In the past few days, both New Zealand and France have introduced laws allowing marriage equality. That it is necessary to pass such laws seems remarkable in itself. Surely, our starting point in all things should be equality – a position that should only be altered where there is genuine justification. In this light, it is either astonishingly naive or disgraceful disingenuous for Prime Minister Julia Gillard to suggest that she doesn’t want to impose her views on people on this matter, but she will vote against marriage equality on the floor of parliament. To take away equality is to impose a view.
This brings us to the point of what it is that “justifies” inequality with regards marriage. The silent spring in this debate is religion. While many of our political leaders may skirt around the issue, the underlying premise that marriage is a bond between a man and a woman stems from the 2,000 year old writings of Palestinian goat herders. In a previous post I commented that the protections for religion or any other ideology or way of life should not exceed the protections from them. So why should religion be granted such primacy in public policy and debate?
Guest commentator, Kosmos Samaras, provides us with his views on religion, its relevance in modern society and the myth that religious spirituality is somehow more compassionate than atheism.
Some of my first memories of religion are my mother’s stories of saints and how they kept a watchful eye over us: protectors, god’s servants.
I conjured up images in my mind of giants in the sky, floating up there with their super powers, ready to come to our rescue whenever danger was near. My five year old mind did not struggle to visualize such super beings, given I was already a firm believer that Superman was actually real, that Santa did eat at our kitchen table on Christmas Eve and the devil did sometimes try to hide under my bed.
Looking back, it does seem that the child mind was very easy to please, and accepting of all things supernatural.
I used to think that I had “one over” on the devil under my bed when I went to sleep with a crucifix, firmly clutched in my hand, as I hid under the doona. Little did I know that I was clutching an instrument of death on par with the guillotine. For those of you who don’t get into the habit of studying the tools of executioners; the crucifix was the Romans' favourite method of execution. At times, thousands would be strung up on these morbid constructions, a truly nasty way to go. A very Christian doctor goes into some detail here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC9krDwjfZE
I’m sure the devil under my bed may have been chuckling to itself, as I clutched a symbol that exterminated thousands of human beings over many centuries. Hardly the halo I was looking for, but, then again, a five year old should not know better.
As the years rolled by, and life and its full reality exposed me to more and more of the human experience, these super heroes suddenly were not so super. Sitting at home as a young teenager I was watching a documentary on the Jewish holocaust, from memory it was on SBS. It was one of those classic mega-documentaries, running over many nights and containing many interviews with survivors relating their nightmarish stories. As I sat there, looking at images of thousands of cadavers being bulldozed into massive pits, I turned to my mother and asked why god/Jesus and his saints allowed this to happen. The explanation was on par with: “god works in mysterious ways”. I’m sure my mother was simply trying to bat away such difficult questions, given her real belief that human beings are responsible for all their own deeds.
But it was my next questions, which remained unanswered that set me on the path to atheism. It went something like this. So who was told that god/Jesus works in mysterious ways? Why do billions of people believe in another god? Why is their god or their beliefs less real, less mysterious than ours? Where is the archaeological evidence that proves our god is more real, more mysterious than my Turkish friends' god?
As a child, the search for rational and logical answers was not needed. After all, I was still looking for the man in moon and the Easter bunny in the bushes, and listening for the big fella on Christmas Eve. That’s ok and, in fact, it’s extremely important that children are allowed to process their new world through the prism of fantasy, fairy tales and mythical worlds. It allows them to over time understand the real world and, for the most part, its ugly nastiness in small steps. Physiologically and psychologically it’s good.
But as the years rolled on, I looked for facts and evidence. My predicament became more entrenched as I slowly acquired a passion for history. That passion for me has now become a door to the true human condition. History does not only teach you about events, places and famous people, but more importantly it reads to you the true story of human beings.
For example, it’s not difficult to work out why ancient people, almost universally, had some form of religious belief. The ancient mind had no real science at its disposal to explain even the simplest elements around them. Even water was explained away as a mystery, cloaked by a god. Neptune, I’m sure, was an easy substitute for the good old molecular heresy of “H2O”.
The world back then was flat and ended somewhere in the vast ocean – where giant monsters lurked, waiting for stray sailors who ventured too close to the edge of the world. The moon was not some planetary object, orbiting and dancing with the earth’s gravitational pull, no it was a god. Thousands of years would pass by before humans would kill off the moon god by landing on it, planting a flag and televising it to the world.
Like the modern child, ancient people had no capacity to use other forms of information to explain away the unknown. Diseases were the work of the devil; famine was met by hunting down those nasty women in the village, otherwise known as witches, and killing them for casting a spell on this year’s crop. Sadly thousands of women met their end at the hands of men wielding a knife in one hand and a bible in the other. We now know that failed crops may have had something to do with drought, lack of soil rotation or infestation.
The modern adult no longer has to hunt down single women in the street to explain away bad tidings. They no longer need to search for the hotline to the church to order an express exorcism for a loved one who obviously is suffering depression. Natural disasters are just that, the workings of nature and not some massive hand of god pushing half a mountain of snow over the lives of thousands of people in South America.
But this is all the beauty of growing up. You go from using the child-like mind to make sense of the world around you to using a progressive method of interpreting life based on logic, reason and science. Humans have always tried to make sense of the world and today we have far greater tools available to us as a species and as individuals than ever before – tools of logic, reason and science.
As an atheist, however, I tend to not look upon religious adults as ignorant, but rather as people still harbouring their inner child and refusing to let go of the comforting and nurturing embrace of the afterlife and a protector god who, like our mother or father, watches over us, even when we are elderly and in our twilight years. Its equivalent to the complete security most humans would have felt when embraced by their mother as an infant, something most struggle to free themselves from all their lives. Do you remember that embrace? Most do and continue to look for its comfort in the many human constructs that take place in oddly shaped buildings on any given Sunday, Saturday or any other special religious day and even in their daily prayers.
But if you can bravely leap from such easy comforts, you can look upon this life with eyes wide open to see and adore its glorious complexities, its forms and its sensitivities. Life becomes extremely precious, where it begins and ends. Freedom becomes a virtue, where it nurtures life and improves the human condition for all. This then becomes the passion of the atheist: the trinity of life, freedom and equality ... [fades to static]
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