Next up: Prince Cholls lectures on empiricism
Good old religion, well-known source of every virtue.
Since a Ugandan MP proposed the death penalty for some gay people, homophobia has been on the rise in other parts of Africa…Monica Mbaru, from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, describes these crackdowns as a ripple effect from the Uganda situation. She says many African leaders and communities remain hostile to gay people because of pressure from religious leaders. “Our politicians have great respect for religious leaders and are careful not to disagree with them, especially not on homosexuality,” she says.
So a bloc of people is tormented and hounded and persecuted for no good reason, on the say-so of ‘religious leaders.’
One of the most extreme examples of religious leaders advocating repression of gay people is Ugandan Pastor Martin Ssempa…In Kenya, too, religious leaders have been at the heart of anti-gay campaigns. In a statement last week, US-based Human Rights Watch quoted witnesses as saying Christian and Muslim leaders had joined together to call for communities to “flush out gays”.
Oh dear – well maybe the Templeton Foundation could set up an Institute to promote the intersection between religion and not persecuting people for no good reason, and then everything would get better.
Or perhaps there’s no need for that, perhaps it’s enough for the Catholic church to do more to lecture everyone on how to be good.
The Church says society will rediscover its ability to trust by practising virtue. It outlines the importance of marriage for couples, and says the country has had “an expansion of regulation”…The report goes on to say that trust has been “severely eroded”. It added: “Few need reminding of how major institutions have failed to live up to their calling.
It cites MPs and banks and even (belatedly) itself – but its own rather spectacular and protracted failure to live up to its ‘calling’ does not give it the slightest pause – it goes right on assuming it has possession of the moral high ground and the duty to lay down the law from that elevation. It doesn’t seem to grasp that among people who pay attention, it has no moral standing whatsoever. The Catholic church saying ‘Be good’ is exactly like the Mafia saying ‘Be good’ – it’s a harsh and horrible joke. The Catholic church has no grounds for claiming that it even knows what ‘being good’ is – the Catholic church is a hideously confused institution that officially considers homosexuality a terrible ‘sin’ and energetic abuse of children a mere byproduct not worth mentioning. It is not the place to go for lectures on morality.
The church’s report is a thinly veiled attack on the Labour Party, with little sense that, while the Labour Party does indeed need to take a searching look at itself (something that applies to MPs and Peers generally), the church is in even more need of such reflection. A number of MPs and peers have been caught out in financial irregularities; few of them, to my knowledge, anyway, have raped children, and shared them with their friends. It is simply astounding that the church should set itself up as a moral authority, when it and its Muslim confederates continues to be responsible for some of the most serious outrages against human rights and dignity. Not only against children and gays, but also against the dying, against women, and, despite its affirmation of the importance of marriage and family (which is code for its anti-gay stance), against the most precious of intimate loving relationships between human beings – all in the name of natural (read ‘unfounded religious’) law. (I note the church’s dimissive use of the word ‘rules’, when it really means to oppose laws promoting equality and non-discrimination, especially of women, and gay and lesbian people, where the church’s own record is a moral disaster.) I get almost physically sick when I read this kind of repetitive reflexive rebarbative religious rhetoric.
I was quite taken with something by AC Grayling that I read yesterday: “There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. … The only way to manage the dangers it presents is to confine it entirely to the private sphere, and for the public domain to be blind to it in all but one respect: that by law no one’s private beliefs should be allowed to cause a nuisance or an injury to anyone else. For whenever and wherever religion manifests itself in the public arena as an organised phenomenon, it is the most Satanic of all things.” (“Evil”, in Life, Sex and Ideas, 34-35)
Yes Eric, well said.
But I would add that one must never lose sight of what keeps religion alive in the modern world. For many people, the religion they received from their parents and ancestral line is just as much an organic aspect of their existence as their physical bodies; which is why so many Muslims continue to be Muslims and do not seek to become Christians, atheists or Scientologists. For them, it does not just explain the world; it gives them in their own perception a legitimate place in it as participants.
All those monks who toiled their lives away hand-copying scriptures were doing so mainly because in their view no books explained the world better. Likewise the holy hermits who sought to bring their world-view(/s) to the tribal camps of Europe. In their view, it was all worth the often considerable risk.
The religions of today are vicious and so destructive because their priestly bureaucracies feel threatened as never before. Vide Nazism: on the rise was bad enough, but in decline it was bent on dragging the world down with it.
