Let's not tread too gently around the issues here (for a change). If you're easily offended by a distinctly cynical view of religion or the odd swear word it might be time to look elsewhere (you have been warned).
I have a fundamental belief that the vast majority of people are good. Or at least have goodness and generosity hard-wired into them. Our first response (I'm certain that this is not just me), on finding someone in difficulty or danger or need, is to try to help. That may not extend to 'real' help, financial or materiel, but our first reaction when faced with someone who's depressed or down on their luck is to try to offer help in any way we can.
I conducted an experiment in which I said that I needed cheering up, in a serious way. On twitter. I was amazed by the result of that plea - and have since appologised for 'crying wolf' but it was necessary to prove my point. That people are inherently generous and 'good'.
I think this is an important starting point: It's not about religion, upbringing or what we're taught, in my opinion. Nor is it about politics or nationality. It's about basic human feelings and instinct. What and who we are as a species. I am not arguing here that God doesn't exist by the way, but I am seeking to explain how, if He does, He's being used in a way that could not ever have been His intention. On balance I am skeptical; I think the goodness is within everyone and is something akin to the 'keep carrying the fire' sentiment expressed in Cormac McCarthy's brilliat book The Road (which is essentially about maintaining human decency and kindness).
My 'experiment' was not funded by science or any product-seller or Government, but was inspired by my own curiosity and my fundamental belief. It might not stand up to the rigours of the statisticians or the terminally cynical. It was not embarked upon for any ulterior motive, financial gain or anything other than to prove my premise that, in essence, people are good.
Wherever they come from. Whatever they believe in. Whoever is their 'God'. However they vote.
So having - I think - proved (at least to myself) that truism; why are we perpetually at war with each other? Why are 'ordinary' people fighting and dying every single day for centuries, when they are inherently 'good' and 'generous' and concerned about the welfare of their fellow humans? Would individuals in their heart of hearts, actively pursue conflict and war as opposed to partnership, trying to help each other if left to their own devices? I don't think so.
So what is the cause of global conflict? Idealism? Religion? Politics? Poverty? Money?
I'm not a what is often derided as a 'lefty': I believe in effort, contribution, freedom, responsibility. Most of all I believe in generosity of action and spirit. Not in a religious way - I don't need to be told what to think, by anyone - but in a fundamental way (and in the true sense of that word).
I tend to reduce my thinking on many difficult issues to that of a small village: I find that this really helps when one is considering complex issues. You may not of course! But in my small, simple village; We're happy with our lives, doing OK and if a stranger walks in he or she is welcome. Accommodated, befriended. We'll show him or her the best bits. The things that we're proud of. The things we've worked to achieve. If they want to stay they will have to, eventually, contribute to the life of the village. They will have to change, if they want to stay permanently, from 'visitor' to 'member'.
They'll have to fit in, to respect and conform to 'our' laws and belief system, to our way of life, but if they do they will be accepted and become part of the community and be protected by our community. They can share our good times and our bad times; Become 'one of us'. That's not to say that their experience from 'out there' is not valuable nor that we cannot learn from it or for it to have an influence on our thinking: we are not opposed to new ideas but we do have ideas, values and traditions of our own.
We (in my 'village') respect older people, have a belief in rightness and fairness - it's how we have functioned successfully in our past. and hopefully how we will continue to function successfully in our future. We reward effort. Acknowledge achievement both personal and collective. We're proud of our number who go on to achieve great things. (This is not necessarily an English village you understand?) ;)
Do you fundamentally disagree with any of the above?
Most people are good and generous fundamentally. We all are. Yes we strive to protect and promote, perhaps prioritise our 'nearest and dearest' but we understand that our wider 'family' is also important to us. It's why we enjoy it when our national sportsmen and women do well for example. We have a kindred spirit. We enjoy winning against our next village at Cricket perhaps, but we will enjoy a drink with their players after the game and take the jibes in good faith if we've lost.
We won't, generally speaking, start a war with them. Firebomb their houses. Attack them. That would be ridiculous wouldn't it? Because they respect us and our views, achievements and lives, just as we respect them and theirs.
