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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Deadly fashion Me too religion By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 798 words Publication date: October 23, 2005 Earlier this year I received an email from a high school student somewhere in the Bible Belt. He wanted to know why atheists weren’t athletes. An ardent swimmer (a mile non-stop three times a week), I wrote back asking where he got that impression from. He told me it was because the atheists at his school were all drop-outs and Goths who wouldn’t be seen dead near the track while the jocks were all Christians. I got to thinking there were two reasons why the athletes were Christians. The first is that footballers, basketball players, track heroes and the like are not usually known for their mental abilities. Religion flourishes where critical thinking is absent. Ergo, athletes are more likely than scientists to be Christians. The second, more charitable, reason, is that most people, on and off the sports field, are unaccustomed to exercising their minds. It’s easier to accept other people’s opinions than to generate one’s own. When it comes to religion, jocks are no different from the rest of us. If everyone around me believes in God, then heck, I believe in God too. It’s not just athletes. At award ceremonies it’s almost obligatory for rap artists and other musicians to thank God for whatever statuette they are holding in their feverish hands. Mainstream politicians from left and right have to state a belief in God to ensure they even get on the primary ballot. As polls keep reminding us, most Americans call themselves Christians. If asked what that means, they will tell you that there’s a father figure on the flip side of reality and the far side of death who’s watching over them. So far, so depressing. But probe a little further, asking why they believe in God and some will start to flounder. They’ll offer vague rationales – “I feel him in my heart”, “well, someone must have made the world”. The more you push the more likely they are to admit that they don’t know why, but everyone else believes and so it must be true. This is faith as fashion. “I don’t know what it’s about but it’s cool so I’ll string along.” After all, Christianity is pretty easy to pick up. A few phrases here, the right attitude there, you convince not only others but yourself that you’re a true believer. But it’s only skin-deep. You can bet your last dollar that if it were cool to be Muslim jocks would face Mecca five times a day and Spring Break in Cancun would see diet soda being sprayed over girls in burqas. At first glance, true believers are different. They quote the Bible or Rick Warren. They are convinced that their faith is logical and infallible. They tell you that gaps in evolutionary theory are proof of a Creator or that the universe could not be the product of chance or that morality must come from the deity or they have personal experience of God’s blessings. Yet though their faith is stronger and they are better able to defend it, true believers are as much victims of fashion as their uncertain cousins. They have accepted the dominant ethos in their community, and having accepted it they devote all their intellectual skills to defend it. To defend it, but not to question it. It’s not just in America that religion is in fashion. Faith flourishes across the Muslim world, Africa and much of Latin America. The good news is that it for millions of people it is only a fashion. The bad news is, it can be deadly. Throughout history societies have been swept by illusions that masquerade for a few years as reality. Remember the chupacabros – the mysterious goatsucker a decade ago which miraculously was only seen by Latinos and only attacked their livestock? Or the belief that mediums could manifest “ectoplasm” that swept through Britain a century ago? But not all social fashions are as harmless as the chupacabros. In 1930s Germany the values promoted by National Socialists appeared reasonable to most citizens. The Nazis were voted into government and their pursuit of power destroyed the nation and millions of lives across Europe. Only the most extreme Christians in America today propose a holocaust for Jews, Muslims, homosexuals and other “undesirables”. But the James Dobsons and Roy Moores who speak for the religious right are as intent on remolding society as the Nazis were three generations ago. To many Americans their “values” appear as reasonable as the Nazis’ once did. Dobson and Moore would create a theocracy but in doing so they would destroy freedom. If they achieve their aim, it will be through the support of millions of people who are only Christians because their neighbors are. By the time they realized their mistake, it would be too late.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |