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| Epicurus: 'Why does evil exist?' |
We don’t really have separation of Church and State
in this country, even though the claim has been made that we do.
There has
never been a church that revolted against this state, and the state has never
represssed a single religion.
Well--maybe a few. Maybe just a little bit--but they came around in the end.
To the state, all religions are equally useful.
They keep the people placid, and that’s good if you
want to exercise power over them. Once the truth has been revealed, it is unchangeable—an important element in
any system of beliefs.
The
truth is unchangeable. Truth comes from somewhere far above you.
Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, these are all state
and religious holidays. People who haven’t seen the inside of a church in years
for any reason other than the wedding of a friend or the funeral of a relative
celebrate religious holidays with an inconsistency that to me seems
schizophrenic.
Religion is an excuse to have festivities.
The state itself rests on some religious foundation.
The Queen of England, the titular head of our constitutional monarchy, is also
the titular head of the Anglican Church. We have Henry VIII to thank for that,
when all he wanted was to appoint his own friends to benefices that were up for
grabs, (and the income derived from them) which up until then were strictly Catholic. That’s
right, ladies and gentlemen—Henry VIII was a Catholic. Some would argue that
all he wanted was another divorce, and the pope at that time refused.
It was a power struggle, nothing more, and I don’t
think Henry VIII had any great theological arguments to back him up. So in that
sense, it really wasn’t about the Reformation or Protestantism per se.
No one wants to talk about this. We prefer to let
sleeping dogs lie. I’m just supposed to accept things and keep my mouth
shut—because you guys have given me freedom.
And you’re not going to give it up—or the power that
goes with it, anytime soon.
What a ludicrous claim. You have given me my
freedom.
No one can set you free, ladies and gentlemen.
You must free yourselves or be perpetual slaves in
service to your corporate masters.
Personal freedom requires the individual to take
full responsibilty for themselves—and responsibility is hard.
Before each session of the Legislative Assemby of
Ontario, the proceedings are opened with a prayer.
It is true those dummies need all the help they can
get, for surely one or two of them had some vision…before they got elected, and
had hopes of making some sweeping social progress in the context of this
century, a hope that will be quickly pounded out of them by ‘realities.’
I’ve never actually heard it, but it’s likely not
the Roman Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer that they use.
They had to pick
one, and only one, of several creeds.
In fact, when I switched from a public school to a
Catholic school back in the 1960s, the words of the prayer were slightly
different. The hair-splitting of theology is legendary.
One syllable, one wrong word, one wrong inflection
or accent and the transgressor is immediately condemned to everlasting
hellfire. Since I’ve uttered that prayer both ways, it’s difficult to see me as
anything other than but one of the damned.
The trouble with atheism is of course morality.
Without a God, one socially-acceptable to my
neighbours, where can morality possibly spring from?
What if I agreed that murder, theft, arson, violence
of any sort was wrong?
Would you doubt my word, even though these things
are first of all illegal, and secondly, they are impractical methods of conflict resolution?
Ah, but Ian, where are you getting all of this?
Surely a man, a normal man, is incapable of figuring these things out without
some miracle of divine intervention, a lightning bolt, a splitting of the
Earth, or even just a stork leaving town in a hurry—a flock of birds behaving
strangely, or perhaps the meteors of the air, showering the world with sparks
and pestilence…but I digress, ladies and
gentlemen.
Where do atheists go on Halloween? Because we don’t
believe in the supernatural, it would be hypocritical to dress up as a ghost or
a goblin; or to indulge in superstition such as reading the horoscope, crossing
our fingers for luck, or throwing a penny into a wishing well.
Atheism, in order to be valid, must be supremely
rational, and that is also its greatest weakness.
That’s because none of us are completely rational
beings.
We
cannot escape our upbringing. From our upbringing stems all prejudice, for we were born a clean slate
with no rational thoughts at all.
Atheism takes power away from Church and State. No longer
is there a fountainhead of morality, one that all can recognize and agree to, even if it is only as a legal fiction.
Atheism
empowers the individual. It empowers them to be free.
I say the power to govern stems from the people, but
in the maternalistic political world, the people can‘t be trusted and so we
need a Queen. And in order to justify one person being Queen over some other
choice, a person equally or perhaps even better qalified to be Queen, we must
accept their ‘Divine Right of Kings.’
We must accept the prerogatives of birth and blood, their pedigree. We must
accept not only history as it was written—mostly by educated males of the
ruling class, but we must also accept that it can be no other way. We must
accept the tyranny of past precedents without question.
Otherwise there is no legitimacy, and that includes
the legitimacy of elections based on
historical precedent, which is the only argument that you have when God is
taken out of the equation.
