That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘control’

As a Humanist with Darwinian pretensions, I find that Religion as a topic for discussion gets pretty easy laughs among my peers – who unsurprisingly tend towards the same beliefs.
Not all of them however. I was raised a Catholic and my parents are still devout Christians. One of my closest friends is as well, along with a myriad of other people I interact with on a regular basis. My point is that I’m by no means isolated from people of faith. Faith and religion form a part of my everyday existence.

So to clarify my personal beliefs, let’s all do something that I have been doing for years: let’s separate the concept of Faith and Religion.  See these concepts as two distinct entities. I’m going to take Christianity as an example because I’m most familiar with it.

Faith may be described as the belief in a higher intelligence which, in whatever form it takes, created the universe and is deserving of worship. You don’t need to belong to a particular type of group or body in order to believe this. You simply have to have faith.
Religion, then, can be described as the organised gathering of people who share a particular faith. Again the most obvious in the Western world is the Roman Catholic Church. The main objective of the Church as a Religion is to promulgate, preach and otherwise propagate the word of God as the One Truth.

So far, so harmless. Until we look back at the Church’s history and see just how it went about spreading the Word.
It has done so through murder, rape and pillage. It has done so through war, blood and torture. Christianity has become the West’s dominant religion not through mass voluntary conversion, or even through its message of God Almighty. It has quite frankly butchered its way to the top of the religious food chain and remained in power long enough for most people to have forgotten (or conveniently ignored) the fact that it murdered its way there. The Inquisitions. The Crusades. The destruction of the Pagan faith in the UK. Allying Paganism with Devil worship (which is just daft – Pagans don’t even believe in the Devil).

This, then, is what the Church’s power is built on today. And that is my issue with Organised Religion. I’m going to borrow a little from Marx  now, and say that Religion (not Faith – keep the concepts separate) is a very good way of stopping people from thinking for themselves – not only not thinking for themselves, but believing that blind devotion is the right way to go through life. It keeps millions of people pacified – the opiate of the masses, indeed; keeping its followers tractable, impressionable and docile and, most importantly, unquestioning.
Because that’s what Religion fears: it fears the free-thinking mind, the inquisitive nature of the curious and the intellectual.
Why? Because free-thinking minds cannot be controlled. As Richard Dawkins has commented – “…thinking is anathema to religion.”

But not to Faith.

Let’s look at Faith now. Taking the description above – albeit a simple one, but I want to keep things to their lowest common denominator – being a member of a Religion requires faith as a prerequisite. However, it is not necessary to belong to a Religion in order to have Faith. There are countless people around the world who have used Faith as motivation to do good. I can’t and won’t “conveniently” ignore or deny that. The Faith of individuals and small groups has caused the most incredible acts of charity.

But when a body gets too big to govern itself, it begins to create a hierarchy in order to govern it. And that is the beginning of Religion, and the loss of an individual’s control over what they believe and determining for themselves how they ought to live their lives.
The perceived need to be told what to do, how to think – “am I doing this right?” “Will my peers think I’m wrong?” “What if I’ve being worshipping/praying/living differently to others like me?”. This seems to be a fundamental aspect of human nature – the desire to belong and to be accepted. Conformity.  Again, not a bad thing – this isn’t a black and white issue.
However, as soon as we begin striving for not just conformity, but hegemony of thought and belief, we open the door for a hierarchy more concerned with retaining power than guiding its flock.
And that’s not what people need. Nobody needs Organised Religion. Some people need Faith to sustain them. And that’s fine by me. Religion has tried to teach us that we need it. In point of fact it’s the opposite: Religion needs us to survive.

But we don’t need it. You don’t need it. Your faith (if you have one) is all you need to sustain you.

The Pope’s comments in his end of year address only prove (to me at least) that the Church is hanging on to the social taboos of over 2000 years ago and preaching it as the Truth. The Church may well promulgate, preach and otherwise propagate the word of God – but in doing so it preaches hate, intolerance and injustice.
That’s not what Faith is. That’s not how we become better people, more enlightened or more tolerant of others. What Religion does now is preach fear and hate.
Don’t betray your Faith any longer. Break free, and live life the way you know, in your heart, your God wants you to live.

In his end of year address, the Pope has seen fit to inform the world that it is the duty of the Catholic Church to not only save the planet, but also us poor defenceless humans labouring away thereupon.
Basically, the Pope rejects the concept of Gender Theory, which in a nutshell studies the traditional roles of men and women in society. So for example, the man is the breadwinner, master of his home and wife. The wife, meanwhile, has 3 roles – kids, kitchen and Catholicism.

Know where that phrase originated from? “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church). Know who propagated that philosophy? Hitler. Yup, you got it, that Hitler.

Now I’m not saying that Catholics are Nazis. Not at all. What I have a problem with is the fact that the Catholic Church is pushing an agenda that preached hate and intolerance over 60 years ago, and whose fundamental theories haven’t deviated from that same hate and intolerance. The Pope believes that when men and women step out of their assigned gender roles, these people bring our society and existence nearer to destruction.

What I say is that every time an individual decides for themselves who they want to be, how they want to live, love and flourish and with whom they want to do that – each and every time we move away from the roles we have been assigned based on the social taboos of 30, 40 or 50 years ago, we take another step towards redefining the society we live in, and another step away from the control of the Catholic Church.
Because let’s face it – that’s what it’s all about. The Church seeks to establish and maintain its influence over its flock by telling them what to think, how to think and when to think it.

The Pope also urges us to respect the “nature of the human being as man and woman,” and yet does not understand that we are constantly defining and redefining the concept of man and woman. It’s how we evolve, how we move forward – we recognise that just because Mrs X is a woman doesn’t mean she can’t be the main earner of the household and just because Mr Y is gay doesn’t mean that he’s a bad father. What the Catholic Church cannot grasp is that we are more than our assigned roles.

No, it's not the end of the world. Now have another sip of communion wine.

Interestingly enough, the Church also differentiates between homosexuality – which isn’t a sin – and homosexual acts – which are sinful. So essentially, it’s OK to be gay, as long as you never have sex, because that’s a sin (which roughly translates to “we’re grossed out by the thought of gays copping off, ergo God must be too, ergo it’s a sin”). Of course it goes without saying that they can also never marry. I mean, gosh, what next? Women voting? Chah. Ridiculous.

Wait, that already happened?
Well damn.

Organised religion has propagated more hate, intolerance, violence and prejudice than any other mass consciousness entity in the history of this planet (yes, way more than 6000 years, bless you). It’s time that we recognise organised religion for what it is, and evolve towards either:
a) the realisation that religion in general is obsolete in the face of scientific objectivity or
b) the kind of faith that sustains and nourishes the individual rather than that which whores itself out to the masses via brainwashing, intolerance and some white-haired old bloke with a natty dress sense preaching about society’s end based solely on the fact that there are elements of society which lie happily outside his control.

Move on, folks. It’s the future, doncha know.