Small Wrongs and Great Consequences

I’ve been in a bad mood today, and it’s mostly (although by no means entirely) aimed at myself.  The reason is this:  I was standing at the bus-stop this morning.  The only other commuter was a young man, eating what I assume was his breakfast, consisting of a packet of cocktail sausages (each to their own I suppose).  The bus appeared in the distance, and he finished the last sausage, and threw the packet onto the floor behind him.  A tide of righteous indignation swelled up within me, but being far too British (and cowardly), I said nothing, instead subjecting him to a particularly vicious glare, the heat of which should have been enough to vaporise him, but which, annoyingly, he did not appear to notice.  I know that we’re told not to judge, but really, some people just ask for it!  The bus arrived and we both got on (me maintaining my glare, which he still didn’t notice).

I am now far more annoyed with myself for not having said something than I am with him, but it has brought my thoughts back onto something I was pondering a while ago.  I have written here in the past that I consider the many, many tiny unrecorded goodnesses inspired by religion to far outweigh the numerous great evils done in its name and recorded by history.  However, if that is the case, then I think that the same is true of evil.  That they also outweigh the great evils that is, not that they outweigh the great goods.

Great evils have been done in the past.  Genocides, persecutions, wars, the avoidable suffering of millions, maybe even billions.  The thing is though, that a great evil is obvious for what it is, even to those who perpetrate it, and therefore requires a justification.  Hitler believed that the holocaust was not only necessary but even laudable, that he was doing it for the good of his nation, perhaps even the world.  Inquisitors and witch hunters tortured and executed, but they did so in the belief that they were doing good, maybe even doing it for the good of the very people they were torturing and killing.  Wars have led to the deaths and suffering of whole nations and continents, but they were waged for Freedom, Crown, Country, God.  Because they were so great, they needed large reasons, and as a result (assuming that the people committing them genuinely believed in their reasons, rather than using them cynically for their own ends) I wonder whether they will not weigh less in the scales than the tiny wrongs that have no justification at all.

The young man at the bus stop dropped his litter on the ground, and as a result, in his own petty, idle way he made the world worse, grubbier, more tawdry.  There was a bin perhaps twenty yards away.  The bus was approaching, true, but it was still some distance off.  The only reason he can have had (or that I can think of) is mindless idleness.  The driver who goes through a puddle and splashes a pedestrian ‘because it was funny’ has made that person’s day worse, and has gained nothing from it other than a brief, sadistic amusement.  The bully who insults or jeers because they can and it amuses them and gives them a brief sense of power, the vandal who destroys something, depriving others of it, but getting nothing but the enjoyment of destroying it, the person who smokes in a bus-shelter, regardless of others, even the person putting their feet on the seat of a bus or train, making it dirtier for the next person to sit on it.  I wonder if the tiny, petty wrongs that make the world an infinitesimal bit worse for everybody else, that have no justification at all, do not tarnish and corrode a soul far more than the great wrongs worthy of being recorded by history.

They are also more likely to be habit-forming.  No-one makes a habit of genocide.  I was trying a different bus-stop this morning, so for all I know, this young man litters regularly and without even thinking about what he’s doing.  I suspect that there’s no thought process of “Hmm, no bin here.  I guess I’ll just drop it on the floor then.”  He just finished his food, dropped the packet, and didn’t give it a first thought, let alone a second.  It’s partly that mindless lack of consideration for others that I find so annoying. 

And yes, I have been, and will no doubt continue to be, guilty of those small cruelties and inconsiderations myself, I make no claim whatsoever not to be.  They’re so easy to do, which is of course part of the problem.  It’s not easy to commit genocide (I assume, I’ve never tried, myself), or start a war or a persecution.  It’s very easy to make a cruel remark or avoid doing something because it would require slightly more effort.  They are also easy to avoid, in most cases.  Not making a cruel remark is no more effort than making it, barring a certain degree of mental self-watchfulness.  However, in the case of the young man at the bus stop, putting the packet in the bin was marginally more effort than just chucking it behind him.

