I apologise for the length of
time I’ve taken in getting another post out.
I was away for Christmas, and then we were moving house, and have been
living like benighted savages, hunting with stone-tipped spears, avoiding
sabre-toothed tigers and living with no internet access whatsoever. However, the internet has been restored to
us, and we have thus returned to the folds of civilisation. This being so, I hope that you had a very
happy Christmas, and I would like to wish you a happy and prosperous new year,
belated those these wishes may be.
So much for the preamble and
excuses and pleasantries. What I
actually want to write about in this post is a vague realisation that I had
before Christmas. I’ve sort of mentioned
it before, I think, but I believe it bears closer examination.
It is this: When atheists and antitheists attack
religion, what they very often attack is this vast, nebulous, faceless,
monolithic entity called Religion. It looks a lot like militant Islam crossed
with the worst excesses of American right-wing fundamentalism, and is an
oppressive, repressive, greedy, grasping, diabolical entity responsible for
jihads, pogroms, inquisitions and persecutions.
It is a vast weight on history, dragging people down and back and
allowing the evil to rule the ignorant through fear and superstition.
And do you know what? Standing at the distance that they are, that
is certainly what it does look like, in a certain light. But then, from a distance, a mountain can
appear to be a vast, barren rock. From
high above, a rain forest can appear to be a single, homogenous blob of green
that could be swamp or jungle or even just a vast expanse of moss. A beach appears to be an empty stretch of dry
sand. Seen from a distance, such things
appear almost lifeless. You have to get
up close, or even get inside and underneath them, before you realise that they
are full of life.
I frequently read the tirades
of online atheists, and wonder whether they’ve actually spent any time around
‘everyday’ theists, the kind that inhabit their local parish church and run the
coffee morning or the jumble sale or hand out the hymn books. You get the impression that if they have ever
met a theist in the flesh, it’s been a door-to-door Witness or a slightly
spittle-flecked street preacher. They
rage not against the vicar or the minister or the church steward or the chap
sitting at the back of the church with a newspaper when it’s open for people to
wander about in during the week. Their
bile is reserved for Religion. If they think about those people at all, it
is only as cogs of the vast homogenous oppressive machine of Religion.
And this is it, when one looks
back at the past from the distance of centuries one sees the inquisitions and
witch hunts and jihads writ large in the pages of history. You look at the newspapers and websites today
and you see ISIS and the Taliban and Westboro Baptist Church, and church sex
abuse scandals. What you do not see,
what was not considered history-worthy, what is not considered newsworthy, are
the hundreds and thousands and millions of small acts of kindness and charity
and generosity and mercy and humility and self-sacrifice, of hope, faith and
love that are the result of individuals’ religious beliefs.
But in order to see these
things, you have to get up close. You
need to put down the telescope and actually walk up to the mountain, and talk
to the people living on its slopes, to understand what life is like there. Unfortunately, to do such a thing is not only
daunting, I suspect that many would think it unnecessary. They don’t need to talk to religious people
to see that Religion is evil, any
more than they need to dig up the crabs and worms to know that a beach is
lifeless, or walk beneath the trees to see the many animals living in the
forest.
“Oh, of course there are some
good religious folk,” some may concede, but Religion
should still be banned. What they fail
to realise is that there is no such thing as Religion. Only religious
people. I’ve said in a previous post
that there’s no such thing as Christianity, but that goes double for Religion. They rage against a thing which does not
exist, and ignore the people that actually make up what they think they oppose.
And of course these
footsoldiers and factory floor workers aren’t perfect. Many, maybe even most of us are hypocrites
and recidivists, wrapped up in our own holiness and how much better we are than
others, by sheer dint of being us. But that doesn’t mean that those acts of
goodness that I mentioned aren’t being performed and a billion ways, in a
billion places, every single day.
A machine is just the
aggregate of its parts. A society is
just the aggregate of its members. A
religion is just the aggregate of its people, and their actions and their
beliefs and their opinions. There is no
such thing as Religion, there is only
us, and as a result we each have the responsibility to make sure that what we
are adding to that aggregate is something positive and worthwhile, even if the
people who think that they oppose us never see it.
