I was chatting at my favourite watering hole in Jakarta, Eastern Promise, with my drinking buddy, Austin the other day and he asked me a question. What is the difference between a cult and a religion? I said it just depended on the number of members and he agreed. I am wondering what the difference between spiritualism and religion is. I think it’s the next step down. Or up, as it were.
Spiritualism, to me, is a personal thing, whereas religion is a whole bunch of people who think and behave, or at least are meant to think and behave, similarly. Religion – a lot of people, cult – a few people, spiritualism – one person. Wouldn’t it follow then, Dr. Lecter, that a healthy mistrust of people would lead to spiritualism, not religion? Religion is virtually BASED on trusting other people. A spiritual journey is undertaken alone, ideally with only one companion: God. And God, not being a person, can be trusted by someone who has lost his/her faith in humanity. The works of God are nature and nature is smooth, unchanging and dependable.
Alternately a person could come to the realization that there are bad people in any group. Indeed, the group mentality might be the source of a sort of mental pathology that causes bad behaviour. What was it Sting said in his awesome song? “All this time the river flowed endlessly to the sea.” Smooth. Unchanging. Dependable. In the same song there is the line, “Men go crazy in congregations. They only get better one by one. One by one by one. Yeah yeah yeah. I looked out across the river today….” And so on. LOVE that song! Maybe Sting is a bit of a pantheist like me.
At any rate, there are going to be some bad people in any group. And any religion has to be a group. They are many and varied. A guy who I often disagree with made some really good points about this. Sam Harris explains that there are so many religions they are almost like sports. Think of the wide variety of sports there are. Some are very violent. Hockey, one of my favourites, is among the worst. And badminton, well, if you get injured playing that it’s pretty embarrassing. Although, he has never seen my friend Ken Romney and I diving for the birdie in his back yard badminton court. You land on a tree root and you feel it lemme tell you!
Harris says that religions are many and varied too and that "religion" is almost a useless word. I totally agree! He goes on to say that you’d have to be “acrobatic” to try to UNconvince the Muslims Osama Bin Laden is teaching. Well I think the leader and the followers are both being given a lot more credit than they deserve here. First of all a major strategy in any religion nowadays is to count on the parishioners never actually fact checking your sermons. As always the easiest example, because they are more scrutinized whether fairly or unfairly, are the Christians. Take a gander at this article! HOLY! Christianity.com folks so you KNOW they're not going to be too hard on their own. And STILL the stats are staggering! Most Christians in the U.S. don't know more than a few of the disciples. 60% of Americans can't name half of the 10 commandments. But let's compare Christian Americans. To be fair, you wouldn't expect all the regular people in the U.S. to read the Bible even though it is a Christian country. 82% of Americans think that "God helps those who help themselves," is a Bible verse. Surely the Christians have to know better! Well, they do. Whew! Only 81% of American CHRISTIANS believe that that is a Bible verse. I'd love to ask what book it came from and see some of the answers. "Um Hezikiah?" "Jebidiah Simpson?" "Wasn't that Austin 3:16?"
Joan of Arc was Noah's wife? 12%. Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife? The Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham? You can't, you just can't make this up, folks!
And to give credit where it's due, all my atheist friends are going, "Idjits! Morons! Phillistines!" There is some debate as to whether more atheists have read the Bible than Christians considering a huge number of them are in countries that have limited access and VERY limited concern about the book. But studies have shown that Atheists tend to know a lot more about religion than do their Christian counterparts. I'm glad of that. I mean I wouldn't want anyone to disavow all religion until they've looked into as many as they can. Same as I wouldn't want to hear someone say they hate sports after only playing one or two and not liking them. There are LOTS of sports out there and in my mind there are some very important lessons sports can teach us. Teamwork, unselfish play, fitness, emotional control, negotiation with teammates and referees... cheerleaders...
But back to the point. You don't have to be acrobatic as a Muslim moderate to talk these extremists down. I'm telling you now, I picked up the Koran, or the Quran or however you wanna spell it because I live in a country where there are a bazillion people who follow its teachings. And in less than 10 minutes I came across a couple of verses that would seem to be pretty obviously telling Muslims to leave non believers the FRIG alone! This is taken from the first book of the Koran, the Cow:
[2.6] Surely those who disbelieve, it being alike to them whether you warn them, or do not warn them, will not believe.
[2.7] Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing and there is a covering over their eyes, and there is a great punishment for them.
Some people won't believe. Screw them. Don't warn them. Or do warn them. It makes no diff. And then the really important part to my way of thinking, ALLAH has made them disbelievers! Why he's going to punish them for a trait HE gave them? Well that's Allah's to know. And if you think just for a second that it could be interpreted that "there is great punishment for them" could mean that man should be punishing the infidels, just skip ahead 8 verses:
[2.15] Allah shall pay them back their mockery, and He leaves them alone in their inordinacy, blindly wandering on.
Talking about the same folks here. It would take some kind of acrobatic, sophistry gymnastics to get out of this wouldn't it? Leave the non-believers alone, I made them that way and I will deal with them. It's very like the "Vengeance is mine saith the Lord" verse that has stopped Christians from taking the lives of non-believers throughout history. Ahem...
But both examples illustrate my point. Both books, whether written by God, influenced by God or having absolutely nothing to do with God, have been totally violated by asshole humans who claim to be following them and only get away with it because their followers blindly take their word for everything without doing something as simple as devoting a few minutes to checking the scripture they are basing their decisions to kill, rape, behead fellow human beings on.
I stand with my atheist friends on this one. Numbskulls, knuckle-draggers, nose-picking mouth breathers! Hey, say what you will about Atheists but they don't kill people for not believing there is no God as far as I know. But I do not fully empathize with the atheist. I think it is unfair to blame any of this religious SHYTE on God. Be an antimantheist if you hate religion. Being an atheist is almost like saying God made these idiots do all this crap, isn't it? And if that's the case, how can you blame them?
No comments:
Post a Comment