I am also, of course, not suggesting for a second that the great evils are not just that, very great evils indeed, and the perpetrators worthy of God’s judgement, but nonetheless I can’t help but wonder whether the easy, tiny, petty, grubby, indefensible evils won’t be held to be just as bad as the great, vast ones, which at least required a justification, even if it was pure self-deception.

If God sees every sparrow that falls, then surely he also sees every food wrapper as well, and takes note of it.  That makes God sound a bit like some sort of pedantic moral accountant, tallying up the dropped litter and the splashed pedestrians in a ledger, but it’s not the dropped wrapper or the wet person that concerns God, but what it says about, and what it does to, the person that did it, and to other people.  It bespeaks that basic lack of consideration, of love, for others, that lazy selfishness, that little streak of cruelty that is present in every single person, but seems stronger in some than others, and which Christians are called upon to resist.  I’ve said that such things are habit-forming, that the more you do them, the less they seem to matter, and I believe that to be true, and you feed that habit every time you repeat the action, every time you jeer, every time you drop some litter.  You normalise it, and you act as an example to others.

The little sins are the easiest to commit, but they can also be the easiest to avoid, the easiest to see for what they are, if you care to think about them, which so many people seem unable or unwilling to do.

It is the great evils that everyone remembers, but I increasingly believe that it is the little, easy, everyday evils that will be held against us when we are finally called to account.

Religion Up Close

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.

The Ethics of Enforcing Ethics: Part 2

Yesterday, the BBC carried a story regarding the Archbishop of Canterbury’s opposition to assisted dying.  Now, personally I happen to agree with the Right Reverend Welby’s stance, although I freely admit that it is a grey area, and it’s hard to know which is more compassionate, and whether anyone can or should be asked to suffer, perhaps needlessly.  That’s not a discussion I want to get into now.

In their ineffable wisdom, the BBC opened this story up to comments, and as with any story even vaguely pertaining to religion, the comments swiftly filled up with mockery, vitriol and abuse.  One of the frequently repeated comments boils down (when various insults have been removed) to “Why does this person think he has the right to try and force his beliefs on us?”

At some point, I’ll remember to get round to writing out my view on ‘rights’, but that day is not today.  I do not think that Welby has the right to try and share his beliefs with others; I think he has a duty to.

(Most) Christians believe that life is sacrosanct, and that this is one of those objective pillars of faith on which the church stands.  As I said, I don’t want to get into the assisted suicide debate here, but the fact remains that Christianity presents the sanctity of life as a fundamental truth.  Now, we might be wrong about that, but that’s what we believe, and if we believe it to be an objective and absolute truth, how can we possibly refrain from trying to share that truth, and prevent people from going against it?

Now, obviously I am not in favour of some sort of theocratic oppression, in which people are forced to obey the beliefs of a vocal minority.  I don’t believe that anyone should have someone else’s beliefs forced on them.  However, we absolutely have a duty to share them, and to try and persuade others, especially in an instance like this where lives may be taken, and even doing it forcefully (but never forcibly).  I occasionally indulge in a fond day-dream of a utopia in which people with widely differing, even diametrically opposing views can air and discuss their opinions without censure or censorship, but in a respectful (even if forceful and challenging) fashion, and listen to the views of others in a calm and equally respectful way.  Alas, this seems unlikely to ever occur.

I’ve posted before about the strange doublethink that allows us to rail against forcing our morality on others, and then passing law after law which does exactly this.  We state as absolute truths that theft, fraud, murder, assault and rape are wrong, and feel comfortable forcing these beliefs on others through punishment for failure to comply.  We understand the moral imperative that causes us to make these rules and laws, to constrain people from doing what we know to be wrong.  However, some people seem to fail to understand that exactly the same moral imperative drives people to protest outside abortion clinics, and for faith leaders to speak out publically against assisted suicide.  The only difference is majority opinion, and should morality really be a democracy?  A debate can be had here, but almost everyone will agree that certain things are fundamentally wrong, while others are fundamentally right.  It is around the edges that we are permitted to quibble.

If anyone, atheist, agnostic or believer, perceives an injustice, then surely it is their moral duty to speak out against it?  Others don’t necessarily have to agree with them or even listen to them, but to suggest that they ought not to speak at all is utterly wrong.  After all, silence and inaction are consent and, “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.