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| "Oh no...it's gone all heavy, maaan" |
Walking to work this morning, apropos of nowt at all, I got to thinking about the role religion has played in the shaping of the human race, and whether or not there is a God, as you do. Having been brought up in a conservative (small c) and religious family, whose church going antics ceased to appeal round about the age of fourteen, I feel have enough experience of organised religion to comment, so there!
Since time immemorial religion has been used as a cover for murder, rape and pillage in the name of a greater god, opposing sides fighting with equal conviction that their religion, or even more narrowly, their branch of it was better than the other lot's so only "we" can win. In the times Before Science (or BS) a complete and blind conviction in the preposterous teachings of one's favoured religious text was taken as a certain truth, no matter how unlikely those writings. In the case of The Bible writing about something of which there was no record hundreds of years after the supposed events being a case in point. There are people today who go under the oxymoronic banner of Creationists who still take every word literally in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary. In a way I admire their conviction, although it is utterly impossible to have any kind of debate with them.
With the advent of modern science when Copernicus discovered that the Earth went round the Sun and not vice-versa, small chinks in perceived tenets began to appear until, fast forwarding hundreds of years, we arrive at Darwin who proved conclusively that the human race evolved, and didn't fall out of an apple tree, modesty preserved by a fig leaf, or summat. The ridiculous nature of religious dogma was once comically summed up by Rowan Atkinson, waaay back in the Hell Sketch on Not The Nine O'Clock News where Rowan as The Devil is welcoming in the new intake to Hell..."Christians, ah yes, I'm afraid the Jews were right". Heehee.
Therefore one has to ask, is there or is there not God? It would be so easy to declare myself an atheist as there seems little evidence of a God, benign or malign, as stuff just happens, seemingly at random. Go ask the Japanese if you don't believe me. Being a "glass half full" type, I am a committed agnostic, or 100% ambivalent, who knows? I consider it is impossible to prove one way or t'other if there is, is not, or even was, however briefly, a God. Something sparked the Big Bang, maybe that was God, and it lasted for a quantum fraction of the smallest amount of time possible, but exist it did. Or not. And he certainly wasn't a bloke with a white beard sitting on a cloud.
It's fairly obvious to me that God and the Devil are simply metaphors for the two sides of human nature, a consciousness that has always strived to know why we are here and what is our purpose. Religion was born out of a need to put a framework on these unanswerable questions methinks.
Modern Christian religion seems at odds with the world it exists in and struggles for relevance, and seems to me to largely act as a salve for the conscience of those who believe. If I find a fiver in the street, or swear at a motorist it'll be ok after a few Hail Marys or whatever.
In the USA in particular there exists a small but vociferous minority of ultra right wing Christians, that bloody awful Palin woman among them, who if they ever attain the power they seek will cause havoc in the world, havoc to equal that already meted out by the equally slavering Muslim extremists and the ensuing chaos and carnage caused by the reply to their actions carried out in our names. Not that I know enough about it to comment, but there seem to be a lot of Muslim countries that still exist in a BS state, and some of the more manipulative and grudgeful religious leaders there have used that ignorance to their own black-hearted ends.
While all this was going through my head, I looked up, and lo the Wellingborough Road had parted, and Ed Milibrand was leading his people to freedom.....
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