Ready to piss some people off?
Good! Because so am I.
See, I don’t really feel bad about annoying some of the most powerful institutions in the world. Some of them have dominated wide swaths of humanity for literally thousands of years, suppressing independence, science, and individuality.
Suppression of culture, independence, science, and the like? That all falls to the organizations, not the individuals. There’s a difference between the organizations and the people that fall under their power, but we can get into that later on. We have time, you and I.
The organized part of religion is especially guilty of this, having committed so many fucking atrocities throughout history that should we bring up the concept of penance… Well… They’d be hellbound for sure, if such a thing existed.
See, the very statistics here in Canada dictate that Atheists like me are firmly in the minority, as at least 50%+ of the population self-identifies as some sort of Christian, at least as far back as a decade ago. Us atheists barely take silver at about a quarter of the population, give or take. And that’s not even starting to consider the myriad of other religions that make up the social fabric in the demographic numbers below those two! Not that they’re innocent, as we well know from history.
Anybody know if the Buddhists are clean?
So yes, we’ll focus today largely on the bigger religions of the world in this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries. The ones with the most power and influence over society throughout history. And if my normal amounts of hate mail are anything to go by, I expect the sheer spite to double after this! I’m almost developing a sort of masochistic glee every time some fuckhead tries to anonymously rake me over the coals at this point, because as per video game logic – when you encounter more enemies, you’re going the right way.
I’ll fight all eight billion of you if I have to. Think of how powerful I’d be after all that grinding!
So where do we start?
Let’s start back at church and bible camp as a kid. Because of course I wouldn’t rip religion a new one without at least having read some of the text. I’m not a complete monster, just most of one.
My family grew up largely atheist, with the obvious exception of Ukrainian cultural practices that were deeply rooted in Orthodox Christianity. As kids, we were curious, naturally, so when my schoolyard friend and his family were signed up for bible camp in addition to their normal churchgoing routine, I opted in as well.
Even back then, I never understood the concept of sitting in a room on a Sunday, one of only two days off from school, and listening to some random dude preach his interpretation of a book. Like, who was the authority that deemed this book to be a perfect guide on how to live one’s life? Why should I worship some make-believe dude in the sky with a wide-ranging spread of atrocities and shitty behaviours to his name as written in said book? And why should I help support an organized form of worship that forces me to become subservient to not just some god, but the entirety of the institution as well?
These were the sorts of questions I didn’t have answers to until later. Because if there’s anything organized religion is extremely good at, it’s heavy-handed social policing based on perceived moral value. Institutions in general don’t like questions. Government or not. Not that every single pastor is guilty of it, moreso that they’re choosing to adhere to a system in which it is rampant, which is being guilty by association, in some of my redneck circles.
And I guess that’s the first tenet of organized formal religiosity – it’s an experiment in groupthink, really.
In bible camp, we learned positive moral values according to the bible. I played Jesus in the little skit of the last supper, giving people fish to eat.
Not a bad idea, as far as they go. Feed the hungry, help the poor.
And that’s always where it starts, right?
I’m a history major, so I know more about the formation of christianity than some christians, which gives me something to laugh about, really. But I’m not here to pick fights with basic concepts of kindness, because I actually hold many of those values sacrosanct in my own worldview. There are plenty of Abrahamic believers out there that actually DO practice what they preach in terms of helping others, as many groups devoted to helping the homeless and addicted prove. I think that’s what’s truly messy here – dissecting the genuinely good people from the toxic and manipulative belief systems.
At the root, the idea of a single man – be it Moses or Jesus, preaching equality? Even for people back in the Roman and Egyptian Empires that were slaves? That was a big one, because it checks the first box on widespread adaptability of an idea – a belief system that applies to everyone, regardless of social standing.
You should already know I am fascinated with social engineering at this point. I actively had to promise to myself I wouldn’t pull an L. Ron Hubbard.
Which is why at first christianity itself was shunned and persecuted. Jesus was walking around telling Roman elites that the people they saw as lesser beings, literal property, were not only equal to them in the eyes of his god, but that they could achieve salvation and ascendance in heaven.
No wonder the idea took off like a gunshot, eh?
Imagine you’re a slave, damned to work the fields, play servant, whatever, and all of a sudden this guy shows up and tells you that nirvana is waiting, insofar as you repent and believe!
Sucks that it comes after death, eh?
Religion usually works that way, after all. You need a flock, a population of people who will believe your ideas and perpetuate them after you wind them up. There is no better group than the oppressed for this flock development concept, which often leads oppressed peoples throughout history to join up to causes that might cause them and their society more harm in the long run.
Besides, Abrahamic faiths are simpler and easier to understand!
While I often lump all the Abrahamic faiths together based on common ancestry, back in the polytheist Roman days, if you needed something, you would pray to a specific god that was theoretically in command of that realm. Love, Harvests, War, there was always a specific god that could fill in.
With Abrahamic faiths, for possibly the first time in over seventy thousand years of proto-humanity, you could pray to a single god that just encompassed all of them!
So… Promised salvation after death in exchange for belief, worship, and devotion? Not having to remember dozens of pesky individual gods, and being able to pray to just one?
Holy hell that sounds like a deal!
Now, in bible camp, we never got into the nitty gritty of the “Why.”
Indoctrination of children comes best from painting the world in blacks and whites and telling them to adhere to that system, whatever it may be, with the four quadrants of positive and negative punishment and reinforcement to back it up. I cannot count the number of children I have taught over the years who have come in various shades of religious indoctrination. Oftentimes, they have been taught not to question their worldviews in such a heavy-handed manner, that truth and knowledge can sometimes be seen as a mortal threat to their way of life. They become quite adept at reinforcing their own belief systems by directly clashing with opposing viewpoints, even. Strike first, strike hard, or some such philosophy I assume.
Good educators function in almost the exact opposite dynamic, in that instead of instilling knowledge as the end-all, be-all, critical thinking forms the basis and the focus of the spreading of said knowledge. Questions like “why” and “how” are held sacrosanct in education, whilst being discouraged or bylined in more religious institutions.
Similar functions, with vastly different forms.
Let’s not forget too that the majority of our public and private education system comes directly from religious institutions – dating back to early monastery traditions and evolving later into boarding and grammar schools. Canada for example loves to sweep the straight up kidnapping and murder of indigenous children in christian-run residential schools under the rug. Not that those early Jesuits are around to answer for their crimes of rape, murder, cultural genocide, and kidnapping.
Increasingly in our society, we’re starting to see the cracks forming between the religious right and the rest of society who want rights, freedoms, and independence.
I won’t even get STARTED on the abortion debate as a perfect example of moral and ethical values based on religious beliefs infringing upon the individual rights of other citizens. It’s a perfect example.
See, due to the historical power of organized religion, nobody has really been allowed to stand up to it. And this inherent power has not only allowed it to evade justice for everything from pedophilia to the kidnapping of children, but also has been used to silence dissidents.
Go read up on Galileo as a perfect example of some of the tragedies of religious power. Holy wars and genocides are rife everywhere one looks.
Now personally, I did enormous amounts of research over the years, and didn’t arrive at the beliefs I hold now until my early twenties.
In a nutshell? I hold The Empirical Method as holy as any piece of religious doctrine. I frequently will state that science is my religion, as more and more we have witnessed the attacks of the religious right on science and scientists in general, hearkening back to old Galileo despite being centuries past his death.
But before my religion was science, I first delved into spirituality, researching the roots of my more pagan histories. Both Slavic and Celtic traditions are full of all sorts of neat, dead old spirits and gods. The old witches, shamans, and druids believed that many of these supernatural creatures roamed all around and were responsible for many of the things we have happen all around us.
But despite hunting for a proper Domovoy for decades, I eventually had to realize that old superstitions are often just as hokey and fake as many of the mainstream religions. My modern witchy practices and spookery is more for my own amusement than anything.
So I went back to christianity of course, rereading the bible for guidance or knowledge. Unfortunately, even as a preteen, some of the stories only destroyed any belief I had further that I wasn’t being lied to.
I think my biggest piss-off is always the Binding of Isaac. If you ever wanted proof that the Abrahamic god was an egotistical, sick son of a bitch, even after the plagues, poxes, genocides, killings of firstborn sons, and drowning the world, look no further than Isaac.
See, in the biblical story which dates back to before Christianity in the Jewish era, god wants Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The reason? To have Abraham prove that he loves and fears god and would do anything for him.
I’m sure the original story is supposed to inspire some form of prostration before divinity, in the same vein as Paradise Lost was touted to be, but all I see is some sick fuck forcing a man to ritually sacrifice his son. It’s only after Abraham goes through with it that at the end, just before Isaac is killed, god has a dude show up, who goes: “lol, just kidding, you can sacrifice a sheep instead.”
I don’t give a fuck if your religion tells you to bow before a greater power. I refuse to sacrifice kids for a sick joke just to double down on grandstanding my fear of the divine.
I’ll fight any god to the death to save somebody like Isaac.
The garden of Eden is worse. Poor Eve wanted to evolve beyond ignorance, to grow, and she was damned entirely for it.
Ignorance is good. Knowledge is sin.
I will always stand against any god and organized religion that holds such a belief as a core tenet. Denying people the ability to grow is the most wretched of heresies in my eyes.
Listen, religious beliefs by themselves aren’t actually all that bad. The more moderate the belief, the less likely there is to be conflict. But one need only look south of the border at America to see how completely fucked the religious right is.
From QAnon conspiracies, to trying to force religious belief systems upon the rest of society, the power of religion in our greater societies is absolutely fucked. And the historical precedent many of the religions have, in addition to constitutional rights for protection, often mean that any defense against such shitty behaviours are rendered toothless due to religious protections.
It’s almost a perversion, that something designed to protect smaller religions from persecution from larger denominations, is now becoming a tool of the religious majority to shit on the rest of us.
Listen, if you want to learn the truth about some of the atrocities of religion, you need only google it. The silver lining to having all of human history and knowledge at your fingertips is that being ignorant is almost a sin in and of itself in the modern world.
Choosing to remain ignorant and small-minded is nigh-worse than remaining so against your will. But it’s not my right to live your life for you. That’s the whole point behind my beliefs in autonomy. I want everybody to be able to live as freely and openly as they feel, insofar as it never infringes on those same rights for everybody else.
I guess I’m so pissed off at religion largely because of the holier than thou attitude coming from a largely ignorant and stupid baseline. People are coerced into groupthink situations due to the power of social conditioning and community most formal churches provide. You become a part of a community that in many areas of the world, polices your very actions as an individual.
You can’t be gay, or you’re going to hell.
You can’t live in sin without being married, or you’re going to hell.
The list goes on and varies wildly depending on your own individual experience with specific subsects and locations.
There are more social contract pieces telling you that you cannot do things than anything else, really. How many “moral stories” are there in the various religious texts that dictate an ideal outcome or state an ultimatum rendered down by god?
Fuck that. No anarchist worth their salt would ever stand idly by as any god or human dictated down to another person.
It’s important to note that while one side sees the gospel as absolute truth, and the other views it as absolute garbage, the people are often innocent, when you truly regard the systems they are victims of.
The role that faith plays in building community often leads to legacies of intergenerational traumas, as we know very well. Look no further than the queer christian community to know that sad legacy.
So no, we cannot blame the individuals for being reinforced and indoctrinated by the systems of the organization, can we? It becomes a messy situation a la the Nuremberg trials if we are to attempt to somehow damn every single follower of a religion for the atrocities committed throughout history in each of their names.
And we must respect their individual rights up until the very moment it butts against the autonomy of others, truly. ‘Ere we become the very authoritarian monsters we make out the dictators of the religious right to be, those sorts who protest abortion clinics and damn poor girls and women who merely wish to live. Which is why lines in the sand such as Roe Vs. Wade and general body-autonomy are so very important to defend and uphold.
Yet, that autonomy is the key.
I know plenty of good christians who know consent, and autonomy, and make the world a much lovelier place.
And I know they are examples of how these organizations can luck out when the proper tenets and beliefs are adhered to. But the racism, sexism, and horrors of religious colonialism cannot be ignored, no matter how far back in history they were. The guilt, ironically, is carried on within the organization itself, not the generations that followed while supporting it, yet by choosing to stand with a formal organized institution, they’re perhaps willing to adopt a portion or portions of that guilt.
I guess it’s ultimately a good thing that the lord sacrificed his son to abolish us of all our sins, right?
Back in university, I took the odd course in Philosophy wherever possible. Epistemology wasn’t quite as fascinating to me as Ethics, as I’m sure readers of this series can suss out. However, the idea of a purely good god, or an indifferent one, was fascinating to me.
Clearly the Abrahamic faiths can only surmise that I myself am the most divine of holy divines, a challenge propagated by god himself to test faith and wit and will.
Or perhaps the indifference speaks the volumes, no?
I offer no damnation, at the end of the day.
We must acknowledge that religion is a hurdle as a species, and abandon it or adopt it to better suit a humanist future as an apex predator on this planet. That’s my belief as according to my religion – science, speaking to sustainability and progressivism.
Or else, it will be one of many other grim factors that drag us back into another dark age, as it has been proven to do many untold histories before.
At the end of the day, I wish to only play the serpent, and offer the apple, or pomegranate, to you. I’ll do what I always do. I’ll tell you exactly what it contains, as best I know – the entirety of human knowledge and sapiency. And then find somebody else to awaken to the best of my ability while you decide.
Maybe I just don’t get religion, because I’m just another dumb, disabled, redneck hick logger kid, after all. The only thing I seem to understand here is autonomy. The same autonomy that lets me write this article is the same autonomy that lets people practice their religions insofar as it doesn’t harm me or anybody else.
I’m only worth the weight of my words, you know?
And if at the end of the day you think I’m an asshole, and that’s where you end up? Then that’s where it ends up! I don’t hate you for it. You’re free to believe what you believe, and so am I. Just like Google Docs tries to uphold the social norm of capitalizing god throughout this article by highlighting it in blue, I also have the autonomy to ignore it. Agree to disagree.
We’ve grown long in the tooth, now. Ex-loggers like me have no time to pray to a god, much less talk about them. We’re all well aware of how damned those sorts of bastards already were from the start.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
