Yup, that.
This is partially as a reaction to the film Religulous with Bill Maher which I just watched and found both amusing and thought provoking so straight off the bat, so you'll get an idea of the tone I'm just going to say, I'm an atheist. I do not believe in god. I used to think I was an agnostic but then I thought about it more and I realised that although I don't doubt that there's more to this life than meets the eye and that some things are beyond any logical explanation (until we find one), I don't attribute any of those things to any kind of supreme being, no matter how good said being might look in a Gandalf costume.
What bothers me about the way religion works is that there seems to be this idea that the basic moral code of humanity is up for interpretation, you can agree or disagree with certain parts of it. Take the ten commandments: 'You shalt not steal' and 'You shalt not murder', OK fair enough, that makes sense. What isn't present is 'You shalt not rape', 'You shalt not torture', 'You shalt not destroy people's homes and possessions' etc. etc. No-one's going to argue that they're allowed to rape someone because there is no commandment against it (well some people might, I wouldn't be surprised) but still. Effectively rewriting what's fundamentally wrong and right because you believe a man in the clouds made the world in seven days is, to me, a corrupted and possibly even evil thing to do. Look at the story of Abraham, specifically the binding of Isaac, god supposedly told him to follow his every command, then asked him to take his son to the top of a mountain and sacrifice him. Sure, when he got there an angel stopped him and said it was a test to see if Abraham's faith was absolute. He would have willingly burned his son, a child, alive because god told him to. FUCKING JUSTIFY THAT. It's a conflict of interests with other Biblical teachings (don't give me any of that 'interpretation' crap, it is) and it's just wrong. I don't care that he wasn't actually having to do it, the murder of a child is wrong, end of story and this book which is supposedly the code we live by is telling us we need to be ready to do it on a whim as a measure of our faith!? I can't believe that people consider the religions that teach this story and its morals, that would be Judaism and Christianity, to be the more logical of the faiths. News flash. There are no 'logical faiths', that's a fucking oxymoron.
I know you might be thinking 'yeah yeah Callum, attack the God Squad, it's the cool thing to do' but I'm not just attacking organised religion here, I'm not explaining why I'm not a believer either, already did that in a sentence. What I'm doing is looking at the fundamentals and history of religion and expressing the fact that I think basic, principle morals are the only thing you should adhere to in life not ultimately determined by you personally, let alone really old books about whales swallowing people, a guy who was beheaded and now has an elephant's head who you pray to when you're moving house, mosques that move around following the direction of some guy's toes or prophets who could, respectively, walk on water and split the moon in half.
To be honest my issues with it spread beyond religion, I dislike the fact that these days everything seems to have a philosophical grounding, everything from books to films to demonstrations to deja vu can have a profound and 'spiritual' effect on you. It seems like these days if something doesn't work on at least two levels, those usually being literal and spiritual, it ain't worth talking about. I don't like that. Let my cite an example: I have a tattoo, it's a kind of tribal, aboriginal looking depiction of a gecko as if it were crawling across the top of right arm, moving towards my shoulder. A lot of people asked me what it symbolises, which special meaning it holds to me. None, particularly, I chose a gecko because I have one and I think they're beautiful animals, I wanted the image of an animal, I like geckos, ipso facto. I wanted it to look tribal because tribal and aboriginal because I thought it would look cooler in that style. I don't think I was a gecko in a past life, it does not symbolise my 'cold-blooded resilience' or my 'nocturnal nature' or my 'love of the freedom expressed via climbing to high places'. I like geckos, OK? Now stop asking and if I hear spirituality again I'll adopt a faith that believes people who say that word are actually asking to be punched in the dick. Then I'll punch you in the dick.
That's a real world example of something that happened to me and it's only really a small complaint, but how would you feel if you were forced to throw yourself screaming from a window thousands of feet above the ground to escape the heat, smoke, flames and debris slowly consuming the building you worked in and the only justification that the perpetrator could give was that he'd been taught to interpret it as a good thing to do that, largely because he'd get to be a pimp in heaven after he was done? Psychopaths convince themselves that they are justified in murder for righteous reasons, terrorists are convinced by other people who were convinced by other people who were convinced by other people who were convinced by stories about a violent man who got told to do stuff by god. You know exactly what I'm getting at with this. I know that only a small fraction of Muslims are terrorists and a lot of them practise and preach peace via Islam, the same thing applies to Christianity, Judaism and all the others. That's all well and good but even as an exception to a general rule, the scary thing is that people aren't going around hating and killing because they're misinterpreting these passages, they're taking them very seriously and very literally. It all goes back to my 'live life by basic human morals and beyond that live it by your own values, not those of others' idea. As long as a human being knows not steal, hurt, rape and kill, they don't need all this ancient scripture as a framework for how they live their lives, especially if these scriptures might in fact contradict basic human morals. Why do you think socialism and major religion have never really been as unified to the same extent as individualism and religion? People want god to help and save them, right? You couldn't ask god to save England because our country is guilty of so much past evil, a lot the men who committed said evil believed they were doing right by god. The same thing goes for America, Germany and any other country you care to mention.
I can say all of this stuff, but you can't just ban religion because that'll make things worse, there's no ultimatum I can offer. All I can do is talk about it, even if I do that to vehemently I'll have people howling for my blood. People aren't going to listen to me, largely because I have my own ideas, people listen to people who may not have even existed, but they rarely listen to people who do. In the 60s South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm severely oppressed the Buddhist contingent of the country. There were numerous protests which ultimately lead to no result. Then, in 1963 a monk named Hòa thượng Thích Quảng Đức burned himself alive in the middle of a busy road in the hope that such an act would win his people freedom from further oppression. The protests continued, special forces raided pagodas, many monks were assaulted or even killed, more monks burned themselves to death and Thích Quảng Đức's remains were actually seized, it wasn't until 5 months after the initial act, when Diệm himself was killed, that Buddhist monks began to experience some liberation from this crisis. This man genuinely believed that he had to die so that his fellow men could live and even after he was gone many more peaceful, innocent monks were both killed and committed suicide following his example. I acknowledge that what he did was a major turning point in that crisis but it saddens me so deeply that any act that brought any change or made any major statement linked to any religion, even one so peaceful as Buddhism, will normally be attributed to murder, suicide or hatred. All that in the name of stories from thousands of years ago. Imagine if in the year 4000 team Edward blew up a train because of friction with Jacob priests, it sounds stupid and it is. I'm glad stuff like 'raptor Jesus' exists, so at least I can take solace in the fact that I'm not the only one who doesn't take religious scripture any more seriously than anything I'd pick up in a WHSmith at a service station.
Here's something slightly different than usual to bookend my thoughts:
Talking about doing your own thing in life, Aaron Funk could have just made music, instead he took music, chucked it in a giant blender full of genius and thus we get this result.
Until next time my droogs.
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