“What about the dinosaurs?!?” cried the atheist stand-up, as if creation stories are the only question religion attempts to answer.
Whilst I do not deny the unhelpful impact religious institutions have on some aspects of society, from distrusting pork, prawns and homosexuals, to harbouring institutionalised paedophilia, there is also only so much you can learn about the human heart by dissecting a frog.
Jesus’ ‘sermon on the mount’, a live track from his excellent first album ‘the new testament’, is a pretty right on message of love, forgiveness and social harmony. However, just as Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood (any many more in their wake) seized upon the revolutionary punk movement to sell records and clothes (albeit excellently cut – damn that girl knows a woman’s body!), so too was Jesus’ anti-establishment message appropriated by the mainstream. Punk was dead by the Nicene Creed 325AD.
But if this stuff has been being said for so long, why is it so frequently missed? Other than the fact that most people work too much to ever have any time to think about this stuff, we often find it hard to separate the fine wheat from ubiquitous chaf.
Athiests might throw out a ‘Jesus’ baby*, with the ‘I’m the son of god’ bathwater. David Icke talks a lot about stopping brutality in the world, famine and saving the economy, but he also says the Queen is a lizard… as well as straying frequently into anti-Semitism. John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’. He also worked with Paul McCartney.
Sometimes I hesitate to say I’m an atheist, because other atheists are so annoying. Maybe this is how those people feel when they won’t say they’re feminist because they don’t like dungarees. Of course those people are very foolish. To not say you’re feminist, you might as well say that you are pro-bigotry. But back to ‘some atheists’ - an enthusiastic defence of rationalism overlooks the fact that we are not totally rational. If my girlfriend is seeing her ex for coffee, my rational response is ‘I’m sure he is a great guy, he certainly has a great taste in women’, but my gut’s response, and the one I feel altogether more vividly, is a desire to grind his face into an abrasive surface, be sick and hope he fails in everything he ever does again. I do what my head says, but still feel what my gut says, and maybe religion can answer my guts questions. Besides, atheists who criticise dogma, just do it so dogmatically!
Preech over. Testify.
*Jesus baby NOT Baby Jesus
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