ALONG WITH THE RIDICULOUS REQUIREMENTS of total accuracy for the Bible, the demand that it be literally true and accurate in the sense of modern history and science, neither of which existed for the centuries during which it was composed, edited and compiled, there is an absurd insistence that religion has a totalitarian hold on the minds of its adherents which it most certainly never has had except in the fewest of cases.
I have pointed out how in my personal experience of anti-LGBTQ violence, intimidation, invective and discrimination, all of which I've experienced, the very language of those who committed those showed that they certainly didn't take the "second commandment" to heart. I can't remember every instance of that but I'm sure the two instances of actual violence I experienced included "God" and "Jesus Christ" featured in one or the other. Clearly the Golden Rule was no where in evidence nor other teachings of Jesus.
The same is seldom true of men who attack women, those attacks generally violating even more of the commandments and moral teachings of the Bible, it is impossible to believe that religion is a major motivation in that - as if men who are totally irreligious have a lower incidence of misogynistic attacks against women and sexual assaults up to and including the perpetual lynching campaign against women which is so common that it is not even imagined in such terms even as it fulfills the requirement for being the worst campaign of sustained, intimidating violence in history, in all places and against all women, Women of Color, White Women, Poor Women, Destitute Women, relatively privileged Women.
The idea that religion is to blame for all of that is unrealistic. It is notable that even the strongest prohibitions of Western religion, all of those having to do with sex outside of marriage, are not nearly universally effective in controlling the behavior of even the most officially fanatical of those who profess to believe Jesus was literally God and spoke with the authority of God. If they did then, universally they would hold that remarriage after divorce was literally adultery - though I have seldom encountered a sexual dictator who was against anything they wanted to do, themselves. It's far easier to be a precisian adherent of the scripture when it's someone else's behavior you propose to monitor.
I have certainly not noticed any great influence of religion on most people except as setting an outer limit of what they will do to satisfy their desires and likes. The Republican-fascists who profess to be such big fat supporters of religion are among the biggest fattest haters of religion, especially such Christians as propose the radical egalitarian justice that is the center of Christianity as it is of its parent, Judaism and its cousin, Islam.
Like the things we are supposed to learn in school, the actual power of religion on peoples' lives is too weak to account for the evils that they do, give or take an extreme example of heretical fanatical sects. The greatest influence on peoples behavior is their economic self-interest, the second greatest certainly the entertainment media they consume, TV and other commercials, peoples family and class interests. Religion, which a minority of Americans "observe" even an hour a week in church could not possibly compete with those, mandatory education can't compete with it and they have students for many more hours a year than the churches do.
Why do they blame religion for things that are obviously not taught in the Scriptures, indeed many of those things they are blamed for things not contained in the Scriptures or the official teachings of the Churches? I'd guess because it's about the easiest of targets in post-WWII America, the absurd feeling of transgression for dissing religion as so many idiots online feel is totally anachronistic. I think it was the sarcastic atheist Alexander Cockburn who pointed out that it was more of an act of bravery to profess a belief in Christianity than to diss it. Especially in the scribbling, babbling classes. I don't know about bravery but you'll get attacked for being religious more certainly than for being an atheist a-hole.
It's also cowardly like the attacks of the middle-class and even working poor on the destitute instead of the real enemy of those People, the ruling class. It's a rather stupid waste of effort for the left except in so far as the supposed figure of religion is also an active supporter of Republican-fascism or other powerful gangsters. It's more one of those lifestyle issues that the play left really cares more about than establishing equality and economic justice and a democratic commonwealth. It's as déclassé as eating unfashionable food or wearing unfashionable clothes or speaking Esperanto. It's a lifestyle thing for the play left, the secular left and the libertarian-liberals.
P.S. It occurs to me while going through this for editing, the first thing I ever wrote on my first blog was against the media requirement never placed on conservatives or moderates or centrists, that liberals (real ones, especially) MUST get everything 100% right all the time or they are as useless as it was asserted to me that the Bible must be. I think in so far as real liberalism is all about equality, economic and social justice and democracy under that overarching moral framing that the two demands are not unrelated. I remember, it was being fed up with hearing Scott Simon do that on NPR that morning that led me to do what I'd been toying with for a while and start posting things on the blog I'd put up but was too inhibited to. I got over that pretty fast.
No comments:
Post a Comment