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The Religious Rant |
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Disclaimer:
These are my personal views. All religious views, or lack thereof, are
bound to offend somebody. That is the nature of religion. I’m not
setting out to be offensive, but it’s going to happen anyway. You’re
welcome to disagree with me, to my face or behind my back, but if all
you’re going to do is bang on about whatever fiery pit of hell you
believe in, then kindly step away from the webpage, for everyone’s
sake. Thank you. I worry about the world. It’s
hard not to, given the circumstances, but we’ve all got our little
selection of issues that set us off. Drink driving, unscrupulous
businessmen, environmental concerns, lenient sentencing, harsh
sentencing, abortion, religion… there’s always something to get mad
about. My father, for example, gets quite disproportionately annoyed at
anything to do with exams. My secondary school made a huge fuss over
league tables and he hated it. Now any government plans to change the
exam system gets his back up (which is fair enough, to be honest,
there’s nothing wrong with the exam system that wouldn’t be wrong
with a new one), and usually he’s the mildest man you’ll ever meet.
The things that make me angry don’t usually appear in the
paper. To be fair, I generally read the Mirror, which tends to
comprise fluff pieces, bean counting and grisly horrible deaths that
give me nightmares. Bush and his anti-abortion bills make me angry.
It’s not something we’re likely to have a problem with over here.
Blair would have to really want to lose the election/hand over to Brown
to even suggest it. What bugs me so much about Bush’s little agenda is
that they’re not his freedoms he’s signing away. I find it very hard
to be sympathetic to men fronting abortion campaigns.
I’ve rarely seen a whole roomful of people up in arms about the
same thing. But I have seen it. When I was in my last year of school, a
friend of mine got baptised. She invited several people from school (not
me, obviously, she didn’t think I’d be able to walk through the
doors), and the next day she brought in booklets for them. Yes, that
sort of booklet. Perhaps I should have mentioned that this friend of
mine is extremely Christian. Nobody held anything against her for that,
so long as she didn’t try and convert us. But in her newly-baptised
state she was apparently feeling lucky, and distributed her booklets
about the common room.
I’d known most of the girls in there for about seven years, and
I have never seen them so angry. Angry that anyone would write that
stuff and frightened that anyone would believe it. Sample quotes: “All
of your virtues and good works will not cancel out a single one of your
sins.” “It is useless to do good works. God demands perfection, and
any effort by a mortal must be hopelessly flawed.” Incidentally, a
little later, the booklet states: “One must do good works in order to
enter the kingdom of Heaven.” Religion is fine, but I have no time for
idiots who don’t even notice a contradiction as blatant as that in a
pretty short pamphlet with big letters.
Fundamentalist propaganda bothers me. I don’t mind being told
that Jesus loves me, although I used to, and I don’t mind the
Christian who wants to spread a message of love. I’ll even listen
quite happily to it, so long as this love is freely available and not
dependent on my going along next Sunday to meet the vicar and be
cleansed. I have no problem with Christians who preach love; that’s a
beautiful thing. However, the ones who preach fear can kiss my shapely
Pagan arse.
One of the wisest women I have ever known is a Christian who
silently prays that my religious path is just a phase, although she
knows me well and knows I’m not the type to get involved with anything
silly, so she lets it go. This wise woman firmly believes that the
fear-preaching Christians are not only wrong, but blasphemous. God, she
tells me, is a higher being, one that we here on earth cannot hope to
comprehend. She was quite shocked when I gave her my friend’s booklet
to read. What, she asked, makes this man so great that he knows what God
wants, what God requires of us? How does he know who God will send to
hell and why He will send them there? What puts this man higher than
everyone else? Why should it be him who tells the rest of the world how
to get into heaven? She was angrier at this than any Pagan or atheist I
had shown or quoted it to. And she was quite right to be. This was her
God, and this man was claiming, quite glibly, to know all about Him.
Nobody likes to see their gods portrayed in a negative light. Smoke
comes out of a Wiccan’s ears when someone lumps their God and the
Christian devil in the same group. Why shouldn’t someone be insulted
when they see their God portrayed as an abusive father punishing his
children because their best isn’t good enough?
God, says my very wise friend, is the ultimate Father. If we do
something wrong, perhaps we need to be punished. But why punish us after
we die, when we cannot learn from our mistakes and go on to be better
people? If a good father saw his child drawing on the wall, he’d go
and tell the child to stop doing it. He wouldn’t take out a piece of
paper entitled “List of Sins”, write down that the child has drawn
on the wall and make a mark next to it every time the child repeats the
offence in the future. What good would that do? Incidentally, I’ve
always wanted to ask a serious fundamentalist if God is still holding my
own wall-drawing misdemeanours against me.
I believe I am very lucky to have the parents that I have, and
they seem to believe they’ve done pretty well raising my brother and
me. My mother is pleased that I have never taken up smoking, I go out
with my friends to dance rather than to binge-drink and fall over and
that I have not got myself married or pregnant by the age of almost
twenty, like the eldest girls of both my uncles. My mother is also a
pretty wise woman, and she tells me her greatest triumph as a parent is
that she has raised me to think for myself.
Be honest, now. Pagans, would you feel as though you’d failed
if your child converted to Christianity? Christians, would you feel
you’d failed if your child converted to another faith? Speaking
honestly, I might feel a little disappointed if my child became
Christian, but if he or she became Fundamentalist, then I would feel
like a failure as a parent. No question. If a child that I had raised
needed to get all his or her opinions out of the same book, if they had
no better answer to a question than “God did it” or “Satan did
it”, if they went around preaching fear and fire, I would be pretty
upset with myself. My parents were never especially religious (although
their parents were) and would only go to church when one of their
children was in the parade (yes, I was a Brownie, and a Guide. It was
great fun), but C of E was still all they knew. My mother has told me,
several times, that she is grateful that she raised me to be curious and
ask questions, because as I grew up I made her question things. The last
time we went to church (the christening of my cousin’s little boy), I
couldn’t speak the words, as you might expect. Looking around me, I
realised that my mum and brother couldn’t either.
I went through the anti-Christian stage, as almost all Wiccans
and Pagans seem to do. Personally I believe they can only start getting
to the heart of their religion when they get over it. Christian may be
the dominant religion and all over the place, but I’ve got no reason
to object to any religion that doesn’t object to me, unless said
religion involves doing nasty things to people and animals. On top of
the obvious reasons, I am really very squeamish. I can’t even step on
a bug.
Something to add, which has been bugging me since I saw it here
a few hours ago. This guy makes a very reasonable argument, to begin
with, against the statement “There is no God.” It makes sense. You
can see that. Up to there, I was quite impressed. The problem is, one
can make exactly the same argument against the statement “There is a
God.” By this argument, the only thing one can reasonably be is an
agnostic, one who admits they do not know. The author does not explain
agnosticism away. We are just told it’s not true, and having run out
of actual arguments, the page descends into burning lake of fire, you
all know it’s coming and you’re pretending it isn’t, which isn’t
really an argument, in the strictest sense. It’s a shame, really, as
when I read the first bit I was starting to get excited, thinking I had
found a fundamentalist site based in reason. The rest of the page was
the usual bollocks (and rather funny, may I say). It might help if these
people would learn that you won’t convert non-believers by quoting the
Bible. The first bit was very impressive. If the author happens to be
reading this, you were going down the right track to begin with. Try and
make a whole page out of that sort of stuff. I am not Christian, but I
believe I am a good person. Can you give me a cogent, logical reason why
that can’t be? Thank you for your attention. Feel free to disagree with me. But reasons, please, people, reasons. |