..close
makes animosity almost inevitable, rather like sibling rivalry, but fortunately
other religions take a more peripatetic view of the calendar and have festivals
at other times. Would you have to work at all if you held every possible belief?
It was a rhetorical question, so don’t put pen to paper, or fingers to
keyboard – or nose.
I’m sorry, but given the non-existence of God, I believe that if you want
to have a religious holiday it’s on your own time. Why is Easter better
than Ramadan or some Hindu ‘piercing-yourself-with-skewers-in-places-that-would-surprise-your-maiden-aunt’
ceremony, (apart from the fact that it looks more colourful in the National
Geographic?) Why is it better than Waitangi or President’s Day?
Lets be honest; we want the holidays but we could well do without the religious
cant. All of these arcane rituals and ceremonies are interesting relics of more
primitive times, but we should get over it. Religion is an opiate of the masses,
and one that stops people having to face, what my one and only philosophy teacher
described as, ‘the brute fact of reality’. Life is short and intermittently
interesting. We and other animals appear briefly, look mildly surprised, angry
and confused, have a few children and then disappear. Cosmically speaking it
is our ephemeral moment of consciousness – and of not much consequence pan galactically.
Existentially the purpose that it has is the purpose that you give it.
Religion was rightly diagnosed as an opiate of the masses, but so is television,
mud wrestling and sitting in traffic jams picking one’s nose. Opium is
the best opiate by definition, but AFL seems an adequate substitute in Melbourne.
So perhaps you find that being alone in a very large universe, surrounded by
a large number of mammals of a similar appearance communicating furiously by
stating the obvious, “Look dear it’s the lighthouse, look there’s
the Taj Mahal, look Margaret, there’s god, isn’t the sky blue today”
is a little confusing ? Perhaps you may want to seek comfort in a pre-packaged
explanation ? Resist the temptation, even if the music is lovely and go out
and look at the world and say “So that’s all there is , I’m
lucky to have a few brief moments to appreciate it all”. Hold somebody’s
hand at the same time and it will be infinitely better.
But the annoying thing about religions is its intrusion into the body politic
as the arbiter of all things , moral, ethical and legal. Several thousand years
in the western world have been spent trying to free us from dual allegiances
to church and state. At one time you had a choice of jurisdictional punishments
and you could plea bargain in the court of your choice. Would you rather be
hung, drawn and quartered by the Sherriff, or say 4,000 ‘Hail Marys ’
for the Bishop? Is this a choice?
The vestiges lingered for a ridiculously long time in the divorce laws, which
became arbiters of religious moral judgement, rather than being modelled on
contract or partnership law.
A. P. Herbert in ‘Uncommon Law –a Collection of Misleading Cases’
wrote in 1935,
“…It is possible to hold, as some do, that marriage is a holy sacrament,
and therefore cannot be terminated by man or the courts of men; and we may,
and do, respect the holders of that opinion, provided that they are content
to govern their own lives by it and leave the lives of others to more human
direction. It is possible, again, to hold that marriage is a civil contract
made by men and dissoluble by men; and this ought surely to be the view of any
court of law, which is an institution designed for the practical assistance
of men on the material and not the spiritual side of their lives. What is impossible
, both in reason and expediency, is to combine the two views – to say
that marriage is both a sacrament and a civil contract, governed at one moment
by the principles of Common Law and at the other the remnants of ecclesiastical
tradition – enforceable by one set of rules but not avoidable except by
another. For this is to make the worst of two worlds….’
The worst of two worlds survived in Australia until the early 1970s.
As a great believer in a secular society, and being fairly conversant with the
fact that committed religious belief seems at most at chance distribution, I
find the continuance of similar examples of this conflation of the secular and
the ecclesiastical, gross hypocrisy.
So why is there growth in evangelical or totalitarian religions? One reason
is that for the past 50 years we have lived in a world which is designed to
isolate further and further from the people we live with, for us to become unitary
extravagant consumers in our own echoing spaces . The initial culprit was television,
which isolated neighbours from one another , took children away from the outdoors
and ended family conversation. And technology focuses on the individual and
leads us away from the crowd to talk inside or own heads.
Religion creates community for people – which can only be good. It’s just
a pity the thousands of years of superstition and fear comes with it.