RELIGION AND POLITICS

Religion and politics are two topics best avoided at dinner parties, they have been known to say, and, by extension, they are probably best avoided full stop if you don’t want to get into any real trouble on the old interweb.

After all, we are now living in times where bloggers holding a different point of view from one that is deemed “acceptable” by some groups can be murdered in the streets, or having an alternative position upon faith can get your head lopped off in a manner that does seem uncivilized to those of us living a modern “western” lifestyle, but is, unfortunately little different to what our own leaders were doing scant few centuries ago as we forged what we hoped what would turn out to be a more tolerant society in the crucible of history.

“Plus ca change”, and so forth.

Setting all of that aside, I do have to hold up my hands and mention that I no longer consider myself to be a “person of faith” despite the very best efforts of my parents when I was younger. I was, for my pains, brought up to be a member of the Methodist Church, a form of faith that has now joined the ranks of some of the other religions already tainted by the stain of child abuse.

Not, I must add, that I had any experiences of that sort during my own dealings with that church, which I personally found to generally be chock-full of lovely, caring, and mostly tolerant people, give or take the odd zealot.

Any abuses that I may have endured happened in places other than that.

However, as a lapsed believer, I did get to suffer and endured long years of my mother starting sentences with the phrase “As a Christian” which was supposed to imply some sort of “better than you” superiority I fear, although that always kind of befuddles me.

After all, presumably all of those people doing the wicked things to children also considered themselves to be “Good Christians”, too, and were probably thought of as such by their fellow members of their congregations.

Unfortunately it just seems that the trust that the notion carried with it was always enough for other parents to let their children feel “safe” with these creatures, and anyone who does have such proclivities would always use whatever means possible to get themselves into a position where they could be left alone with the children they desired to abuse, which might just include appearing to be a “good” person.

As far as my mother was concerned, seeing a “Christian fish” symbol on an advert made her vulnerable as she took it as a guarantee that the people providing whatever service that they were would, naturally, be decent, honest people which was, sadly, not always the case…

A few months ago, a certain Mr Stephen Fry, a noted atheist, got into all sorts of trouble for an answer he gave to a questioner who asked him what he would say if and when he came face-to-face with God after he had died. In this answer, Mr Fry railed against this notion of the Almighty in ways that upset quite a few people, some of whom suggested that he ought to be more respectful of other people’s beliefs.

I maintain, however, that simply by asking the question of someone who was well-known as being an atheist, on the assumption that his position was basically wrong, the questioner was being pretty disrespectful of his subject’s own beliefs (or lack of them) himself and, as such, pretty much deserved whatever unfortunate results he got.

I suspect that, in a similar situation, I would have refused to engage with the question at all, simply because, if you don’t believe that there is a God, why on earth would you accept the notion that you would ever come face-to-face with one? If that is your own belief, then the question is immediately valueless and not even worthy of a reply.

I think it’s pretty ironic, too, that so-called “modern” religions can be so very dismissive of the more “primitive” religions of the Greeks, Vikings or Romans, when just as many people were completely convinced of their essential truth with just as little evidence as the modern ones are, and I suspect that many of the current faiths will be thought of as being just as ridiculous as they are currently thought to be in a few short centuries time.

These things are, after all, basically human constructs designed to try and make some sort of sense of a chaotic world and keep people under control and prevent them from behaving in an anarchic manner.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m quite happy to let other people believe what they like just as long as they’re prepared to accept that other people might have a different point of view that makes just as much sense and means just as much to them as anything they might choose to believe themselves. It’s the obsession with “converting” me or “improving” me, or using forms of “persuasion” to try and change my point of view that bothers me, not because I don’t believe in healthy debate, but simply because it rarely seems to be treated as a two-way street.

There’s also this stranger notion that you sometimes get, that people without faith are incapable of living “good” lives, which is, of course, complete and utter nonsense. Most of us don’t need a list of instructions from a book to tell us that stealing and killing is wrong, we just know that it is because a lot of us are trying to be decent human beings living in a civilized society because that’s what we’d like it to be, and whilst organized religion does sometimes grease the wheels that allow this to happen, it’s not the only route to get there.

And as to politics…?

Well, you’d probably better not get me started on politics…

After all, you know what you did, don’t you?