So what then introduces the poison that makes us a warring species? Vested interests? The need to sell arms? The need for control over others and our own people? The need to motivate (or force) people either to do the right thing or, conversely, to do the wrong thing for the greater good or, a more sinister reason, to help 'us' (or someone anyway) to achieve some unfair advantage over others?
It's all about money, power and control in the end. And that is where the poison enters in, in my opinion.
Worshiping a 'Sun God' (when did 'worshipping' lose a 'p'?) was effectively about control: Making people subservient to a greater power could, if you wielded or harnessed that power, give you a massive level of control over your fellow citizens. 'If you don't do this, the harvest will fail and your children will starve'. That's a pretty powerful level of motivation and, therefore, control. 'If you do do this - whether it be paying a tithe or fighting for your 'tribe' against others - life will be good, and not only that but you'll have a peaceful, pleasurable, leisurely and plentiful afterlife.' Wow, where do I sign?
Of course we're much more knowledgeable and sophisticated now. We're wise to all that nonsense these days aren't we?
Are we?
As a way of generating funds from people who do not live in your country - a kind of remote taxation if you will - religion (belief in the Sun God) is still going very strongly indeed. Why was Vatican city the most powerful place on earth in the Middle Ages? It wasn't its army or military power (it didn't really have any of its own forces), but the fact that it could fund the crusades; could pay English Kings (and Spanish and French) to go and fight its competitors who worshipped (ah, there it is) other 'Sun Gods', other religions in the Middle East as it happens, so as to expand its money-generating empire in support of the great God 'Cathol'. And how could it do that? Because it could generate massive income, from mainly poor people around the globe who believed in its particular 'Sun God'. It still does.
Out of the global population of 6.7 billion, 2.2 billion are Christian, of which 1.1 billion are Catholic, 940 million are Muslims, 580 million are Hindus.
Consider the grandeur of churches just in the UK for example. These grand edifices were built when people were starving. Based on a belief in a higher being that they'd swallowed hook line and sinker. Almost every village in the UK has one - a building that would be impossible to fund - and probably to build - these days. All that wealth and land and subservience. It's fucking brilliant really. Getting poor people to give you what they cannot afford, and then to go and fight for you at your whim, on the promise that they will get a better time of it in the 'afterlife'.
The example holds true around the world for all of the major religions: palaces and places of worship that would make Solomon blush, built on the backs of people whose own domestic arrangements were considerably more modest. The Catholic Church is the third biggest landowner on the planet. Fourth is the King of Morocco, second is King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Not bad for a tiny principality near Rome huh?
The answer to that question which has recently formed in your mind, is our own dear Queen, head of the Anglican Church. Power, control, money remember?
So, control then, and most importantly, money; a source of income beyond your wildest dreams for flogging a belief with a stick and a carrot - if you don't do this you'll burn in hell, if you do you'll have endless joy and peace. Compelling.
The thing is, this is still happening. In our cynical, sophisticated, knowledgeable world. Wars are being fought in the name of 'religion' (which equals power, control and above all, income) all over the world. Ever day. A British soldier has been killed in combat in every year for more than 100 years.
Islamic 'extremists' are fighting, world-wide to get you to join their gang. But so is the Catholic church if a tad more subtly. And they all claim 'peace and goodwill to your fellow man' as their mantra, but also that you'll suffer if you don't believe in 'our God'. The more subtle religions tend to suggest that this suffering will be in the afterlife, the more aggressive seem to be intent on meting out that suffering in the here and now as we have been seeing endlessly in the Middle East.
And why a 'God' rather than a leader in human form? Well lots of reasons really to do with authority and the inability to question some one or some 'being' who couldn't be directly contacted or questioned. The ultimate 'because I say so'. But also, and crucially, because an all-seeing God, who knew what you were doing and thinking at every hour of the day, in a world without PRISM, GCHQ and CCTV, is the cheapest and most effective 'police force' ever devised.
