In France, the beauty of the dizzying cathedral spires bear the scars of iconoclasm, of religious wars and the millions that died in the name of Christ, but still they stand as a reminder of blood-stained streets and the smoldering husk of a civilization brought to its knees by blind devotion.
Back home, the holy Black Hills of the Sioux have been eternally desecrated by Mount Rushmore; the people of Crazy Horse who once roamed there free, still living, still struggling.
The chains of racism and sexism are not nearly broken, and equality not nearly achieved. All of these truths are ignored and trivialized to coddle the voices that claim “God is good.”
On a personal level, I can understand why it is attractive, because I once found it attractive as well: the idea that someone loves you, the possibility of going to an eternal paradise, but wonderful music and a sense of community.
My goal is not to attribute all of the evil of the world to religion; far from it.
Many horrible crimes have been committed by secularists as well [for example, Joseph Stalin], but from a brief glimpse at the world around us, I think we can at least conclude that if God exists, and if he/she/it is capable of intervention in the physical world, he/she/it is either very randomly cruel, or simply doesn’t care.
A simple example of this is the following: two children are diagnosed with untreatable forms of cancer; one lives and one dies.
Whether or not the family of the surviving child is religious, his/her incredible recovery will invariably be heralded as a ‘miracle.’
But why then did the other child need to die? Was he/she too sinful at the age of seven?
It begs the question: what did the first child do to deserve survival that the other did not? I think we live in a cruel and random universe and that in order to make sense of it, the majority of humanity embraces religion.
We seek to cast light where there is darkness; we seek to explain things that defy our contrived notions of justice and innocence.
It would seem that there is little harm in this; after all, is it any of my business how people understand events?
No. Am I justified in wishing to tell them that I contend their explanations are comforting lies? Perhaps, but it would seem cruel and unnecessary in most cases.
However, what of the Pope telling people in AIDS-ridden parts of the world not to use condoms, thereby contributing to the spread of the disease?
As if to say, “Spreading AIDS and making orphans of millions of children is bad, but offending a disapproving man in the sky is infinitely worse.”
What of the same Pope and Catholic church insisting that educating children about safe sex is somehow bad for them?
What of all the killing in the name of God by virtually all religions?
What of all of the centuries of its use to hold society back instead of moving it forward in nearly every place on earth?
There are good religious people who work for the betterment of mankind, but what we must understand that no divine mandate is needed for this.
We are born with an intuitive sense of morality, empathy, charity and community.
God does not need to exist for me to love my neighbor as myself, and if religion exists to teach us nothing we couldn’t figure out on our own, then it is of no use to us.
I think that if we focus on what is real, and devote our energy to changing it, we really could create a great city on the hill, and it wouldn’t matter whether it was the Garden of Eden or the fields of Elysium, or simply gardens that surrounded it.
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