April 4, 26 J.E.
In a recent conversation with my
brother (a momentous occasion in itself), the subject of religion came up and
he asked me, “Aren’t you anti-religious?” Good Heavens! Hell no, I said. I’m
not anti-religious, I’m just anti-idiot. It’s not my fault that idiots often
cling to religion as a life raft to guard them from original thought. I’m
definitely more of an agnostic.
At the Scopes Trial, Clarence
Darrow said, “I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be
called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure—that
is all that agnosticism means.”
Ah, truer words have never been
spoken (except when I said that I’ll never score—that was a bit truer). I have
already condemned the kind of provincial, blatantly moronic thinking that
impels people to call crusades, blow up airplanes, or refuse to allow the
simple truth that the world is more than 6,000 years old to be taught in Kansas
City schools, and yet it continues to flourish.
What peculiar universal cranial
dysfunction forces us to quest for something greater than us, that there is
some omnipotent power controlling our every movement? Why is it, that instead
of shrugging and saying, “Gosh, I dunno,” every single culture has to create
some iron-clad immutable law of theology that supersedes reason, common sense,
and good taste? I mean, jeez, were they THAT friggin’ bored in the old days
that going to Church on Sunday was the high point of their lives? I guess they
needed a break from milking cows and tilling the fields, but today we’ve got
TELEVISION! I’m sure that God wouldn’t want us to miss football!
Religion itself isn't a bad thing. The world is a complicated place, and if you need some form of religion
as a filter to help it make sense of it, then knock yourself out. Religion used
the right way brings people together and gives them incentive to help each
other or, failing that, a disincentive to kill each other. Hell, not even the
astounding self-delusion and the complete lack of personality of the
fundamentalists is more than a minor annoyance, and can be quite fun if you
know how to push their buttons.
What steams my pickle is when
these self-righteous assholes, realizing that most people actually are fairly
rational and will not subscribe to their stupidity, use either violence or
force of law to bend those evil heathens to the right path. I like to compare
the Kansas City thing to the church’s denouncement of the heliocentric model of
the solar system. Back then, they forbade anyone to write about or teach that
the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, threatening, imprisoning, or
killing those who dared defy them. That didn’t make it less true, but it still
took centuries for everybody to come around. It’s the same shit now with the
old-earth model. It’ll take centuries, but people will finally buy it due to
the mountain of evidence.
The worst part of it is that I
thought of a way to make the Old Earth perfectly compatible with a
fundamentalist viewpoint, as long as they’re willing to accept the idea of
symbolism (Uh-oh! Too many syllables!). Heck, the formless void, then light,
then seas and land, then fish, then plants, then animals, and then us all
pretty much appear in the right order. The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge represents that day the first human looked
at something and thought, “Gee, I wonder why that is the way it is?” from which
point we could never go back. People learned agriculture and had to toil in the
fields to support the resulting population explosion and the consequent
crowding brought disease, famine, war, and a lower quality of life than humans
had experienced before while they were running around naked in the bush. SEE?
Isn’t that PERFECTLY REASONABLE? Of course, fundamentalists are inherently
lacking in good ol’ Vitamin “R”.
“Religion is a hammer. It can be
used to build a civilization or to smash someone in the head.”
--ME!
I should submit that to Webster’s
Book of Quotations! I’d be famous!