nunoncastors

You’re probably aware of my distaste for the way our society is heading, the mindless thuggery, the lack of consideration and decorum, the way people think you’re being a snob because you use the word ‘decorum’, then ask you what it means. It’s not something that I revel in.

However, there is something that irks me far more than the gradual degradation of morals and behaviour, even more so than the culture of idiocy we seem to be nurturing, and that’s the belief that religion is some sort of societal panacea, that in some way being religious, indeed religion itself, is synonymous with being good.

It really fucking isn’t.

You’ll have to excuse me if you are of a religious persuasion, if you take it all to be (excuse the pun) gospel, because I think it’s bollocks. Bollocks inasmuch as it doesn’t hold any appeal for me, doesn’t make any sense, results in wars and genocide and generally does as much harm as it does good. If it works for you then that’s brilliant, I’m glad, may your tribe ever increase. But for me, it strikes me that all religion is the invention of man and therefore prone to the same fuckwittery as we are. And boy can we be stupid, as the following article proves. You’ll have to excuse my picking at it, but it’s the kind of toss that makes me a little irate.

Beware the dark side of the new moral consensus
Peter Mullen - Source

Far worse than the threat from international terrorism is the aggressive process of secularisation that has gripped our country, and most of Europe, and which is becoming ever more frenzied. For example, I guess not many people are aware that it is against the law for state schools to teach the Christian faith as true. Teachers are allowed only to teach about religions. This is atheism by decree, for the only perspective from which one can teach about all religions is the secular perspective. So our children are not brought to a sense of holiness and awe, but are merely taught the meanings of religious terms as sociological descriptions. This deprivation of the spiritual is a form of child abuse.

So, just to clarify, secularisation is more of a threat to society than people flying aircraft into buildings, exploding on tube trains and generally trying to kill folk. Yes, that’s right, not being interested in religion is worse than murder. Give me a break.

Quite aside from that, why should Christianity be taught as fact when there’s a dozen competing religions all making the same claim? Surely we want people to make up their own minds about matters of faith, surely it’s a personal matter to be resolved between the individual and whichever folktale makes them happiest?

Obviously, if there were some empirical evidence that proved definitively that Christianity was the one true religion, then things would be different. But there isn’t, so it’s not. Therefore, teach everyone about all the religions and let them make their minds up. If they think it’s all toss, well, maybe religion needs to start making a more compelling argument.

And then there are the Sexual Orientation Regulations which make it illegal to discriminate on moral grounds between forms of sexual coupling. One might put this epigrammatically: what was once a mortal sin is now only a lifestyle choice. I supported the Homosexual Reform Act back in the 1960s on the grounds that it is not right to criminalise people on the grounds of their sexual orientation.

Or, to put it another way, “I’m not a homophobe but…”

Besides, what once was a mortal sin and is now a lifestyle choice was previously a… uh, lifestyle choice. The ancient Greeks loved it and still managed to come up with democracy and really complicated maths. We seem to be overlooking the fact that Christianity and the views thereof are only two thousand years old.

But the many people who believed that homosexuality should be decriminalised never intended that this should create the proselytising Gay Liberation Movement. The Act decreed that homosexual acts should be “between consenting adults in private” Between means involving two; adult meant 21; and private means behind locked doors. But now the love which once dare not speak its name, shrieks at us in high camp from decorated floats along the high street.

To the best of my knowledge, homosexuals aren’t rampantly fucking in the streets on the back of decorated floats. There are, undoubtedly, homosexuals in the street and, by definition; everything they do is a homosexual act, but so what? There’s chavs too and I find them infinitely more offensive and far more likely to make my life worse than two queens copping off.

Similarly with abortion law reform, the public was told by its supporters that legalised abortion would abolish the damage to women’s health at the hands of the back street abortions. No one at the time thought that a humane Act designed to remove an identifiable evil would lead to abortion on demand, abortion in fact as merely another form of contraception. So now 200,000 embryos every year are ripped, untimely, from the womb just because people fear that a child would interfere with their lifestyle.

Hyperbole powers ACTIVATE!

Ripped untimely indeed, someone’s been reading Macbeth. I can see the point of this argument though; too many people don’t take responsibility for their own actions and, as a result, look for the easy way out. This has got fuck all to do with being secular mind you, but it’s a good point.

The new social morality introduced via these various “reforms” has its dark side. Even the progressive Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported in 1998 that broken families have a higher risk of nine varieties of deprivation: poverty and poor housing; being poorer when they are adults; behaviour problems; performing less well at school; needing medical treatment; leaving school/home when young; becoming sexually active, pregnant or a parent at an early age; depressive symptoms; high levels of smoking, drinking and drug use.

Again, this has nothing to do with being secular. It is possible to be a moral person without bending knee to praise some omniscient git and this sort of self-righteous waffle simply lends itself to further ridicule of the church. The act of departing from a religious centre doesn’t make the “new social morality” any less valid than the old moribund, church bound one. The issue is ignorance and responsibility. We have a burgeoning population of morons who breed before the age of twenty, marry after six months and divorce after nine. Could religion help? Possibly, but the presence of religion is no more implicit with morality than its absence is with social decline.

You might think that, noticing the social benefits of marriage, any government would do all in its power to strengthen the institution. But when, as chancellor, Gordon Brown was presented with these infelicities, he refused to arrange the tax system so that it discriminated in favour of marriage as a proven social good: “I mean practical, sustained help, whenever and wherever families need it, in whatever circumstances they find themselves; not by making ideological judgements but seeking always to find the best way to support every child.”

Supporting x to the detriment of y doesn’t seem to me, to be a very good way to run a society, effectively penalising people for not breeding, doubly so. It’s all well and good to talk of strengthening the institution but it’s pointless until the previously mentioned issues of divorce and abortion are resolved. Money is not the problem.

When it comes to the religious aspect of social issues, the devout Muslim reproaches the secularised for their valueless consumerism and reckless hedonism and urges us to accept Islamic values. What do we reply? “No, thank you. We’ve got our own values - and if you don’t like them we’ll fire a salvo of condoms at you.”

Again, secularism is not synonymous with consumerism and reckless hedonism. At least, no more so than a Pope who lives in a city made of marble that’s filled with a world’s worth of art and treasure… These are precisely the sort of broad brushstrokes that result in the belief that religion is out of date, out of touch and increasingly detached from reality.

Over the past 40 years we have lived under a “liberalisation” that has abolished the idea of the holy and replaced the dignity and moral status of the person with a merely instrumental definition of that once noble term. How truly Nietzsche prophesied that, after the death of God, crass utilitarianism would result in “pig philosophy”.

Bollocks. At least, if you’ve actually read Nietzsche it is. What the death of God results in is the eventual birth of the Übermensch and the conquest of nihilism which, when you consider that he believed that Christianity was a nihilistic construct, seems like a somewhat self-defeating statement to make. Indeed, it smacks of something clever to end an essay on.

And on that note

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

“Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants?

“Behold, I teach you the overman! The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go!”

– Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann