Professor Richard Dawkins says it better than anyone I know. For the safety of the nation and the well-being of the children it is not sufficient for us to be merely atheists. It is necessary for us to be militant atheists. After all, we are all of us atheists to some extent. When you think of it, all good Christians have nothing but contempt and disdain for any belief in Ba'al, Thor and the Golden Calf. Some of us just choose to go one god further.
I have given the matter a lot of thought. There are said to be three known reasons why intelligent West Indian men went into the ministry. They are the usual ones: sex, money and power. All the good looking women, who were at the same time gullible, were to be found in church dressed in their Sunday best. They knelt down before you, emoting to your every word and gesture. Seducing them was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Additionally, with little or no learning, but an ability to talk good, one could make a fortune through a church. Just look at the fat, greasy tel-evangelists we see on the TV every day. And the power came from being in a position to influence people's lives. Jim Jones was one of the most successful at all of these church-centered activities. He was one of the few who came to a sticky end.
It is different today. Our young men of the 21st century can go into politics, business and the professions without any restriction at all. Fifty years and more ago, the options for a bright young black man were more limited. Race prejudice excluded them from most of the more reputable outlets for self improvement. There were few other opportunities to better yourself than the church.
That is one reason why elderly West Indian church leaders still among us seem to have been all scholarship material. We look at them perform and listen to them preach and wonder why they had to waste their brains on such a mindless occupation as preaching superstitious nonsense to their followers.
It is different with the younger generation of preachers and ministers today, I have to shake my head at how unsophisticated and uneducated many of them are. And, so mindlessly and perversely cruel.
I have never heard an evolutionist condemn a church-goer to everlasting hell. No palaeontologist to my knowledge has ever cut off anybody's head for not accepting that the dinosaurs were made extinct by an asteroid colliding with the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago.
Do you not agree?
The soundness of your main theme aside, methinks in your column today you unwittingly tarred the good and the wicked with the same brush of materialism, and so a few specific questions crossed my mind.
ReplyDeleteSex? How then to explain those monks who enter the cloistered, poverty-stricken, contemplative life, e.g. the The Order of the Cistersians of Strict Observance, never to even speak again.
Power? Well, granted! Not only exercised on a local level over congregations but morphed into the larger field of politics, as with the Reverend Ian Paisley.
Money? Everything is relative, one supposes, but don’t you agree that in our time the Anglican and Methodist parson, for example, eked out at best only a miserable existence.
Those factors aside, what motives, if any, are you prepared to concede to the best-intentioned of candidates? How about that ineffable quality called faith?
While I was a young man going to church, we divided the preachers into three categories. There were the "normals" who had girlfriends, the "weirdos" who had boyfriends, and the "impotents" who had neither. The last were considered "holy", though they were probably sicker than the other two.
ReplyDeleteThere was an early teacher on one of one of the more remote and smaller islands of South Pacific Fiji. His school children were assembled in the village one early morning, sitting cross legged on mats in the shade of the coconut trees. They were to the side and thus not in line of a falling nut.
ReplyDelete'It is time,' said the teacher, 'For me to tell you about your home in Fiji and the world beyond your reefs and seas.' He drew a rough picture of the earth's land masses and oceans and then pointed at a large open expanse near the bottom. He placed a fingernail in the centre. 'You see this tiny spot, no larger than the eye of a fly. That is the size of your land compared with the rest of the world'.
When the children returned to their families with this extraordinary tale, the elders were incensed at such an insult. They went to the house of the teacher, clubbed him to death, roasted and consumed him: thus providing an early example of what happens when the truth is told to those who cannot recognise and do not wish to hear it!”
I do not agree. The big dinosaurs became extinct because they could not defend their big delicious eggs from predators. Birds are a branch of dinosaurs that put their eggs up high, but other than that would have been more fragile to effects of any asteroid.
ReplyDeleteBut on your other points, you are right.