by Ray Jason
A handsome
catamaran recently docked near my lovely sailboat. The captain is Russian and his wife is
Turkish. They have two children, and
although they are too young for passports, I suspect that they are from the Kingdom of Joy. That’s because all day long they spread their
laughter and happiness throughout the marina.
Whether it is riding their tiny bicycles or fishing with their parents
or trying to learn how to swim, their vibrant innocence delights and comforts
me.
It has also inspired me. The essay that I had been working on seemed
lost in a mental labyrinth. It deals
with the immense subject of religion, and it had become too big and too
confused. But then a wave and a smile
from the two kids suddenly made me realize that I should narrow my focus, and
concentrate on religion and children.
*******
The Ultimate
Terror
Witnessing the carefree exuberance of these
youngsters, bequeaths me both joy and sorrow.
I am happy that they live so effortlessly in the ecstasy of the moment,
and that their youth shields them from the woes of the world. But I am sad that all around the world
hundreds of millions of children are having such blissful contentment
sacrificed on the altar of hell.
How do we not understand that churches that preach hellfire are the most evil terrorist organizations on the planet? The worst that a political enemy can do is
torture and murder a person. At least that
victim’s suffering ends with their death.
But if a Christian fails to abide by certain rules, they are supposedly doomed
to eternal fire and damnation.
And if a person is NOT a Christian, they too are sentenced to endless
fiery agony.
If such a virulent dogma was imposed on people when
they arrived at adulthood, at least they would have enough life experience to evaluate
it. But forcing such a terrifying vision
on an unknowing child is so repellant that I can’t find a word for it – oh
wait, here’s a good one – DESPICABLE.
Consider for a moment, the child-raising process. Human nurturing revolves around the parents
steadily and incrementally passing along life-lessons to their offspring. The kids learn that snakes can be deadly, that
deep water can drown them and that fire can kill them. As this knowledge is passed along to the
children, a bond of trust is established.
So when the parents claim that there is this horrible place called hell,
where bad people suffer eternal torture, the child believes that as well.
And so their world, which had been such a magical,
immediate, constantly unfolding realm of wonder, is suddenly darkened and
poisoned by the horror of hell.
Destroying the innocence, optimism and joy of youth with such a doctrine
is an indisputable act of terror!
But even more appalling is the fact that it is also
an act of deceit. There is utterly
no way that a parent or a priest or even a pope can absolutely know that there
is a hell. And yet they proclaim that
this is the case. When someone insists
that something is true, even though they cannot prove it, that person is
telling a lie.
And how do the hellfire spreaders defend such a perverse
dogma? They insist that without the threat
of eternal incineration, these children would not behave themselves. And yet the huge portion of the world that is
not hypnotized by hellfire religions, such as the Hindus, Buddhists and
non-believers, do not rampage around the planet wreaking havoc upon it. Even though nobody is screaming at them from
a pulpit with threats of devils and pitchforks, these people manage to behave
with decency and compassion.
So this is my first example of how religion is
profoundly harmful to children – it mutilates the innocence and wonder of youth
with the terror of a hell whose existence cannot even be proven.
*******
Morality
Does Not Need Religion
One of the common defenses of religion is that it is
the keystone that keeps the arch of morality from collapsing in ruin. This is a preposterous claim that is easy to
disprove. There were about 10,000
generations of humanity that preceded the appearance of the sky god monotheisms
that dominate today’s religious landscape – or should that be battlefield? Without any commandments from Hebraic gods,
these people managed to discover enough moral principles to not destroy each
other and thus they carried on the human line.
Furthermore, throughout history there have been
hundreds of other religions that arose, prospered, declined and
disappeared. As each of these
disintegrated there was no widespread chaos and carnage even though their
ethical precepts had vanished.
Moral knowledge - the awareness of the difference
between right and wrong - is innate in all of us. We do not need priests or mullahs or rabbis
to reveal it to us. The revered “ten
commandments” are a perfect example of this.
Four of them are just a megalomaniacal insistence on reverence toward
one particular god and the other six are essentially self-evident. Any New Guinea hunter- gatherer has figured
out these things without the need for stone tablets.
Rather than being essential to morality, I find that
religion is actually a keystone of
immorality. For decades I have been
arguing that the most far-reaching way to improve the world is to replace
religion with “BASIC HUMAN DECENCY.” Consider
this short list of things that you cannot do in the name of basic human decency,
but that you can do in the name of Jesus or Mohammed:
·
Witch-hunts
·
Suicide bombings
·
Inquisitions
·
Book burnings
·
Holy wars
·
Female oppression
·
Slavery
·
Homosexual
bigotry
·
Ethnic cleansing
·
Unwanted children
·
Demonization of
scientists
One of the main reasons that religion is such a
malignant rather than benign force, is because it immediately allied itself
with the kings and pharaohs after the arrival of so-called human
civilization. During pre-Agriculture, in
the long Paleolithic hunter-gatherer era, there was no hierarchal division of
rulers and ruled. But when Neolithic agriculture
provided food surpluses and then division of labor this also initiated what I
call “division of importance.” In simple
terms, this means a society comprised of a tiny elite of dominant people and a
huge mass of subordinate people.
Those that ascended to the top of the political class
tended to be the most ruthless and immoral.
And since religious leaders wanted to be the handmaiden of these
pitiless demagogues, they camouflaged their immoral deeds with moral
platitudes. They had already sold
their souls even as they were claiming that their mission was to save
souls.
*******
As I sit with my back against the mast, finishing this
essay, the two beautiful children come scurrying past. A few steps behind them are their parents who
are carrying tiny swimming goggles and life jackets. As they disappear down the dock this little
scene of happiness somehow inverts itself in my mind’s eye. And I
realize that halfway around the world there are two other parents sobbing in almost
unbearable agony as they hold their dead child in their arms. Ten minutes earlier she had been the joy and
blessing of their lives – a bundle of sunshine in human form.
I wonder on which of the current killing fields of the
Holy Land this sad event is unfolding.
Is it Gaza, where one religion opposes another? Or is it Iraq where the carnage is even more
perverse - since it is warring sects of the same religion?
I quietly curse all of the senseless, cruel tragedy of
life as I sit here pondering it from the evening of my years. And then I wonder about the future of those
precious children on the nearby boat, who are only in the daybreak of their
years. Will their twilight decades see a
planet that has been purged of this evil force?
Will their children get to savor a new golden dawn emancipated from this
curse which has caused so much horror and suffering down the centuries?
I will not pray for this … but I will yearn for it … and
I will work for it!