Category: Religion

The “You’re Dead To Me” history podcast has a “problematic marriage klaxon.” They ring it, typically, when talking about a child-bride being sold off to some rich old man. However, despite how uncomfortable those historic marriages may make me or us, I am not always certain that those arrangements, then, were all that problematic.

When reading Jane Austen, or more crucially when adapting her books for film, the age and circumstances of the, often children in our eyes, makes adaptation… tricky. Same for Shakespeare. You cannot faithfully make a dramatic film of Romeo and Juliette with actors of the appropriate age without that creeping to the edge of child pornography.

We today however do not have to wring our hands about how problematic it is for an older man to interfere with an underaged child. That, now, is statutory rape and it is unambiguously a criminal offence. Men who take advantage of children, rich men who use underaged girls, they are rapists, pedophiles… criminals.

And while the victims should be entitled to some kind of justice whether that man is uncle Jimbo in Nose-pick Arkansas or the rich son of some esteemed captain of industry, I think it is especially important to punish the men who have the most power to do the most harm.

Perhaps the zeal with which we prosecute and the severity of the punishment should scale with privilege and responsibility and the position of trust, rather than be overlooked because of those things.

The problem with religious “belief” is twofold.

First, if you teach, usually young children, to BELIEVE one untrue nonsense, then you have equipped them to be credulous of anything.

Second, we are use to “religious” people living within the constraints of modern secular societies that were necessary to end centuries of religious violence. Intolerance is a feature of all mythological belief systems because, if you sincerely believe that there is “evil” and your doctrine stands against that evil, if you are certain that heresy is a threat, if you think that people who do not conform or agree or fall in line are the “other,” then essentially being at war with all those others is inevitable.

We should not be surprised, as we watch fundamentalist Christians in the US, having been given consent to throw off all external constraint, a la “Heart of Darkness,” have reproduced a hideously medieval atmosphere of religious persecution. That tendency to violence is a feature, not a bug. We just got used to several decades of most deeply beliefy religious folk being restrained by secularism.

My mum was a long-time Sunday school teacher. She was one of my Sunday school teachers. She taught stuff to vulnerable kids, as if that stuff was history, that had been proved to be fiction 80 years before she was even born.

But she told those lies just as she had been lied to about it in her turn. And she was never even slightly resentful, any time reality conflicted with that received myth, that she had been lied to. She never was angry with the lying liars.

Nope. Far from it. What she was angry about was if anyone told her she had been lied to. She’d get mad at the revelation that she had been taught… lies.

And in there we can find the reason the world has taken this insane turn to the Reich. People are not bothered much about the lies they have internalized, or the liars that lied to them. What makes them angry, what makes them violent and genocidal, is being told they were lied to.

And that is the human nature that we need better secular education to counter. Because once a person has grown to adulthood believing a load of nonsense, they are forever going to be painfully resistant to correcting their misconceptions.