The Gospel According to St. Bastard

A relevant musical treat - Mr. David Gray

Got into a long overdue David Gray kick recently - I had totally forgotten about Ain’t No Love on Life in Slow Motion. Besides being a great song in general, it opens with a solid first verse that I’ve always loved. I first heard this song right after I’d moved to NYC & was reading End of Faith and going through all the questioning/distancing I mentioned in my 2nd post - so you can see how I’d get attached to it easily:

Maybe that it would do me good
If I believed there were a god
Out in the starry firmament
As it is that’s just a lie
And I’m here eating up the boredom
On an island of cement

—David Gray “Ain’t No Love”

Do yourself a favor & give it a listen (ignore the stupid visuals, it’s the only one I could find of the studio version):

Let’s get topical

It never ceases to amaze me how we let the most appalling actions & injustices happen in the name of religion and don’t think twice. While it’s certainly nothing new, I’ve found myself paying way more attention to some of the more political examples of this recently. Chalk it up to getting older maybe. The recent New York-centric issues, possibly.  Twitter, definitely.

The specific issue that’s been gnawing at me lately is the good ol’ gay marriage debate. It’s a major topic in NY these days and has come to the forefront of my world mainly through my passion for sports. I won’t go through the Sean Avery support video and ensuing sports agent’s rebuttal that initiated the debate’s place in sports. What’s more interesting to me is the man who was untouchable in my mind after the helmet-catch paved the way for the GMen to take down the “perfect” Patriots in Super Bowl 42. Untouchable until he just revealed himself to be a closed-minded asshole. I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, but far and away my favorite part of the whole situation is the irony of an African-American man not seeing the painfully obvious parallel to slavery when saying:

“It’s not about establishing a theocracy. It’s about what’s right… how can marriage be marriage for thousands of years…and all of a sudden because a minority – an influential minority – has an agenda … [it] totally reshapes something that was not founded in our country, not founded by man.”).

It’s odd to see things like gay rights as they’re happening rather than from a historical perspective. I wasn’t around for the end of slavery, can’t say I caught the women’s suffrage movement, & I missed the civil rights struggles of the 50s & 60s. But I’m front & center for this one as it’s happening, knowing full well that eventually this will be put in that same historical context - where it’s weird for kids to read about and think there was a time when two men or two women weren’t allowed to marry. Being here as it’s happening gives us the position of seeing the other side before rational thought becomes the accepted way. Before the time comes that if you truly believe gays shouldn’t marry, well then you need to lower your voice and look around the room when you talk about it because you know society won’t tolerate that bigotry. We’re not all the way there yet, but you can see that freight train coming around the corner.

In hearing Tyree’s comments and reading people who agreed with him, and reading people who agreed with the people who agreed with him, is was a big reminder that at its heart, the anti-gay marriage camp is not about hatred or homophobia for the most part. It’s simply another case of people blindly following religion. Because a two thousand year old book told them to (or in most cases because someone TOLD them a two thousand year old book told them to), people are telling two other people what they can and can not do. And the government is agreeing with them so far.

I live in NYC. I know lots of gay folks. For the most part they’re great people. Some of them aren’t. Just like every other way you can slice and dice a population into what is essentially a demographic bucket and nothing more. And two people that fall into the same slice anywhere else in that population are able to marry hassle-free (I realize the opening for argument with this simplistic description in terms of incest, marrying children, etc - but really if that’s your defense you should probably just wave a white flag right now).

It’s just crazy to believe that anyone would dare quote a piece of paper that they can’t defend in any way except for “faith,” and try to tell two of their fellow kind that they’re not allowed to get married. If only folks would think. In a vacuum where the god you believe in and all of his inconsistent, intolerant rules might not exist, would you still be against it? Are you ok thinking that? No shame, no embarrassment, no nagging morality concerns? Then congrats, you’re a bigot!

Think

I think it’s about time we got this thing started… Hopefully you’ve read my first 2 intro posts and got a little of my background, as well as some quick thoughts on religious moderates. Moderates: the group that most of the people I know belong to. The group that very likely, you belong to as you read this. So take every single post that follows as an address to you. As a plead to you. To just think. Forget everything you’ve learned about God & religion for just a minute. Scan through your brain & beliefs and if your only rationale for believing it is “faith,” get rid of it, even if just for the second it takes to mull things over.

Anywho…onto the fun stuff.

Once you think about it for a bit, it’s pretty mind-blowingly insane that here we are in 2011 and religion is still so prominent and deeply woven into our every day lives. 2011! If you somehow met a person from two thousand and eleven years ago and they attempted to explain the world around you based on their knowledge, wouldn’t you laugh in that person’s face? Think of the enormous amount that people didn’t know a century ago, let alone 20. Yet here we are, still reading that book and buying into the nonsense inside.

Science put a man on the moon 40 years ago. We can instantly send images, sounds & information through the air. We’ve cracked the genetic code, cloned animals, and eradicated horrible diseases. Science is everywhere. Throughout history (and especially recent history) we have gradually understood, explained, or at least developed testable theories for so much of the world around us. And with each successive discovery or supported theory I would have assumed that as a species, humans would have gotten less gullible towards the absurd. I would have assumed that it would have occurred to us that just maybe, we should require some proof, some explanation before we believe a fantastical story that was written down a couple thousand years back. But apparently that’s not the case. And that’s wild.

The more I think about it, the more it seems absolutely irresponsible to even entertain the idea that this God fellow* is up there just checking things out, listening to all the folks that fold their hands & turn them into magic GodChat walkie-talkies, and only answering some of them with his world famous “mysterious ways.” Besides just eliminating it for the sake of its lunacy, there are obviously other, more serious factors. The role religion has played in hatred, discrimination, intolerance, repression, war, murder, violence, etc is known by all and yet for some reason shrugged off and accepted as “the way it goes.” And all for what? A crutch for some deep seeded guilt & fear of death?  In the same way that the Greek & Roman gods were eventually laughed off, it’s about time we started doing the same with our’s. We’re passed the need to make up stories to explain what we don’t know. It’s 20-freaking-11. Maybe I’m an optimist but I truly believe that people are better than this. If folks would stop simply going through the motions because they always have and instead just stepped back to think.

*God = the Christian rendition for the most part. S’what I know best. But most points will apply across the board I think.

“By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally” —Sam Harris

“Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.” —Sam Harris “The End of Faith”

About 5 years or so after I first got the inkling that something about religion might be a little fishy, I had pretty firmly planted my feet in the nonbeliever camp. For half a decade I spent time thinking about everything I knew about religion, everything I knew about science, and if/how a higher deity, specifically the one that I’d been raised to believe in, was really running the show from the clouds. And really, when you step back and think about those things, it’s a pretty ridiculous concept.

Coincidentally, just after I really started pulling away from religion I caught Sam Harris on The Daily Show (I think?). He was promoting his new book about the dangers of religion. He mostly talked about the Muslim/Terrorist connection (it was about 4 years after 9/11, so that was still a super easy card to play to drum up sales), but spent some time discussing how ALL religions were bad & dangerous to some degree. A few points around that bit caught my attention, so I went out & bought the book. It was a fantastic read - I didn’t agree with all of it, but there were still some really eye-opening ideas tossed out. The point that grabbed me the most is the one written above.

He says “religious moderates,” probably the term that best described me to that point, as well as many/most of the people I know, are the major issue. Kind of like that tried & true: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” line. But damn what a point! It mirrors so many other divisive issues in the way that those for it & those against it really cancel out. It’s the folks in the middle that ultimately decide the direction. The middle ground also tends to have more residents than the extremes, so if the middle folks all lean one direction, that’s generally the direction things will shake out. It’s the same reason politicians campaign their asses off in swing states. They know they’ve got their loyalists locked in, and they know they won’t convert the loyalists from the other party. The only ones that matter are the undecided.

I’ll try to dig into why that’s a bad thing next time around…

“It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.” —Calvin

So with the (non) events of this past weekend, it’s brought religion back to the forefront of my mind. I was a good Catholic boy growing up. Baptized, First Communion..ed, Confirmed, Youth Group, even the leader of a 120+ person teen retreat that my church ran. I did most of this with the “sure, of course God’s real” mentality of someone who had always been told that was true but had never put much thought into it. As far as a I know, that’s a fairly standard tale for many folks’ first 15-20 years before they think for themselves and decide whether or not to believe because it’s the way THEY feel, not just what they’ve been told.

Then one fateful night when I was 17 or 18, my buddies & I got to chatting about religion and suffices to say that there were some differing viewpoints. Discussion was had, questions were thrown out, opinions were defended, and at the end of the night, shit I’d never thought to think was flying through my head as I lay there (in a sleeping bag while camping nonetheless - amazing if not 100% cliche place to throw down the religious gauntlet).

Anyway… this isn’t meant to be & hopefully won’t turn out to be just a history of my religious journey, that wouldn’t be entertaining for anybody. I figure this will turn out to be a collection of thoughts, rants, and questions about religion that I think of, dwell on, or wonder. The next post will of course actually do one of those things instead of boring you with crap about me.

Ah! Here, most entertaining 6 mins you’ll ever see on religion…I give you Mr. Eddie Izzard: