Down with God

[Re: “Church and state together again?” Letters, June 12] Championing religion, Paul Kokoski denounces as nihilistic “legislation that legalizes homosexuality, same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia and genetic manipulation.”

The havoc wreaked by the religious could be ignored if it were relegated to crusades and inquisitions of yesterday. But the disease spreads its virus today, transmitted by mad mullahs, rabid rabbis and born-again preachers gleefully anticipating end times. Convinced that their Saviour will appear only after Armageddon has engulfed the Middle East, rapture-lusting evangelicals have infiltrated the highest corridors of a hyper-power and allied themselves to seekers of global hegemony in a ruthless marriage of convenience.

With a compliant media and a population numbed by mindless entertainment, at no other time in history has a messianic cult wielded such potential for cataclysmic carnage.

Despite its frightening future and horrid past, despite the charlatanism of its television evangelists and the contradictions in its sacred texts, despite the corruption of its clergy and the hypocrisy of its followers, religion continues to be defended. God-given precepts provide a blueprint for righteous living, its apologists proclaim. It offers a true moral compass in a transient world, they insist.

These justifications betray not only a glaring cynicism but expose the ethical squalor of its proponents. Are believers so suspicious of rational thought that they distrust its capacity to distinguish right from wrong? And if it is to escape divine retribution that compels the faithful to behave decently, then what does that say about their true character?

Religion is a child of fear conceived in ignorance. Terrified of thunder, early man bestowed it omnipotence. Puzzled by life’s origins, he fabricated creation myths. Dreading mortality, he invented afterlife.

In an incomprehensible world, religion provided the comfort of answers, albeit concocted ones. But today, it has outlived its usefulness other than as an instrument of manipulation, with Sunday schools in the West to madrassas in the East intellectually castrating entire generations. This process is systemic and carries too much vested interests to crumble lightly. But neither is it eternal nor unstoppable. Its fruits are too visibly rotten, its stench too putrid to forever stand.

If nothing else, millennia waiting for Messiahs in vain will tire all but the pathologically delusional. The requiem mass may be distant but the funeral inevitable.

>>John Dirlik

I sense a common thrust behind Mr. Kokoski’s half-argued points, and I further sense that I disagree with the premises. Since the arguments are typically religious—in that the premises and the reasoning are not stated, but merely the conclusions—I’m forced to go out on a limb and attempt to provide them myself.

The thrust seems to be this: “Because God says so” is the beginning and end of every argument, and the application of this is (I expect) as follows:

I “misunderstand” the “authentic” separation of Church and State because I submit that it exists. The “authentic” Church and State Mr. Kokoski describes does not exist, in that he describes the Church as the State, which is the old system, where “God says so.”

I didn’t even attempt to equate Catholicism with totalitarianism. What I did was explain that the old Church—as a theocracy and a system of government, and not merely as a faith, as it stands today—fit the modern definition of totalitarianism perfectly.

In such a system, you do what the clergy says or you burn for it, because “God says so,” and heaven help you if you are not a Catholic. This is not how it is today because of the separation of Church and State. If there is another type to understand, then Mr. Kokoski should bring it to the attention of political scientists.

Augustine and his fellow Neo-Platonists enjoyed a long run of claiming ancient and longstanding ideas for early Christianity.

Plato and his reasoning were appropriated to explain a great many things: Transubstantiation and the old Church’s (notoriously) imperfect description of the cosmos, among others. In those days, it was customary for a philosopher to retroactively claim whatever he liked for Christianity, actual evidence notwithstanding, and so democracy is Christian because “God says so.”

When Mr. Kokoski stumbles on down the well-trod paths of “Absolute Values” (the real meat of fundamentalism) this leads him inescapably into the brambled mire of bigotry and his inevitable, ultimate denial of democracy.

God, he explains (without offering arguments, or even basic premises) is the ultimate and only arbiter of good and evil (the only two states), and democracy, though it is Christian, if actually used—God forbid—risks offending Him by arrogating His power to itself. Hence those horrible homosexuals—whom we all know God “hates”—finally getting hold of the rights proper only to normal people like Kokoski.

What Mr. Kokoski is describing is not democracy any more than the fundamentalist version of liberty—the mere freedom to choose God as fundamentalists describe him—is freedom.

Democracy is risky, imperfect, and unfortunately, it tends to do what its possessors like, rather than what a judgmental, fundamentalist conception of God would like them to.

Democracy—actual democracy—is beautiful precisely because it does not do what Mr. Kokoski would like it to.

>>William Richardson

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