Have you noticed that the poorer a country, the more likely it is to be fanatical about religion (except the USA of course - but I bet you can correlate religiosity against educational achievement and therefore poverty there too). The government of Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries and inevitably therefore a religious stronghold, has arrested 3 atheist bloggers from a list of 84 provided to them by a bunch of islamic 'informers'. Quite apart from the legitimacy of these whistle-blowers to determine who should be arrested and who not, even if you believe in supercomputers in the sky watching and controlling every Higgs Boson (etc) in the universe rather than trusting there is a scientific answer for everything (whether we yet comprehend it or not), you have to agree that freedom of thought beats brainwashing - especially when imposed by the state.
If there really is a deity, then assuming it/he/she (!) is simply not a control-freak having Olympian fun at our expense, surely it/he/she would encourage us to seek knowledge and understanding instead of blindly following words written hundreds of years ago by people who wouldn't recognise the world today (and assuming they were sufficiently educated that they could write... Mohammed couldn't by the way). And Genesis tells us that what really pissed of god was Adam and Eve eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge instead of remaining ignorant as he instructed them to be. Religion DEMANDS ignorance. Otherwise if people thought for themselves, they'd soon realise it's all invented hogwash. How many of those 'wise men' (exclusively men weirdly.. or just weird men perhaps), had they been born into a world of science and reason as well as having the planet's knowledge and debate at their fingertips, would abandon their ideas of celestial voices in favour of more rational ideas and less bloodthirsty retribution for non-believers? How many might have checked into psychiatric establishments if they had persisted in their babble?
In other words, if the prophet(s) had been born in the latter half of the 20th century in Bangladesh, and had written a blog about some voices he heard telling him how we all should lead our lives and what we should do to people who didn't believe him... would the Bangladesh police have had him arrested as anti-islamic? Would the British police arrest him for inciting violence? Come to think of it, I bet I can find more than 84 deluded people who spout irrational nonsense in blogs. Maybe it is a sin to be stupid. Education and reason, not brainwashing and lazy-thinking.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thanks for taking an interest.