My disgust and revulsion for religion in general is reflected in my disgust and revulsion for the actions of both Hamas and the Israeli state in Gaza. This is war at its most base, no regard for international law with respect to civilians, just mutual blind simple hatred to the extreme. It is a professional soldier's worst nightmare.
As far as religions go, and after long experience with them both within and without, I can only say that at least the three major western religions are not nor have they ever been positive forces for good in the world.
I am proud to declare myself a child of the Enlightenment, thus divorcing two areas of thought that should remain divorced, ethics and the understandings of nature around us. I might be called a Diest for I have no problem with the notion of a "supreme being" any more than any other initial "bang" or other catalytic event that set physics in motion to create the universe.
I can even be good with the idea of a code of ethics associated, one of mutual respect, treating others as you would want to be treated, honour, justice, equality. But that code must apply to all humanity.
As soon as someone starts in with having to join something, something that makes you exclusive and better, I'm out. I've seen enough evil and hate and death caused by assumed divine exclusivity to be revolted, much as I am today. Lost tribes, the saved, you are infidels or sinners, all of it is man-made twaddle as is every book that gets waved. As soon as the accepting of some line of bullshit gets you a leg up to the right-hand of God, the competition, the divisiveness, starts and the more devout the belief the more righteous justification in acting out that divisiveness, my faith versus your faith, crusades, genocide, murder in the name of God.
Until it is realised that religion is man-made and, as such, needs to be universally repudiated, we will never be without war, without murder justified by a book. Still, I believe a respect for the spiritual and the natural worlds is a requirement. That concept of the golden rule and those other qualities mentioned above applied universally and believed in universally rather than just amongst the lost tribe or the blessed or the anointed by hands, that is true salvation for humanity.
If those books were understood as early attempts to explain the nature of, well, nature and those parts taken as historical, and the rest of the content were understood to not be literal definitions of belief but parables illustrating values to cherish, such as kindness, justice, foregiveness, they would be as valuable as the chosen hold them.
Science differs because it evolves as our understandings of the natural world evolve; the huge difference between science and religious belief. Morality and ethics must also evolve rather than be locked into strict adherence to a code thousands of years old, else enslavement, war, subjugation, those things acceptable around the Med millennia ago find justification today in literal interpretation.
Society is able to evolve with an acceptance of and respect for the intent of a supreme being, a Father of ethics and morality, for as one ages so does one find the acceptance of some things purely on faith important in squaring our concepts of our own existence, our reason for being here, our goal of having left humanity just a little bit better for our having been here.
Likewise, our understanding of and respect for nature, of Mother Earth, comes with the ability to evolve inherent in science. Additionally, I have no problem with the respect for the intangibilities of spirit and soul of Mother Earth and all who dwell in her bosum. Man needs to put aside that arrogance that says he alone has a soul, and become a member of the community of nature rather than demand to be master of it.
Here is where I make peace with nature and ethics coming together again after I had divorced them in my initial diatribe against that bastion of human arrogance, organised religion. Once we learn to coexist with nature and ethics rather than own them, and once we accept both as something to learn of and, yes, even accept the not-entirely-understood, not as fact perhaps but as something we just don't understand rather than make up bullshit to explain it or deny its existence, we can put aside that human arrogance that says we're somehow better than "them". And we have to all do it, or nothing.
Message Thread
« Back to index