What Exactly Will it Take to Convince Them?
By Joss Knight
It's Christmas Day, 2001. I'm eating Christmas dinner with my
family, that is, my parents, my brother, and my sister. 3 o'clock
is approaching and we're still eating, so we decide to bring the
radio into the dining room so we can listen to the Queen's Speech
while we eat. I say we, I personally was against it, since
the Queen was bound to mention the September 11th atrocity in some
kind of warped pro-religious light. Boy, was I right.
The Queen, or I should
say her script-writers, suggested to us, in summary, that in this
time of tragedy, we should turn to our faith, whether we be Christian,
Jew, Muslim or Hindu, for comfort. I almost left the room in disgust,
and got into something of an argument with my family which left
me feeling uncomfortable the rest of the day.
Why? Well, first of all, the Queen didn't seem to think it necessary
to mention the non-religious among her subjects, which, according
to most statistics, is about 50% of the population. So half of
the country was excluded from her message. My father suggested
that as head of the Church of England, of course she wasn't going
to talk about them; but she is first and foremost the head of state
of the country; quite apart from the fact that she felt fit to
include those of non-Anglican faiths without hesitation, as if
organised irrational sky-pixie belief of any kind gets you into
some kind of exclusive club. Yes, let's just forget for a minute
the long history of “holy” war against other faiths,
we can tolerate their mutually incompatible dogma now; just as
long as we don't have to listen to any of the crap from those hateful
unbelievers.
But second, and most importantly, I took issue with the Queen
adding her name to the list of idiots who seem to think that, rather
than religion being largely responsible for the atrocity, it is
in fact the way to salvation from such acts. Rather than reevaluating
our irrational delusions following this damning indictment of the
core theistic ideologies, we should consider them reinforced. Apparently,
there are people out there who actually believe that if religion
was removed entirely from the equation, this atrocity would still
have happened! These people would still have been willing, apparently,
to commit suicide and mass-murder only and entirely due to political
grumbles. I suppose the apologists spout similar bullshit about
the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, and unrest in Northern Ireland
and the Middle East.
What exactly would it take before these people admitted religion
was at the core of responsibility for an atrocity? We've had Holy
War after Holy War throughout history, we've had genocide, we've
had torture, murder, subjugation, empire-building, slavery, all
in the name of religion. We've had a multitude of acts of terrorism,
some entirely due to religious delusion (such as the Oklahoma bombing).
On a more subtle but probably far more damaging level, we have
had, and still have religion responsible for overpopulation, for
restriction of basic education, for class/caste systems, and for
sexual inequality. But none of it seemed to make much of a dent
in the barrier of unreason surrounding these devout theists. Now
we've had the worst terrorist atrocity in history, recorded from
all angles and watched in gory detail by a billion people. Up step
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: “God has removed his protection
from America because it has become a sinful nation”. <sound
of hand slapping forehead> D'OH! They missed the point again!
The answer is sad, but simple. Nothing. Nothing will ever cure
these madmen of their delusions. The only solution is to breed
it out of the system. Teach children properly, and eventually all
the indoctrinated delusionals will die.
Teach children properly? When's that wild idea likely to happen?
Text © Joss Knight 2002 |