Thursday 12 April 2007

Lies To Children



When I was a child I believed in God. It soon occurred to me that I did so because I had been told to. No-one, though, ever gave me compelling proof that he existed. So I became doubtful.

When I was aged twelve my father enrolled me at a new school (owing to organisational circumstances - ordinarily it would have been my mother's job). He was filling in the enrolment form smoothly until he stopped, pen poised, and leant over to ask me, almost guiltily, "What religion are you, son?". It not being anything like any question I had ever been asked before, I shrugged and said "Dunno." He set his shoulders and replied "Let's put C of E, then."

That was the moment I realised that I was free to choose my religion, independent of anyone. Sure, my parents were ambivalent - probably atheists - and had never addressed the notion at home, and my grandmother was a social Christian like all "good people", but this was a revelation to me.

For the next two years I would tell anyone who asked that I was a Buddhist. But it didn't take (it's impossible to live a western lifestyle and adhere to any form of Buddhist philosophy). By age fifteen I had drawn the conclusion that God didn't exist so I would put "Atheist" on any form that asked my religion. This ruffled one or two feathers during high school and I rather enjoyed that.

University came and went and by the end of it my understanding of the scientific method had taught me that being an atheist - essentially declaring that God did not exist - was as dogmatic a position as saying he/it did. Thus I have labeled myself as an agnostic ever since. "If God taps me on the shoulder I would be a fool to deny his existence." Evidence is everything.

If I apply simple logic to the question of the existence (or necessity) of [any] God of humans I invariably come to the conclusion that he is an irrelevance, an invention, a crutch. Bertrand Russell crystallises my thoughts on the matter of God and religion when he says
"My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."
I need only look to the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Spanish Inquisition, the Taliban and countless other instances to see this disease festering and fettering humanity.

Yet I live in a society whose very structure and continued survival is predicated on Judeo-Christian ethics. I cannot deny them and believe them utterly essential to our continued survival. I often flatter myself that I am a better "Christian" than many of those who go to church every Sunday. I certainly know more about Christianity and the Bible than most because I have had such a need to better understand this conceptual framework that has dominated, driven and determined western history and culture. Far too many Christians I have met believe because they've never asked themselves about it and have just been raised into the mindset. Sheep!

I acknowledge, nonetheless, that religion has been fundamental to almost everything I hold dear. How do I resolve this dichotomy between something so central to my society yet so damaging and illogical? I realise that religion is the glue that holds most societies together. Without it anarchy would probably be the result. How and why is this so?

The vast majority of humans are stupid, ignorant and uneducated. They are peasants, drones, sheep, automata - children. They don't have the education or time to indulge in rumination about the meaning of their existence or any sort of higher truth. Most of the time they are too preoccupied with the job of just living and surviving to spare the time or mental effort to indulge in philosophical ruminations. Plant, grow, harvest, eat, breed, survive.

So how do societal structures endure? How do we ensure that society and culture remains viable? In the absence of science and logic, religion steps in and imposes structures, strictures and scriptures to drive the masses along the viable paths. This is achieved by applying the educational principle described as "Lies to Children". It's not a completely Bad Thing but we need to recognise it for what it is and what it has achieved.

I first perceived the principle in the course of being taught atomic theory in chemistry during High School. We were told that atoms connect together to make molecules. Each year we would be presented with a model for how the atoms connected and by the end of the year more and more discrepancies and illogical situations would become evident that weakened that model. The next year a revised model would be presented that resolved these but by the end of the year more discrepancies and problems would become evident in the revised model and the process would repeat - all the way to the first few years of university.

This process - successive "lies to children" - can only be truly recognised and its immense usefulness appreciated after we've grown and matured beyond our need for it. With knowledge of it we can now recognise it wherever it arises, and one of the prime areas where it is applied is in religion, or specifically, in religious proscriptions.

I've already posited that humans are stupid. A corollary of this is that there are many things that humans are wont to do that are stupid. Here are just a few examples: don't interbreed; don't waste natural resources; don't kill other people; don't eat things that are bad for you.

How do you stop stupid people doing these and other stupid things? You can't explain to them about genetics and birth defects, or why environmental damage is counterproductive, or where parasitic diseases come from. This is especially difficult if you don't fully understand them yourself despite compelling observational evidence collected over long periods. So what do you do?

You frighten people off bad behaviour by using the only weapon that is readily to hand: taking advantage of their innate fears, respect for authority, ignorance and superstitious natures. Ascribe a supernatural cause; pull rank; tell them "God said so." Use anything but reason and logic.

God says "Don't kill people." God says "Don't eat pigs." God says "Be nice to people." God says "Stop it, or you'll go blind." "Why?" "Because!" Initially it could be a mere convenience to achieve a definite social aim but after a few centuries the original purpose has been lost and the proscription remains in force, regardless of any continued need for it or possible relevance to the present society and technology.

I claim that I can take almost any seemingly arbitrary religious proscription and derive a social, environmental, political or economic justification for it. In future posts I will present examples of these. I don't claim that I am right, or that my interpretation may be correct or true. I'm not discounting the worth of the religious source. It's certainly not my intention to use it as "proof" of the non-existence of God. I intend it as exercise in logically deriving the origin of things that on casual and dispassionate viewing make no immediate sense; not eating pork, baptising children and not cremating the dead are just a few of the subjects I intend to analyse and present.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi CG,
I agree with most of your thoughts regarding the standard Judeo-Christian notions of God as a Being who is personally involved in the lives of human beings and who has a special relationship with each of us - and who, incidentally, as it were - wants us to be and helps us to be good and responds to our prayers, and so on - but this surely begs the question of what we actually mean by the term 'God'. Let us, for the purposes of discussion, ignore the concept of Jesus - of God made flesh (leaving that for another time), and focus on what 'God' actually means. There is a notion of God in Hinduism which has no ethical or personal dimension whatsoever. This is the concept of Brahma, which is simply understood as the source of all being. If you think of the source of life, and go backwards in your mind to 'what made it all happen' , as it were, then you will arrive at a notion of God which is quite acceptable to anyone with an enquiring mind. God is simply the source of all that was, is or will be. Empty of content, you say? Hard to believe? Beyond the realms of possibility (qv Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner)? Nooo... Okay, so there's not much there. But Joseph Campbell goes on to say that all other Gods (including the Judeo-Christian construct), as well as all other Demons, "...are all within us, and are the manifestations of the energies of the body in contention with each other." You are of course aware of the huge range of human emotions and impulses, and how they might correspond to the vast array of Divine personalities that have been presented to us in the form of myths, stories, fairy tales, parables, etc. Somebody once said that all the characters we encounter in our dreams are actually manifestations of ourselves (meaning the dreamer), and this seems to me a fairly convincing way of interpreting the Pantheon. If all these things are really me, then perhaps the difficulty of accepting a whole raft of religious traditions simply falls away. And if, after accepting all these wacky stories as manifestations of Self (a la dream), one thinks of God again in the sense of Brahma, then maybe it will be a bit harder to say straightforwardly "Ich bin ein Atheist". There is so much more to say on this topic that I have to stop now, or I'll be here all night. But let me reiterate that I have complete sympathy with your complete disillusionment with the notion of a Christian God. DG.