All this pious piffle and proselytising about gods… many find the supernatural bizarre, pathological and harmful to society. In fact, like obeisance to royalty, religion is so bonkers it makes astrology look respectable.
Religiosity and self-righteousness are so often used as a cover for personal prejudice, racism, bigotry and all kinds of inner conflicts, complexes and hang-ups, while in society, religion often mobilises to oppose change and progress, especially around basic issues of democracy, human rights, women’s rights and the death penalty.
Worse, it’s frequently used as a justification for the kind of monstrous acts we currently see in the middle-east, as well as being a tool for controlling the population, with a line of ‘just accept it, it’s god’s will, and so on.
This attitude of ‘let it be’ and loyalty to scriptural interpretation is a view which steers the religious away from politics. Just look in Britain today – polycrises, injustice, suffering, refugees, foodbanks, homelessness, a million kids don’t even have their own bed… Yet the plastic Christians on here and elsewhere are as quiet as church mice about it (unlike ABC Welby who recently came out to remind them of British and Christian values, and even got criticised for it!).
In fact the co-existence in the same person of ‘holier than thou’ and ‘devil may care’ brings to mind a Jekyll and Hyde figure who uses religion as a form of insurance against, or even justification for his/her own inner monstrousness – a sort of roof prop which prevents the whole edifice from collapsing.
Opiate of the masses? A sort of inner ‘Cliff Richard’?