Our
ancestors fought for those rights for sound personal reasons.
Personal reasons, and today we can only speculate as
to what they may have been.
***
You could try speaking to me in purely practical
terms, but I think you incapable of actually doing it, without quickly running
out of arguments and falling back on tradition.
Genetically, we are asked to accept that the
blue-bloods are not just morally superior in that they have the right to
govern, it seems we must also accept their genetic
superiority! Something that has not been scientifically proven seems to be an unwritten law.
Otherwise,
the only other possible argument is that they are rich—or that they have a
monopoly on truth, one which stems from somewhere far, far up above the common
man.
Objectively speaking, if we did away with Queen
Elizabeth II, would the country collapse of its own internal moral
inconsistencies?
(But of course you don’t see that we have any moral
inconsistencies.)
Of course not. Someone would find the justification
to continue with our present system, with absolutely no changes (or disruption,) at all. Anyhow, they
always have another king or queen waiting in the wings to take over, don’t
they? If you follow the genealogy of the Royal Family, it goes all the way back
to Wotan—the
god of war, whose effigy was placed on a wagon and drawn through the camp of
the barbarians before battle in order to remind those savage warriors that the
gods were on their side and that Valhalla awaited the heroes who gave their
life for their king and country.
It would seem that either they were wrong or now, in
the present day, we must be wrong. For now all religions are equally valid
before the law.
We have changed religions many times over the last
two thousand years, and in fact Christianity itself would be almost unrecognizable
to Jesus in the unlikely event he should be ressurected and return to Earth for
a quick look to see how things were going.
Our ‘belief system’ is irrational, and even more so,
it is perpetuated by an unwritten code of bigotry and prejudice, a system of
checks and balances to keep us from asking all
the wrong questions.
It
must be based on a system of unconscious assumptions.
It has to be unconcsious, it has to be unwritten,
and it has to be accepted by all, just like the emperor’s new set of clothes, for
to question it is to unravel the whole fabric of our society, very quickly, and
in the interest of order, we prefer not to do that.
We
simply must have order.
To an atheist, the whole basis of Canadian law and
government is irrational—because it is based on assumptions of the divine, the
revelation of religion, which oddly enough always seems to favour the
predominance of the rich—and the well-born—and it is really nothing more than a
way of squelching dissent from ordinary people, most of whom do not have time
for great philosophical debates.
They’re too busy struggling to put food on the table
and keep a roof over their heads.
I have no doubt most of them have an opinion, one
which no matter how loudly shouted, bears little evidence of actual thought,
any real practicality, or any real usefulness at all.
I don’t really have the right to say this. Freedom
of expression is in the Constitution? Yes it is, but then the neighbours also
have pitchforks and unlit torches in the back closet, just in case something
goes terribly wrong and another belief system comes along to threaten their
comfortable assumptions.
You see, since atheism is not a religion, my belief
system is not protected by the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of
religion. It most definitely does not guarantee ‘freedom from religion,’
because Canadians ‘don’t want that.’
They want to have their cake and eat it too. They
want to be left alone and not to have to think too much.
They want some nice
Christmas gifts, they want to eat turkey and give thanks for not being
Americans—how many times have we watched Canadian journalists on TV, who report
on the U.S. with such smug and self-righteous glee.
“Thank God we aren’t Americans.” How many times have
we heard it?
To an objective observer half a world away,
Canadians and Americans are almost indistinguishable.
But it means so very, very, much, to a Canadian, not
to be an American.
Because Americans are unwashed. They are loud,
boisterous, obnoxious people with a little too much power around the globe and
a little too much money to spend at home…unless they’re here as tourists, in
which case, ‘Bienvenue.’
Welcome to Canada, eh. The home of peace, order and
good, rational government, a government of the people and by the people—well,
two out of three ain’t so bad, eh?
And it is the home of an irrational system of
beliefs which justifies much.
I hate justification. I think justification would
suck a basketball through a garden hose if you gave it half a chance. In that
sense, justification is much like assumption.
I hate assumptions,
for they are a form of limiting
beliefs.
If this nation really has a moral system of beliefs,
a moral system of government, one which takes into account more than just the
ignorances and prejudices of the loudest mouths, would someone please tell me
why the disabled must live thirty or forty percent below the poverty line; a
situation which has persisted for decades, and which will go on for the
forseeable future?
But you can’t do it, can you?
Religion, morality, tradition, none of that can help
the true hypocrite explain a situation that is intolerable to any thinking
person.
Maybe that’s why I became an atheist.
You simply couldn’t satisfy my inquiries. And now I
have become like the state—I see all religions as equally valid, or perhaps vapid
would be a better word.
The state sees them as useful, a fundamental difference
of philosophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