Well, Ian, I wouldn’t argue with you that there are always some for whom the world without religion would seem meaningless. I suggest, however, that these have seldom been the professionally religious, who are much more able to see the world in other ways. The monks whose calligraphy so fascinates us with its artistry and beauty today, copied more than just scriptures. And whether the missionaries were bound to their conception of the world or to their hold on power is, I think, probably an important question to ask. My father, who was a missionary, and in some ways not particularly imaginative, certainly had some idea that religion was not so much about explaining the world as having power over it. That’s what makes it worth the risk, after all, and if some poor sods are taken along for the ride, there are always those for whom what gives the world meaning is the power that they wield. Those few still know. They dress it up in its Sunday best. It may even take off its shoes because of holy ground. But it is power and the hunger for power that drives it.
As for Nazism, I think it was consistently destructive from the beginning. It became apparently law abiding since a putch was not going to bring it into power. And while it is true that it became fanatically destructive at the end, it was fanatically destructive in vision from the very start.
Religion, in my view, is largely the same. It is unsatisfiably power hungry, and it will, given the chance, take with it as much of the world as it can as it declines – something that all religions do.
But there is scarcely a religion, it seems to me, especially monotheistic religion, that is not inherently destructive, from its inception until its inevitable end. The only way to avoid religious cataclysm is to marginalise religion as much as possible. That, at least, is something that we have learned, though it seems as though we are trying our best to forget it. The idiocy perpetrated in the name of religion today would have been laughed at without reservation as borderline insanity or worse in the Europe and North America of a generation ago, yet it is now reported with high seriousness.
One of the contributors to 50 Voices suggests, as I recall, that religion is mainly an excuse to mind other people’s business. I think this is true. It has much more to do with power than it has to do with meaning (though arguably meaning is about power too). Remembering my own religious days, it wasn’t because the world would have been senseless otherwise; it was more that it provided a sense of personal control over the shape of the world.
Religious motivation is the motivation of the spoiled child. I am not proud of my past, but I am not prepared to give away the future to a bunch of children either, and make excuses for them when they hold their breath and turn red in the face. What keeps religion alive in the world today is that it is a way of throwing a tantrum at the refusal of others to play the games that these spoiled children want to play. Let them turn blue.
Eric: Ah yes, quite so. The way to cure a tantrum-throwing child is not to go softly-softly with it and give it what it wants, but to do things calculated to produce escalating tantrums and then not only fail to reward them, but make a (friendly) joke of them. The control-freak means to be taken seriously, and none of them likes to be mocked and ridiculed; and a tantrum-thrower is a control-freak in the making.
But back to the main event: Knowledge begets power and so some people seek knowledge for that reason. But the other side of it is this: the more understanding you have of the world and the universe, the less likely you are to have sand kicked in your face by the hoons down at life’s beach, including priests, cardinals and other assorted shamans.
Knowledge of the Universe inevitably includes and leads to knowledge of oneself. There are no doubt some highly educated PhD ignoramuses round, but in general I think that holds true. So I pass on what I know to anyone who is interested.
After many years of study of both Western and Eastern philosophy, the humanities and the natural sciences, I can honestly say that the ultimate payoff of it all is insight into one’s own life. In that long process I have been in and out of Christianity, Marxism, Yoga and Zen (the last two not really religions) but spending serious time in each. I learned a lot. There are more things under Heaven than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.
I think I am much the better for it for having seen it all from the inside, because now I have a sort of critical empathy with anyone I meet who is reliant on some off-the-shelf thought system (like Christianity) in order to get along. At the same time, the operators and Elmer Gantrys tend to stick out like doggies’ proverbials. As it says somewhere in the Gospels, by their shell games and three card tricks ye shall know them.
Which is why I stay around B&W. God knows there are a zillion blogs out there. But I always read OB’s threads with fascination, and likewise all the comments. There are only about 1% of the commenters around here who fail to enlighten me on any one day about something. And yours usually get an A+.
Religion is a mind-game, and once you can handle mind games, you can handle anything. It’s a bit like a shomen strike. Once you can handle that (particularly against a sword) you can handle anything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE4jkH204pM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb7Y3qx_mYc&feature=related
http://noahsarc.wordpress.com/about/
Taking morality lessons from the Catholic Church is a bit like taking cooking lessons from Jeffrey Dahmer