The Apocralypse
I spend my time on Fundies Say The Darndest Things, Normal Bob Smith and the Skeptics' Annotated Bible. Living in Northern Ireland can be a little bit like living in the Bible Belt; there's always a religious nutjob (or several) in government, and fundamentalist assholes run around throwing Chick Tracts at you and screaming about your usual eternal hellfire. Using the afore-mentioned resources, I can pretty much strip down these batshit types to their true motivations: moral superiority, homophobia and bigotry. And you know one of their rock-solid witnessing tools? I'm sure you've heard it.
"Okay, but what does it hurt to just believe? If it's true, you go to paradise for believing. If it's not, then it doesn't matter. But what if it's TRUE and you DON'T believe? Then it's Hell for you, girlie!"
That's a simple question to answer. They believe out of fear - fear that a 'loving' God with MAJOR insecurity issues will torture them horrifically with no end, ever, at all just because they had the audacity not to go "okay, I think you're real". They ignore the eighty billion contradictions and logical fallacies in the Bible. You know 1984's doublethink? Fundies got it goin' on.
According to the bible, insects have four legs. So does poultry. God created light before he created the sun. Dinosaurs either didn't exist, or lived with man. The great flood wiped out all living creatures, including underwater mammals (and dinosaurs). Once Noah's Ark landed, the animals somehow carefully redistributed themselves back around the globe. Jesus' last words on the cross have been listed as three completely different lines. You can point all this out to a fundie, and they'll come up with absolutely hilarious excuses. Let's take the first point: "Maybe insects only had four legs back then."
"Oh, so you mean they evolved two extra legs?"
"I HAVE TO GO, THINK ABOUT ACCEPTING JESUS AS YOUR PERSONAL SAVIOUR."
Men lived to be nine hundred years old. Science is a huge conspiracy to oust believers. All languages originated from the Tower of Babel. Archaeology is to be ignored unless sea shells are found in mountain rock, which is immediately a coup for creationism because it proves the great flood. Yeah. Doublethink.
What got me thinking about this (enough to blog it) was this quote on FSTDT about science. Snipped the irrelevent parts.
So I say: Let's remove all the contributions both Christians and the Jews have made. And lets see if science can stand without us, and our findings. Don't think that would be much? NASA, and everything they do today would not exist. In fact we would still be in the dark ages as far as science is concerned. And we would more than likely be a third world nation under the control of a dictatorship.
The most concise response to that twaddle was this:
Somebody sarcastically asked if transubstantiation was the fundie's scientific contribution, and it resulted in me dodging traffic in Memory Lane.
Nobody in my primary school tried to explain it to me. Once I celebrated my Holy Communion and started sticking my tongue out to get the stuff that edible paper is made out of (you couldn't accept the 'wafer' - it's not a wafer, durnit - in your hand until your Confirmation) it was accepted that when they were all "Jesus sed liek this iz mah bodee" it was all symbolic. It wasn't until the nun-run convent grammar school in second year that anyone brought up the word "transubstantiation".
Our religion teacher that year was English, but a devout Catholic (you had to be, to get that job). And she informed us that it was REALLY Jesus flesh. I asked, tentatively, why it tasted like edible paper and not two thousand year old human. She told me to shut up. Transubstantiation means when the priest waves his hands over the wafers and says some magic words, it literally turns into zombie Jesus' body. And then we fucking EAT IT.
The class around me were disinterested, ready to take her at her word, as they'd been indoctrinated long ago. Me, on the other hand - Mum had always held to the "it's symbolic" theory and I wasn't about to believe that we were all MAGIC CANNIBALS. I asked if the Church had ever given a consecrated host (wafer) to a science lab to see if they could prove that it had spontaneously turned into human flesh. Once again, I was told to shut up.
I'd always had deep misgivings about my religion. It didn't seem to make sense. In the Old Testament, God ordered holy men to "take the babies' heads and dash them upon the rocks". He ordered holy men to kill entire towns; men, women, children - pregnant women, which is a double whammy. And this guy is supposed to be MY judge? He's telling ME how to be a moral human being? And he's anti-homosexuality, which is an abomination - just like shrimp, shaving, work on Saturday, and bunny rabbits? He's anti-abortion? But the guy was into infanticide and mass-murder!
I pinpoint that day in class, being repeatedly told to shut up for using my brain and the gift of critical thinking, when I was informed that Mass is actually some Satanic sacrifical cannibalistic orgy, as the day that I dropped Catholicism at the tender age of 13. I didn't mind some of the New Testament; Jesus was a real hippie, and I can respect a hippie. But if you have to throw out almost all the Bible to make it fit into your morals, then you're cherry-picking your religion because you don't want to admit that it's bullshit. Maybe we die and there's fuck all. Maybe we die and there's a whole bunch of crazy dimensions. Maybe there's even a god, but it sure as hell isn't the bastard humans invented in the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah. That god was created in the minds of people, and most of them were total assholes. And it's the Judeo-Christian god that has held back scientific progress and social justice, showering bigotry and intolerance down on its believers.
Liberal religious people - non-fundamentalists - are fine. I know a lot of Christians who believe in most of the New Testament, who model themselves after Jesus, who believe that love is love (regardless of gender) and slavery (promoted in the Bible, even by JC himself) is shit. All people are equal, regardless of what country they're in or what gods they do or don't follow. I'm really close with a liberal Jewish girl, who is very likely the outright nicest person I've met. Nicole's dating a Muslim fella, and we talked about religion and fundies all night about a month ago. He wrote my name in Arabic and taught me a lot about liberal Muslims; he doesn't so much as think women should wear headscarfs.
It's these people that reinforce my belief that individual faith should never be restricted, even if it stretches to Scientology. They're what stops me from crossing the line into anti-religion. But when fundamentalists gain power, be it in the Bible Belt, the White House, Iran or here at home, it's cause for fear. Evangelical Christians believe that the Apocalypse will bring about the Second Coming, and the rapture. Do we want people like that forming our foreign policies? Using their religious homophobia to suppress an innocent minority? Spreading propaganda and insisting that Creationism should be taught in science classes? Or, closer to home, that the Darwin exhibition at the Ulster Museum should be removed, or placed opposite a Creationism exhibit (which would contain WHAT, exactly)?
Normal Bob Smith fervently believes that religion will be the death of all of us. Worryingly, it's not that hard to see where he's coming from.