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Followers or thinkers?

By Ian Nance - posted Wednesday, 14 March 2018


Religion hit the road running when ex-Cabinet minister, Philip Ruddock, was appointed last November to head up a panel trying discover whether Australian law protects the human right to religious freedom adequately. He is due to report back at the end of March.

It is interesting that in a nation professing an egalitarian culture the idea of freedom is given a secular link with religion. That move seems to reflect the aging Judeo-Christian background of our forebears.

The legalising of same-sex marriage has seen a variety of proposals for reform to protect freedom of religion. Many of these proposals go beyond the immediate issue of marriage.

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But isn’t Australia battling to choose between freedom of religion, and freedom from religion? Holy Guacamole!  Just what in heaven’s name do you believe in?

If you believe in the absolute right to think whatever you wish, then what gives you a right to impose any ancient belief system driven by an intangible dogma upon others?

Undeniable truth should be what inspires your beliefs, thought processes, and behaviour. Or are you a little like a herded sheep, just going along with the mob without valid research behind your opinions?

Disturbingly, our culture and that of most countries, includes a high measure of belief in some form of deity. That is ingrained into societies by being adopted habitually.  Belief in supernatural beings could well be due to ideology’s being a component of our consciousness.

From early childhood we are likely to regard as true the existence of spirits, demons, and gods as an intrinsic part of our entity, for example the Boogie Man.

Conviction is often reinforced if we are indoctrinated into a religion where what passes for truth is often believed and accepted because it stems from some authority figure.

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Growing up with a notion of such imagined beings tends to make adult humans reliant on a creed which suggests that events are caused by intelligent matter, not as a result of one’s own conduct.

There is also the hypothesis that our spiritual history may have sprung from the need to cope with the threats to the survival of our ancestors in the wild. A person who perceived intelligent and potentially dangerous beings everywhere was more likely to survive than a person who failed to perceive actual threats, such as wild animals, or human enemies.

Humans are also inclined to think that there is a reason or explanation for the existence of something as an end purpose or goal. This activity is known as teleology, or finality.

The word teleology comes from two Greek words: telos an end, a goal, a purpose, and logos, a reason or explanation, an example of teleology in nature being when Aristotle claimed that an acorn’s telos was to become a fully grown oak tree.

When people take a teleological stance, they may ascribe meaning and significance to their surroundings, a trait which may lead people to believe in a creator-deity. This may have developed as a side effect of human social intelligence, the ability to discern what other people are thinking, whose stories about encounters with supernatural beings are especially likely to be re-told, passed on, and embellished. 

As belief in deities spread, humans led to leaving offerings to the gods and praying to them for assistance, ideas which are seen in all cultures around the world.

The idea of divine help is embedded strongly, yet flies in the face of reality.

Lonely and fearful societies tend to invent wrathful, violent, submission-seeking gods, while happier and secure societies tend to invent loving, non-violent, compassionate deities.

Devotees of a supreme being abandon their own personal responsibility and transfer it to that being. Something other than themselves decides on ethics or morality, whilst they also adopt the deluded belief in the ability of that being to forgive transgressions.

Many times, a strong belief in principles of a religion demands the ability to think deeply on its propositions. Perhaps most adherents choose not to analyse, but to follow dictates of persons professing a depth of knowledge about it.

There exist amongst many people, high personal attributes of kindness, peace, and loving care, not due to any action of a divine being, but nonetheless encompassed by the doctrinal guidance of a religion. There are many famed historical examples of such admired folk but they are also overshadowed by the enormous number of unknown doers of good works in, and for, society

This is not to suggest that those outstanding individuals who show selfless concern for the well being of others are impervious to religious belief, but I believe that goodwill and strong ethical efforts are not purely the outcomes of religion.

Helping concern springs from the innate positive disposition which exists in all humans until the time comes when they are affected adversely by the actions of those who are at a different level or standard of anxiety about the suffering and misfortunes of others.

 Over millennia, religion has blended closely with politics to capture control and power over citizens who may threaten the intentions of potential despots by asking too many questions or raising strong objections.

Both political and religious leaders have had access to the power and ability to target spiritual or temporal goals which if they could not be achieved by convincing the populace to abide by the rules of some alleged deity, could be gained by force.

Widespread religious acceptance and conformity over many centuries led to the masses being readily swayed or manipulated to carry out wrong actions in the misguided belief in the rightness of doing so. Evidence of this lies in the Crusades, a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin Church in the medieval period.

The most commonly known Crusades were those in the Eastern Mediterranean aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule. But the term also applied to other church-sanctioned campaigns. These were fought for a variety of reasons including the suppression of paganism and heresy, the resolution of conflict among rival Roman Catholic groups, or for political and territorial advantage.

In today’s times of conflict, we still find the practice of offering prayers to some powerful yet peace loving and compassionate supreme being to annihilate the enemy. 

In present day battle and insurgency settings where survivors or witnesses are interviewed by broadcast media, we note the strong effects of traditional religious conditioning upon interviewees in their readiness to use phrases implying dependence on some form of deity.

 They use terms such as “God willing”, ‘Saints be praised”, and “With the blessing of Allah”, posing an abandonment of personal decision making and the willing of responsibility for an outcome upon some fictitious divinity. The near-automatic quotes ignore the fact that everyone is responsible for the results of their own actions, speech, and attitude, the principle behind karma.

Despite any amount of sincere pleading, imaginary beings are not going to fix any problem.

Individuals are the only ones who can do so by being responsible and true to themselves and not absolving responsibility for outcomes in some form of cop out.

The spiritual lifestyle which I pursue and endorse is Buddhism.  That persuasion does not recognise any form of deity or supreme being, thus is atheistic.

Yet like many theistic religions who have participated in bloody conflict, it is now suffering its own humiliating and unforgivable fate at the hands of some disciple monks in Sri Lanka. That nation has a large proportion of its population claiming Buddhism yet influenced by the extremely temporal objectives of these monks who seem to overlook the malevolence of greed, anger, envy, and hatred. A previous long war against the Tamil Tigers, a violent rebel group purporting to speak for the Tamil minority, brought hard-line Buddhists into their own once more.

Portraying that war as a mission to protect the Sinhalese and Buddhism, nine monks were elected to parliament on a nationalist platform. Their BBS, Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Power Force, has embraced direct action, following the example of other like-minded groups.

It has raided Muslim-owned slaughter-houses claiming, incorrectly, that they were breaking the law, and also took part in a demonstration outside a law college alleging, again incorrectly, that exam results were being distorted in favour of Muslims. Muslims seem to be these nationalists' main target, along with evangelical Christians whom they accuse of deceitfully and cunningly converting people away from Buddhism. Traditional religious intolerance appears to run rampant in this isle.

Thus in this allegedly Buddhist environment, the minority Muslim population is being subjected to gross violations of their civil and spiritual rights by a mindless mob of religiously-conditioned zealots.

A similar sort of occurrence could arise here in Australia if extreme right wing groups are successful in intensifying hatred of our Muslim countrymen.

It is sadly regrettable that so many of this world’s predicaments can be traced back to acceptance of the existence and power of mythical divinities.

The mindless following of religious tenets gives me to say...thank God I’m an atheist.

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About the Author

Ian Nance's media career began in radio drama production and news. He took up TV direction of news/current affairs, thence freelance television and film producing, directing and writing. He operated a program and commercial production company, later moving into advertising and marketing.

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