In the last week or so, I’ve come across two largely unrelated news items that have gotten me thinking. I suspect they are not unique, nor are the they sort of headline that typically gets everyone talking. But I can’t help but think these are terrifically important, both in their own right, and as a mark of something fundamentally wrong.

The stories are as follows:
160 year-old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
The basic story (full story at the link) is that an entire roomful of historic documents (whole shelves of record books along with boxes of wills, deeds, photos, letters, etc.) was discovered in a previously sealed room under the Franklin Co., NC courthouse. Researcher, overjoyed as such a find had just begun the slow process of sorting and cataloging them, when they were told to cease doing so. After some weeks of red tape, an as-yet-unamed local government agency swooped in, took the lot to the basement, and systematically and intentionally burned them in the incinerator.

The other story, halfway across the world:
Lebanon Library Torched, 78,000 Books Burned By Islamists
In this story, a historic library in Tripoli was burned by arsonists after a pamphlet considered offensive to Islam was found tucked into one of the books. The library contained thousands of rare historic texts and manuscripts, from both Islamic and Christian history.

So what do these have in common, aside from the obvious destruction of historic materials? I think that the connective thread here is simply that: that there exists the idea that destroying the past is a good thing. That the destruction of history in the furtherance of one’s current ideology is acceptable. And I think this is the worst, deepest, most fundamental kind of violence.

George Orwell, in his masterwork of political tyranny and destroyed history, Nineteen Eighty-Four, wrote the following:
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”

Who controls the past, controls the future. An odd truth, but a powerful one. One of the deepest horrors of Orwell’s dystopia is that the past has no meaning, there is no past but that authored by the Party. Ellie Wiesel, writing so often of the holocaust, demands that the past be protected from violence. Because in doing violence to the past, all violence is allowed.

And so, these news stories represent the very worst kind of violence; violence to truth, violence to the past. The author of the first story conjectures (with reasonable foundation), that the records were destroyed to hide the shady doings they might reveal done by the forefathers of someone currently in political power. Islam has a long record of destroying the past, from the Buddhas of Bamiyan to the proposal to destroy the Sphinx. In the second story, we don’t even need an ostensibly offense pamphlet to see the destruction of a library, a historic library at that, as a purely brutish sweep against knowledge, against the past, any past, and record that things might ever have been other than as they are now.

The Christian right attempts violence to the past regularly, with its ongoing attempts to rewrite the past of our own nation, making of its Enlightenment progressive deists a crew of Christian fundamentalists; Thomas Jefferson recast as he Sam Brownback of his day (there’s a terrifying thought!). And this is, ultimately, the mark of the unsustainable worldview. When your doctrine requires that there be no past, only a harsh glare of a bright. unchanging, ever-present NOW, you have, in essence, become The Party of Orwell’s Oceania.

And once there is no past, no truth, no objective reality, then all violence is possible. This hated enemy has always been hated, has always been the source of all our ills, and must be eradicated. And once gone, they never were. Without the past, without memory, there can be no genocide, no holocaust. There are no ‘atrocities,’ because there is no ‘never again.’ When the past has no meaning, and is rewritten at will, there is no wrong, for what was done, was not done.

Originally published My 15, 2009

I know, I’m a little behind the times on this; what can I say? I don’t get to the theater much. This one is worth a review nevertheless. Trust me on this one, I’m not going where you think I am; keep reading.Now, I’ve seen plenty of scathing criticism of this film, and not just from the religious right, or even the mildly religious. Atheists, anti-religionists, and liberals alike have lambasted Maher for this one. Essentially, the gripes revolve around two points. One is Maher’s selection of the craziest of the crazy and the most extreme of the extreme in order to give an exaggerated picture of religion. The other complaint is that Maher is overly harsh, condescending, disrespectful and flat-out insulting to the people he interviews.I’d have to say both of these are dead on. There were time in the first hour or so that even I, being a pretty outspoken and vehement anti-religionist, found myself wincing, thinking “Woah! That was harsh!” or “Yikes! Did he just say that?” And admittedly, he does not spend time talking to moderates; his interviewees are decidedly the oddest apples in the bunch. Both of these make Religulous a bit uncomfortable to watch, though incredibly funny.

That’s the thing, though. Getting laughs out of the religious loons is easy sport; were the humor the real intent of this piece, I would have to call it a cheap shot, or rather, a long series of cheap shots. Love or hate Maher himself, one must admit that’s not his brand of humor. That’s how you know the humor isn’t the point. It’s the tool.

The humor is a tool, like his rudeness is a tool, like his selection of the kookiest of the kooks is a tool, like his leaving in the snippets of him being kicked out of the Vatican, or off the Mormon Temple lawn, is a tool. The purpose to which these tools are turned is nothing less than the dismantling of religion’s ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.

Bill Maher is not poking fun at religion to get a laugh. He is not being rude to religion to get a laugh. He’s forcing us to see religion for what it is – delusional, irrational. Our habit of toleration and respect for religion is so ingrained, that it takes a lot to be shaken out of it. Even (perhaps especially), for liberals and progressives, who have so long championed the rights of the other to be who they are, who have fought for equality of the sexes, acceptance of race, non-discrimination; we more than anyone need to be forcibly shaken out of our tendency to be tolerant, our desire to get along.

For all the humor, Maher is deadly serious, and he’s not wrong. It’s crucial that we do let go of our tolerance for religion; our survival as a species may depend on it. It’s not easy letting go of our toys, and leaving the childhood of humanity behind us, with its invisible friends and fairy tales and happy endings. It’s not easy telling ourselves, or each other, that no, Santa’s not real, and neither is God, there’s no happily ever after, and only we can make (or break) a better world. But a child allowed to keep his toys and his childhood fantasies becomes a dysfunctional monster. So too, humanity must grow up, or we will become a monstrous race, killing and devouring with a child’s heedlessness, blindness and greed. As Maher says, our abilities to pollute, to kill, and to destroy have outstripped our ability to reason and to be rational. Religion is the security blanket, the pacifier, that keeps us from moving on.

That is Maher’s mission – to rid us of the security blanket. As long as we treat it with reverence, we will never let it go. Religion is a very real threat to our development as a species. We have only to look at the regressive policies supported by the most religious in our society to see that. It will remain a threat as long as societies like ours continue to allow religion a pass on behavior and thinking which we would (and do) condemn in other contexts. This is a point I have argued for years, and if *I* was taken aback at Maher’s blatant disrespect, clearly, we have along way to go.

I love this: Religious Intolerance, or ‘What I Want to Say When Asked Why I Have a Problem with Religion.’
(The original is sometimes unavailable, so I have reposted it here: Religious Intolerance)

(You don’t HAVE to read the above link before this, but it will make a bit more sense of you do…)

I know this may really make some folks mad, particularly if you happen to be a religious literalist of any stripe. But I just can’t keep forgiving the constant harm done by the childish refusal of my species to give up its fear of the dark and its need for a fairy-tale… (I have stated my position on that previously here*.) And I know what the argument in response to the post linked above will be: people like this aren’t ‘real Christians (or Muslims, or Jews or whatever).’

Sorry, that won’t work. For one thing, that’s a very basic fallacy of argument, known as the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. You don’t get to say that someone who does something awful in the name of Christianity isn’t a Christian because you don’t like what they did, or the way they understand or interpret your ‘good book.’ You don’t get to sneak out from under the atrocities done in the name of religion (like Crusades and Jihad and Hitler and misogyny) by saying those examples don’t count. They used the same book, the same ideology, the same names, and they were every bit as confident in their interpretation of the doctrine as you are. 

Furthermore, there is a (terrifically important) difference between placing responsibility on religion as a social/cultural institution and placing responsibility on every religious person. The Catholic Church carries the blame for an ongoing pattern of child molestation, but naturally, that doesn’t make every Catholic a child molester. That fact does not absolve the Church as an institution for those harms however. (Nor, incidentally, does whatever good it may have done absolve it from responsibility for harm it has done.) What it DOES do, however, is put every supporter of that institution on record as abetting the wrongs done by an institution that they continue to support. People argue that Hamas isn’t so bad because they bring food to refugees, but that doesn’t seem to buy Hamas or its supporters much ground, now, does it? 

Which beings me to the second point. The people in every one of the examples in the post linked above did what they did based on their belief in the same god, the same book, and the same core doctrine of which you are trying to claim they are not ‘true’ members. Their actions, however abhorrent, can be and are grounded, defended, and supported from their source texts and doctrines. Regardless of the text in question, for every verse anyone cites showing that dreadful things are not to be done, there is one (possibly several), that says they should. So I submit that the problem is not with the interpretations of the doctrine after all. The problem is with the doctrine itself. Ultimately, the “fundamentalists” that everyone decries and tries to disown, are simply taking the doctrine back to its “fundamentals.” What does it say that the simplest, most basic interpretation of a doctrine produces horrors? When we must tweak and excuse and rationalize something to make it palatable, we have to ask why we bother. If fundamentalists are reprehensible, we can’t exonerate the doctrine which guides them.

Why? Because it’s ALL interpretation. Because there is no one, definitive, authoritative interpretation for any of these texts. Because it’s all a bunch of archaic, vague, contradictory folklore gathered over centuries that can be used to justify pretty much any damned thing anyone wants it to. And because no one has the slightest whiff of evidence that *this* way of interpreting it is ‘The Right Way.’ But inherent in the very core of any non-trivial interpretation is the idea that ‘my way’ MUST be right, because if it’s not, I lose. And at the end of the day, if one way *has* to be right…you see where I’m going here, don’t you? So the very doctrine at its core is predisposed to allow, justify, reify, and even mandate every one of the examples in the post referenced above. And THAT is why I have a problem with religion.

*It’s not often one can really say they stand behind a post made on a rant 5 years previous! (The link is to a more recent re-post of this here on this site, though the original post was made on LiveJournal in March of 2007)

(Originally posted on LiveJournal in March of 2007.) This was by far the most popular, most commented, most re-posted entry I ever made on LiveJournal. I am reposting it here in its entirety, though I wish I could include the comments.

I try so hard to be fair minded, egalitarian, and respectful of the beliefs of others. I do, even here in the Bible belt, surrounded by Baptist Conservatives, Fundamentalists, and just plain ignorance. However, as time goes on, and the more I see, the less tolerance I have been able to maintain. Today I realized my tolerance is gone. Nothing in particular happened, there was no final straw, I just realized that I can no longer do it. 

Christianity is completely artificial. It is not grounded in anything at all to do with the historical person (if there was one) of Yeshua or his teachings. It is not grounded in anything his followers supposedly said or thought. It is not grounded in anything Paul said or thought. It is not grounded in Judaic thought. It is a fabrication; a construct of the mid-second and subsequent centuries, designed solely to consolidate power. It is the most successful ‘Big Brother’ ever devised. It is a mechanism of control, a totalitarian regime of which the world has never seen the like. Its only purpose is to keep populations quiet, unquestioning, and under control. 

The dogma of religion, (Christianity perhaps chief among them, but by no means alone), has done more to hold back humankind than all the wars (for which it is largely responsible), plagues, famines, earthquakes, and disasters our species has ever known. It idolizes ignorance, encourages blindness, creates division and enmity, and holds stupidity as its highest virtue. It is as insidiously deadly as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco combined. 

I recognize that not all who claim Christianity truly believe that the world began in seven days in a Disney-eque garden with a talking snake. They do not all believe that the Earth does not move, and the universe flings itself around this planet every 24 hours. They do not all believe that science is a lie, nor that is is perfectly OK to trash the environment and destroy the very earth beneath our feet because ‘hey, it’s all gonna end in a few years anyway, and why don’t we start a nuclear war to get it started?’ They do not all believe that is it fine, nay, even vital, that others be exterminated, if not by conversion, than by the sword, and if not that, the bomb. They do not all believe that blacks, or gays, or atheists, or Muslims are subhuman, and should be eradicated like vermin. But many, many, many people do.

And the fact that many people do, and the fact that they JUSTIFY these insane notions in the name of Christianity should be deeply alarming to anyone who claims the same faith. It should make anyone who claims that faith question seriously the value of that faith in any sense. Furthermore, it should be enough to make them realize, at last, that it is time to grow up. It is time to step out of the dark ages, to stop worshiping ignorance, stop believing the lies. 

It is long past time we realize that religion has no place in shaping our public lives, our communities, our government, our policy, our education, our world. It is time we grew up and began to think for ourselves. It is time to set aside faith, and all the evil it propagates, and become rational, thinking adults.

Does this mean I think that our rich and diverse history and heritage of religion is worthless? Not at all. Symbol, allegory, archetype, and metaphor are vital to our wholeness as humans, and to the wholeness of our understanding of ourselves and our relationship with each other and the world. But ONLY when we remember that they ARE symbol, allegory, archetype, and metaphor. THEY ARE NOT REAL. And no one has the sole license to the only valid metaphor. When the symbol is mistaken for the thing, all is lost, and we have willingly turned away from the real and embraced a deeply flawed fantasy. When the metaphor is read as literal, empirical reality is lost. 

The vast majority of the people on this planet, today, right now, have no sense of reality. They gleefully, with an insufferable sense of superiority, tout fairy tale as truth, and look down their deluded noses at anyone who attempts to correct them. It is time to wake up! Time to put religious thought back where it belongs, into personal reflection, personal understanding, and individual thought. It has no business anywhere else.

And that is why my religious tolerance is gone. My respect for the religion of another person extends only as far as that person’s understanding that religion is a tool of thought, and not reality. The rest, I cannot but regard as delusional, having no grasp of reality, and certainly not fit to make rational decisions about the world around them. Let me say that this applies not merely to Christians. It applies to anyone who seeks to make societal decisions based on literal beliefs in religious allegory.

If someone commits murder because a voice in their head tells them to, we remove their freedom to make decisions for themselves, for it is clear that they are not rational, and therefore are not capable of making rational decisions. How is this different from killing an abortion clinic doctor? How is this different from letting a mother die rather than allow an abortion? How is this different from denying access to contraception, or safe sex education? How is this different from refusing to allow stem cell research? How is this different from supplanting science with faith, creationism, and geocentrism? How is this different from starting a war in the name of God? It is no different at all. It is high time we stop excusing hate, violence, oppression, and ignorance in the name of religion.