Followers or thinkers?

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.