wrong, I like Americans just fine individually however they have a very weird, somewhat disturbing and faintly worrying culture and mob mentality, and I’d sooner we didn’t go the same way thankyouverymuch. This issue in this particular case is why a Christian shouldn’t be allowed to wear the apparel of his faith while Sikhs may wear a turban, and so on. Answer : if you’re a Sikh, wearing a turban is not an option. If you’re a Christian, wearing a cross is no more mandatory than displaying that fucking stupid fish on your car.
I could, and have, blather on about various incidences of religions being retarded all day, but I’m not going to. Instead, I will make the distinction between religion and faith.
Faith is something you have in something inexplicable, you don’t need a handbook to tell you about it, you don’t need to see it doing what you believe it does, you don’t need to go to a special building for it to work, donate money to someone who says they can work it better than you, don’t need to wear special shoes, and so on. You know it does whatever it’s supposed to do because you just know.
Religion on the other hand is a man-made construct. At some point a man, or group of men, decided to start an organisation who believed in something, using their faith or the appearance thereof to fuel faith in others. Religion requires that you obey a certain book, go to a particular building, wear special shoes, obey a guy who says he can work it better than you and so on.
Given that any of the gods out there are omnipresent to some extent or another, why would you need to go to a particular building?
Effectively, religion is faith plus control. Having faith is now mandatory and you have to have faith in the ways you’re told to, because the man who set up the religion in the first place didn’t trust you enough to have faith in the right sort of stuff (or contribute to the upkeep of his house). It’s taking something personal and considered and turning it into a commodity, where faith is traded for power.
Let us consider for a moment those happy go lucky chaps who subscribed to Scientology. It is a religion which has been called “dangerous”, “a cult” and various other “oooh scarey” terms over the years. Why?
Given my limited understanding of Scientology, they subscribe to a struggle between malevolent alien forces and those who are good guys. Is this any more far-fetched than an invisible, omnipresent, punisher of the wicked who’ll get you in the end? Any more implausible than a dude who heals people by looking at them funny, walks on water or comes back from the dead?
No. All good fairy tales need a fantastical element in them. Be it Santa Claus coming down the chimney, the Tooth Fairy replacing lost teeth with cash or Beelzebub residing in a firey pit with a poker just for you!
My personal faith is quite straight forward, it alternates between aetheism, agnosticism and deism on a regular basis, and I can buy into all of them from time to time, but I’ve got my own ideas. Deism I heard of only recently, and it pushed the right buttons (and lots of clever dead people were into it) – the basic premise is that the world was put together by some advanced race or other who have sinced buggered off and don’t really give a rat’s arse what we get up to.
I also subscribe to luck more than most. Good luck turns up when needed, doesn’t when it isn’t. I’m also prone to tipping my hat in the direction of karma regularly, just to be on the safe side. It all works for me, because I don’t like being told what to do, and I don’t need to be told how the world is because I can see it.
So, to summarise : the ideal would be that all the brainwashed out there throw off the shackles imposed on them by major religions, but I sense that isn’t going to happen. So instead, how about everyone pick up some common sense? If your religious getup is impractical, consider a compromise. If it’s optional, don’t make a fuss when asked to not wear it, if it’s a means of subjugating your race and/or gender point it out. As we get older as people we learn more about the world, it’d be nice to think that as we get older as a species we’d learn more too, but clearly some people ride the short bus in that respect.
Flame, debate, I’m happy either way. Just so you know, you can’t convert me. I’m too aware of my own thoughts for that.
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