Rant 2

I wrote this also in 2004.

I will preface this writing by saying that I am not against religious pursuits. I have spent years studying religion and have a long experience with religious people, though I am not one.

I have been very disturbed by the recent rise in religiosity in the public discourse. The founders of our country did not intend for a rise of religious beliefs to determine the course of politics in this country. There are those who would try to convince us that the founders were religious in the way that the most extreme of us are today. This is propaganda. The founders were, for the most part, men of faith, though their faith was not the determining factor in how they constructed the rules under which we live. These rules emerged out of a belief in a secular based philosophy. What is particularly disturbing now is that faith is in competition with “reason” and fact. When your faith leads you to negate scientific reality (fact) because the science is contrary to the direction of your faith you are no longer functioning in a rational manner.

As a person of faith you no longer have an open mind to question your beliefs – if Jesus said it its got to be true. I recently heard a friend – who has an immutable deeper faith – a fundamentalist actually, say that his belief is “rational” because what he believes is fact – its in the bible, its written there, it’s the word of god because god said it is!

I remember a Star Trek episode where the enterprise encounters a planet that was visited by another Earth ship in the past. The previous ship accidentally left a book about the Chicago era mob on the planet. When the enterprise returns to the planet, the entire planet has adopted that book as a sort of bible and based their entire culture on it. If asked the inhabitants of that planet would say the same thing as my friend – that their belief is rational because it was given to them by “God” (the earthlings of that past). You might say that this is just a story, but so is everything – including the bible.

Are the believers so uneducated and ignorant that they don’t know that the New Testament was written and compiled in the 3rd century, with many exclusions determined by political needs of the time. So this is the “truth” handed down by God?

These are the reasons why I have made up my mind that there should be no religion in public life. The Maplewood school board and others around the country are correct in taking out religious songs from holiday celebrations. Public life should be determined by secular pursuits. Religious pursuits should be a private matter. The beliefs of one group should not determine how the entire group should live their lives. This was exactly what the colonists of this country were attempting to get away from – as were the founders. They did not want to fundamentalists of England to tell them how to live their lives or pursue their beliefs.

Religious believers want to change education to conform to religious faith. The central example is making creation equivalent with evolution in biology classes. This is absurd. Keep religious faith private. One might say that it is like comparing apples and oranges, but that would make the comparison too close – apples and oranges are both fruit. Religious based creation belief and evolution are not both fruit, they are not in the same class and should not be given equivalence in public discourse. Education can be faith based, but if you want your kids to be exposed to religion in school you can make that choice and sent them to private school. Public education needs to be secular because of the very diverse backgrounds we come from. Teaching about different religious beliefs in school can be done as long as it is from an academic perspective “we are learning this to learn about the variety of beliefs with which we come into contact because of our diverse culture.”

It seems to me that religious people would be happy to have a theocracy in this country, one in which their religious beliefs become public policy. Pray to Jesus in school before games, before tests, before class as public policy. Then of course there is the determination of other policies – against homosexuals, contraception, abortion, death penalty, preservation/destruction of natural resources (I once heard another religious extremist say that God would not have put the resources there if he did not want us to use them and that there would be enough always no matter how much we used because God would take care of it. There is enough evidence to prove over and over again that God does not take care of us very well – holocaust, mass murder, starvation, pestilence, natural disasters, toxic contaminations, etc, etc. But oops, I forgot that I have come to this conclusion through experience not belief!

There is nothing more antithetical to the fundamental beliefs by which we have lived in this country for two hundred years. There has always been a tension between the religion and the secular. We do not like it when strict ideological beliefs determine the lives of people in North Korea, China, Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, Taliban Afghanistan, etc…. However, it is more likely that religious belief will lead in that direction than a secularist or liberal ideology.
I also had a conversation recently with a man I deeply respect and with whom I share a great many beliefs (he is a radical and liberal). However, one area of disagreement is around religion. He is not a fundamentalist, but is a deist. He believes that there is no way to preserve morality without religion. “why would the world not descend into egotistic chaos in which we all pursue purely hedonistic needs.” My response to this is that I am an example of why not. There has not been a day in my life that I have had any belief in a God or other creationist creature. Yet, I am a deeply moral and ethical person committed to respect for all people. By your deeds shall you be judged, not by God, but by your fellow people. Furthermore, I believe that religion was created to standardize, so to say, the morality that already existed, not the other way around. It was not God/religion from which morality came, but God/religion came out of morality. Therefore, the world would not descend into chaos, but would be exactly as it is with religious beliefs.