Choice in Dying

Religion is one lie after another: the lie of original sin, the lie of eternal life, the lie of hell, the lie of answered prayer, the lie that life can have no meaning without religion, the lie that religion is the source of morality, the lie of creationism, the lie of a spy-in-the-sky who hears your every word and reads your every thought. And to this list we must add the lie that it views men and women as equal. It has got away for so long with the kind of lunatic word-games that allow death-by-torture to be presented as an act of love, and eternal torment in the flames of hell to be seen as a necessary act of justice, that we should perhaps not be surprised that it has also managed to dupe its followers into seeing the systematic suppression and silencing of women as an act of liberation and equality. Nevertheless, it is a lie, like all the others: a cynical and wicked lie. It is time women everywhere woke up to it.

The quote is from Paula Kirby, over at The Washington Post, in an article entitled “Religion lies about women.” I would prefer to say just that religion lies, though amongst the lies of religion lies about women are perhaps the most salient. There is no mystery about this. Religions are almost everywhere the creations of men who, in most known societies, have held the greatest power — killing power, for the most part, and therefore the power to terrorize and subdue.

The most serious aspect of religion’s power is it’s power over children. At the heart of most religions is social order, usually focused on the family, on the association of a man, his woman or women, and his children. So important is this considered that the rights of the family are included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 16):

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. [Article 16, § 1]

While this suggests equality, the relationship of men and women in marriage is almost everywhere unequal, and religion almost universally underwrites this inequality. There are several intimations of equality in the Christian scriptures, but they are almost always subordinate to men’s superiority in relationship, and the polygamy of Islam makes the woman’s place as an unequal participant in the marriage relationship patently clear, even though there is a fair amount of special pleading regarding the role of women before and after Muhammad, and the improvement of their status in Islam.

It is not often considered how recent an achievement women’s equality in the West has been. In the United States, for example, black men were given the vote before women of any colour. Until the sixties of the last century the opportunities for women in the workplace were severely limited, and women choosing “non-traditional” roles were often faced with obstacles that men did not have to surmount. After women’s experience on the home front during World War II, where “Rosie the Riveter” became a poster-girl for women’s contribution to the war effort, it may seem that the barrier between men’s and women’s roles had been won, but the fifties marked a massive return to women’s traditional role as wives and mothers, to such an extent that the movie The Stepford Wives – where wives were replaced by their robotic equivalents  — commented satirically on the transformation of women from the self-motivated, competent human beings who kept industry humming when men were off fighting a war, to the empty-headed bimbos who performed their duties as wives and mothers.

But, as Paula Kirby points out, religion does not only lie about women, almost everything about religion is a lie. I still remember the day when Elizabeth’s little niece was playing around the wheels of Elizabeth’s wheelchair, when suddenly she looked up quite innocently at Elizabeth and said, “You know, Auntie Elizabeth, if you would only pray, you could walk.” The niece was only three or four years old at the time. It was one of those milestone moments for me, when the faith that I thought I had died a little within me. Because it was a lie that she had been taught at Sunday School, and it was religion that taught it to her. I mentioned this at Elizabeth’s memorial service, and, to my knowledge, she hasn’t been back to Sunday School.

But religion lies, and this fact is something that needs to be stressed more than it is. There is not one statement of religion that can be assumed to be reasonably confirmed. Claims about an afterlife, about the existence of a god or gods, about the will or commands of a god, or the role of men and women as defined by that will or those commands: none of these claims has any reasonable justification. And religious morality is worse than useless, because, given its basis in ancient texts (or even, as in the case of Mormonism, more recent ones), of uncertain provenance, it ignores the most important reasons that can be given in justification (or mitigation) of its moral prescriptions (or the reverse, of course, as should most often be the case). In the case of some religions, Islam in particular, with Christianity running a close second, groundless moral prescriptions and proscriptions are ranged about with rewards and punishments that are out of all proportion to the good or evil committed — even by such a monster as Hitler. Indeed, the religious are almost always more merciful than their gods.

And yet, despite this, religious scientists have the audacity to claim that religion and science are compatible! This has got to be the most breathtaking lie of them all! Some of religion’s lies are at least intelligible. Sickness and death are certainly bewildering and frightening aspects of being human, and seeking comfort in the midst of the existential conundrums of life is not an unreasonable thing to do, even if it leads to beliefs for which there is insufficient evidence. We must sometimes find comfort where we can. However, science has put a question mark against all such efforts, since, for the first time, human beings have been provided with a method of seeking and finding claims about the world which are more likely than others to be true. Of course, we understand that these claims are held provisionally, and may have to be taken up into larger truths which will subvert some of the things which we now assume to be true. Thus our knowledge of the world progresses. But to try to adapt, to this progressive achievement of knowledge about the world, ancient speculations about the source or purpose of the world, is simply laughable. Of course, some people, realising this, choose instead not to believe that science reveals the truth about the world, and fabricate all sorts of nonsense to cover their epistemological nakedness. But this is scarcely an option for religious scientists, so they must pretend that the lies told by their religion are somehow consistent with what they discover by means of science and its disciplined investigation of natural phenomena.

This is ridiculous, and it is, if they would only look at it a bit more dispassionately, a double lie. Religion is the first lie, though it may be, to quote from a poem by Robert Graves, “a cool web of language [that] winds us in, / Retreat from too much joy or too much fear,” (“The Cool Web”), and the second lie is to deny the first. Religion is a skein of lies, and like any lie or tissue of lies, can only be protected by more lies. Everyone who lies knows this. You have to be very intelligent, and have a very good memory, in order to lie effectively. Every interrogator knows this too. The best way to do it is to create a conspiracy, an institution of liars, so that it is difficult to say where the lies begin and end — and, besides, it will be much harder to break down consensus, much harder to believe that so many people could believe a lie. But they do. Religions are proof that it can be done.

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot they day is
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldier drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves