Thursday, 5/22/97 Religion and politics Religion a social
construct which serves to enforce cultural laws
By Jake Sexton "If God did not exist it would be necessary to
invent Him." — Voltaire I guess I am the token agnostic/atheist on
this panel. Actually, I’m a skeptic, meaning that I don’t believe
in anything. When I was young, I couldn’t differentiate Bible
stories from fairy tales. Cinderella met her fairy godmother, Moses
met his holy Father, what’s the difference? After I understood a
bit more about religion, I was both disgusted and amused by some of
the hypocrisy I viewed. "Those silly Greeks, ha ha ha, they
believed in a whole bunch of gods which represented various states
of the physical world, who all battled each other for supremacy and
had human emotions." How quaint. We are now, of course, far wiser
and in every way superior to the Greeks. We now know that the world
is run by a bearded omnipresent force who has a son with magical
healing powers. And his enemy is a red man with horns and a pointy
tail. All religions have the same evidence that their view of
reality is correct: none. Sure, they all have their "legitimate"
religious texts which "prove" that they’ve got it right. "I know
the Bible’s divine truth cuz it says so right here on page 47." So
in my mind, Christian mythology is just as likely to be true as
atheist mythology or Buddhist mythology or Heaven’s Gate mythology.
So I can’t buy into any of them. For all I know, the Bible was
written by a couple of drunks a few thousand years ago. In a
cultural anthropology class I took some years back, we were shown
how a society’s political/governmental structure was strongly
reflected in the society’s religion. For instance, pastoral
societies believed in powerful deities watching over them like
shepherds. Such evidence cuts both ways: One could claim that
beliefs are Truth and shape the society or, as I believe, the
religion is a social construct, created in the image of the society
and its features. Let’s see how that works with Christianity, the
de facto official religion of the United States … The two main
hierarchies in the United States are political and economic (I’ll
look at the corporate structure). We have little say in our
government, which is different from Christianity or corporations,
in which one has no say, but after choosing who will rule the
country, it’s largely out of our hands. You can try to contact the
"big guy" (president/God/CEO), but with little or no
acknowledgment. The lower echelons (congressmen and civil
servants/angels and saints/vice presidents and upper management)
are more accessible by the people. The lower one goes, the more
ease of access (local school board member/clergyman/supervisors and
managers), but these people have less power. But despite the lack
of control over the hierarchy, we should all unthinkingly obey the
rules of the sacred documents (Bible/Constitution/ "Wealth of
Nations"), and have faith, even if it contradicts our own
experiences and expectations. One must accept the permanence and
"rightness" of the overarching structure. In some ways, this view
is very Marxist; the religious opiate prevents people from
unbalancing the status quo. And I do believe that religion can have
a detrimental effect on the masses, should they decide that their
lives can be bettered through prayer instead of social change. I
think the secondary purpose of religion is to make explicit certain
cultural rules. When these rules become integral to the society,
they are often made into law. The best example is marriage. Some
religions permit various styles of polygamy, yet American laws
prohibit such things. In fact, they even tell who can and can’t get
married: only male/female couples over the state-mandated age, who
can afford marriage licenses (can I just say here that Bill Clinton
is the Judas of the gay rights cause? Thank you). What if you
practiced some other religion allowing very young people to marry?
Well, find a new country, I guess. For better or for worse, they
don’t allow it here. Now we get to a tricky part, specific to the
United States. Although we are supposed to be free to worship as we
will (or won’t), the system (and sometimes democracy) can get in
the way. The first example is when one’s religious beliefs are
anti-social: If your religion believes that it’s OK to dismember
unsuspecting passersby, well, that could be a problem. The state
overrides your free religious expression, and most would agree that
that is a good thing. It’s an issue of the rights of the few and
the rights of the many. Which leads to the second example: What if
the majority in a community vote to establish certain religious
curricula in their schools (the way that Vista, the city next to my
hometown opted to start teaching Creationism instead of evolution)?
Doesn’t the community have the right to make decisions about the
education of their own children? But then again, doesn’t the
individual have the right to not be indoctrinated? Or not face
ostracism if they choose to exercise their "right" (?) to skip the
class? I have no answers for these questions. But my own personal
preference is to not have other people’s religions shoved in my
face.