Why do the heathen rage?

Daniel Thwaites, Contributor

There's been so much chupidniss in this newspaper recently regarding religion that it's time to bun a fyah and return some of the smirking contempt. I fear a secular fundamentalism is replacing an equally deplorable religious one, and there are sound reasons for rejecting them both.

Today, I simply want to note a little blind spot typical of the strident irreligionists, most of whom imagine themselves fighting valiantly for some cause du jour that conflicts with what dem granny did teach dem.

One too many times I've read a version of the following sophistry: "Religion is the cause of the world's woes ... . We all know the history." Well, we do NOT all know the history, or at least I don't! Because I do not agree for a moment that religion has been the primary engine and driver of conflict among men, and I believe that man will war with man regardless of religious belief or the lack thereof.

Check it out. Almost anything or any idea can have its history written as a catalogue of disaster ... . Consider asphalt roads, motor cars, industrial production, steel, business. I could sketch a history of the motor car holding it responsible for causing Henry Ford's industrial slavery, environmental pollution from burning fossil fuels, a mounting death rate from accidents and commuting stress, the slaughter of horses, depletion of urban air quality, soul-depleting suburban built environments, teenage pregnancies at drive-in theatres, and the tyre fire at Riverton dump last month.

With a little practice and historical knowledge, you can spin a similar tale about almost any commodity (gold, sugar, cotton, timber, codfish, etc), and almost any idea (capitalism, communism, family, romantic love, the five-day workweek, etc.).

This is a juvenile jujitsu passing for thinking, and it just betrays ignorance of the archaeology of our moral ideas. In fact, Christianity is not particularly productive of carnage and has done much to staunch human misery.

So why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? I think it's personal issues with the rulebook.

FERAL HOMOPHOBIA VS GAYTHEISM

In Jamaica, we seem caught between feral homophobia and an emerging gaytheist movement. I say this while supporting the extension of rights and protections to gays because I believe in God-given basic dignity for all humans. People ought not to be punished for harmless proclivities they cannot control, regardless that it may annoy or disgust me. But to the gaytheist, I say: If you remove God's call for mercy and the forgiveness of human frailty from my reasoning, why would I not just remove the annoyance and destroy what disgusts me?

By the way, Christianity and Christians did not start slavery, and most people who have practised slavery have not been Christians. It was Christians who ended it, though! Orlando Patterson's Freedom is a good place to start on the uniqueness of the idea of liberty in the Western world.

It was Nietzsche, parson pickney, who showed that all the respectable liberal pieties actually derive from a religious root, and that if "God is dead" (meaning that the idea of God loses its social and cultural force), the foundation stone is removed.

Nietzsche marvelled at the silliness of those who felt they could destroy Christianity but keep the whole superstructure of liberal morality in place, as if you can have all the fruits of Christianity without the actual inconvenience of the religion. That comedy continues today among the herd of independent minds and 'pious freethinkers', all of whom think so freely they agree on practically everything. Memba mi tell yuh: Nowadays, conformist thinking and attitudes are never more prevalent than among those who proclaim themselves progressive.

How quaint! The cocksure gaytheists and secular moralists wish to retain the idea of moral laws despite jettisoning the idea of a Lawgiver. But this shallow moralism is parasitic on the Christian body it wishes was a carcass. Plus, never was a medieval cardinal quite as converted as are the secularists convinced about the inalienable rights they keep manufacturing. Chances are, if you hear a strict, unbending, sanctimonious and preachy tone, it's coming from some gay-marriage crusader, not from a churchman.

Anyway, the core of religion is experiencing the sacred and holy in community, not intellectual doctrine. Therefore, pointing out that Noah's Ark was too small, or that Egypt's beasts all died in plague 6, but got boils in 7 and lost their firstborn again in plague 10, is quite beside the point. After all the science, and even after your karma runs over your dogma, the experience of the sacred abides.

If science is 'knowledge that', for example, the earth revolves around the sun, and that water is hydrogen and oxygen, religion is more about 'knowledge how', 'knowledge why' and 'knowledge what' of our deeper social and cultural lives. It is told through heroes, mythic stories, rituals, metaphors and analogies.

How does one endure suffering, betrayal, remorse, guilt? How to express gratitude for the mysteries of life, grace, redemption? Why does our tribe do this, and not that? What does one do after the birth or death? What are we to experience and feel in the inexact calculus of our emotional lives? I would say that these are essential kinds of knowledge.

Remember that in terms of government and politics, atheism is not an untried creed, but was official policy of one-third of the globe last century. And if Christianity must be held accountable for the wickedness of its princes, atheism must account for its tyrants - Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Pol Pot, and the degenerate and comically sinister Kim dynasty in North Korea, to name just a few.

When Carloman, uncle to Charlemagne, tricked, then slaughtered his opponents, his Christian conscience caused him to abdicate and place himself in a monastery for the rest of his days. Mao and Stalin don't seem to have been perturbed about exterminating millions.

Our most precious ideas (hear the Heptones or Dennis Brown in your head now) that "every man have an equal right to live and be free, no matter what colour, class or race he may be" are, in fact, quite fragile, and are not obviously or inevitably in the future of humankind.

So here's my caution: if you love the fruit, don't cut the root. Even secularists can hearken to Churchill's sly response to the commendation he was a "pillar of the Church": "No, no, not a pillar of the Church, but a flying buttress, supporting it from the outside."

Daniel Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.