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Who Needs Satan? Religion’s a touchy subject. If you want to send somebody around the bend just challenge their fundamental idea’s about that which is fundamentally uncertain -- otherwise why even talk about faith? If god could be summed in a formula, nobody’d be going to church; and we wouldn’t need priests. Physicists or biologists would do. Though lots of good works can be attributed to religion, so can lots of stupidity, hatefulness, and violence. Religion is a holiday from reason; and, panning the horizon from Hindia to Muslimania; from Arielsville to Hamastown; from Pedodelphia to the confines of Robertsonia and Falwellaburg; considering it all, I’d say we’re stuck in the middle of a major holiday season. Growing up, I marveled at the commitment of old ladies in black babushkas hunkered over their rosaries dotting the pews of St. Cyril’s. The murmer of their prayers whispered in Slovak echoing from nave to choir was mesmerizing. Solemn high masses were huge, beautiful phantasmagorias filled with incense and incantations, bonfires of candles, and priests all over the place. But the truth is, try as I might, I never got it. Now I figure the best you can know about god is through inference, which is not the most solid basis for blowing yourself up, waging a war, or spending your life in the closet. The basis for arguments against religion has been provided by religious practitioners themselves. As God might say, “With friends like these, who needs Satan?” From mullahs to ministers, from Presidents to Attornies General, it’s a mad mad mad prayerful world. One reaction to the catholic child-abuse scandal spreading from Boston, has been to attack the idea of priestly celibacy. But celibacy isn’t the problem. Promiscuity is the problem. These guys have not been celibate enough! The main thing I come away with from all this is that there’s probably no special, divine oversight guiding this Roman offshoot of Christianity. It’s just another political system run by men with agendas. Cardinal Law of Boston’s agenda was to protect his system. The core spiritual value he violated in doing so was to ignore Jesus’ grave warning that, “It would be better for (one) to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones (harm)“. All those years confessing my youthful sexual trandgressions to priests, I’d have been better off spilling my guts to Hugh Hefner, at least he’s not a hypocrite. The problem is that religion has little to do with god or morality, but thinks it does. This gets it into all kinds of trouble; some very personal (as with the former Father Goegan), and some political. Indian author Salman Rushdi, laments that the religious wars that have long plaugued his country have flared up again. “ Ever since December 1992,“ he says, “when a...Hindu World Council mob demolished a 400-year-old mosque in Ayodhya, because it was built on the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, Hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight. (Unfortunately),“ he goes on, “a murderous muslim attack on a train-load of (Hindu) activists ... played right into the Hindu extremists' hands.” Claiming sacred real estate is a popular rationale for launching a rampage. I suspect no one has irrefutable documentation proving that Ram came to earth at that particular location, but certain murderers seemed convinced. Actually if Ram did land there, only to have his followers later massacre hundreds of anti-Hindus, the property should rather be condemned than venerated. Likewise with Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Which brings up even more religion, and the late Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl. Daily Express reporter, Leon Wieseltier, recalls the words Daniel Pearl uttered on the videotape of his murder. “I am a Jew,” he says, “My mother is a Jew.” Reacting, Wieseltier says, “I cannot recall...a more unreconstructed example of what we prefer to think of as "medieval" anti-Semitism.” In sad truth, the slaughter of an infidel Jew was just another religious event to be added to the end of a list of thousands of historical precedents committed in pogroms and inquisitions since we learned how to say, “God made me do it.” God may work in mysterious ways, but men are completely predictable. This kind of history makes you wonder why some of us still push the idea of blending church and state (as with faith-based initiatives and the ten commandments being posted on town lawns). Once somebody’s God gets his foot in the statehouse door, its a better than even bet that, sooner or later, he’ll be walking all over yours. Unfortunately, based on the record, there’s no greater threat to an honest and open approach to life than men in clerical garb dictating political agendas, or politicians spewing sanctimony ...no greater threat other than multinational corporations, that is. |