What's happening now is that Western Governments, armed with 'real' police forces and surveillance technology coupled with the still strong force of religion, have at their disposal an even more effective means of control. We may be increasingly a 'secular society' but our values and our beliefs, with laws grounded in religion, are fundamental to our way of life. Work hard, look after your family, pay your taxes and all will be well. The controlling elite now have even more tools at their disposal in order to deliver them their control, power, income and cushy lifestyles and it seems to me that we have come to accept this in return for our 'security' and don't really notice that we're actually being fleeced along the way.
In less sophisticated/developed countries control is still being exerted via the 'old' forces of religion but in a considerably more aggressive, totalitarian and extreme way. They realise that many of the so-called freedoms that we enjoy in the west (see above, it's all relative) would be attractive to many people whose lives are much less free and so they have redoubled their efforts to enshrine religious control and beliefs within those populations. But again, I would argue that the motives remain those of power, control, money/wealth and expanding their sphere of influence in order to expand their power-base and financial contributions.
Their objectives and many of their methods are entirely similar to our own in the West. We may not - and of course we're encouraged in this regard - see it that way. We're 'free' and they're not. Bullshit.
At its more extreme the religious troubles in the Middle East and the threat of terrorism means that we need to be monitored more closely in our own countries, to make sure that we comply with the rules set for us by others. I have a really troubling concern that our Governments actually like terrorist attacks because they enable them to use the threat to keep us in line.
Keeping the threat 'real' means that we will tend not to think too much about what is really going on, that we're being subjugated into living our lives to make those who are more equal than others (I'm not advocating communism as a solution by the way) more comfortable.
And in many ways this is how the 'system' works. We go to work in a factory making a spring that fits into another machine that makes a toaster and we earn enough to buy that toaster so everyone's happy. We earn enough to buy a house and educate our kids and the cycle repeats. And we pay a government to keep us safe and uphold our laws. What's not to like?
And I have to admit that I don't necessarily have a better solution to the problem of keeping people gainfully occupied while the real business of the world goes on. But it's iniquitous and opaque, sinister and secretive. We're led to believe that if we don't like something we can 'vote them out'. And that 'they work for you'. But do you really believe that? The recent quantitative easing and bank bail-outs could have made every family in the UK multi-millionaires instead of bailing out massive failures by people who were already millionaires. Think about that for a moment. But who then would clean the streets or go to work on a Monday morning?
The thing is that our leaders seem to me to be becoming just as corrupt, money-grabbing and frankly piss-taking as the worst offenders in the Middle East and elsewhere. Expenses scandals, bribery and corruption, cash for questions, aggressive lobbying techniques abound; the very police force that we trust to keep us safe seems to have pretty shoddy standards of honesty. Public office seems to be more 'jobs for the boys' than something to be undertaken based on merit or capability, or providing value for money for the people who pay for it. Cover-ups at the NHS and the BBC; HMRC using surveillance technology to try to prosecute a whistle-blower (when they say that this technology will only be used for anti-terrorist work). Private-sector Banks getting bailed out with taxpayer money; actually private deposits being stolen, quite openly by the EU from banks in Cyprus.
It seems to me that quite a lot of what we work for, in my hypothetical little village, where we're happy, is being taken from us by force, threat and 'belief' for no other reason than to allow some people to fund wars; to kill people who are fundamentally 'good' as individuals and to fund the seemingly endemic and worsening corruption in our ruling classes. It feels like Rome before the fall to me. The worst excesses and often, utter contempt for the people they're supposed to work for and to serve.
I realise of course that I'm probably pissing in the wind here. But I think that those of us who are 'ordinary' people, fundamentally kind, generous and 'good' deserve a whole lot better and to live in a safer, fairer and more honest world. I don't know how we get to that situation, but I don't think our current 'ruling classes' have anything like a similar motivation.
Maybe there'll be a British, or a Western 'Spring', now that the internet and in particular, social media enables groups to form, promises to be monitored and remembered, campaigns to be mounted? No wonder our Governments are scrambling to increase surveillance. 'If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear', they tell us. Trouble is, it seems the wrongdoers are the ones dong the monitoring of us ordinary citizens. With impunity.
I for one hope that they themselves will soon have something to fear.
Thanks for reading.
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