Putting Religion In Its Proper Place

WITHIN THE PAST FEW DAY the Holy Roman Catholic church concluded a massive conference called to address the alarming, and pervasive crisis within the faith, in which clerics are and have been for decades sexually molesting children, getting young girls pregnant, forcing them to have abortions, and covering up their sins against the stated requirements of their faith in order to keep their jobs. The more research which emerges, the more widespread this pattern of behavior seem to be, and Pope Francis is well aware of the dire threat posed to the church by this horrible state of affairs. And yet, observers of the conference seem to agree that little if anything was actually done, except to pay lip service, to issue statements of indignation, shock, and dismay. No substantive action was taken in terms of actually implementing policies, Everyone agrees on zero tolerance, but nobody has any concrete ideas how to zero tolerate, such as reversing the centuries old prohibition against priests having sex, to address the situation. When one cleric admitted to seeing documents destroyed, nobody asked: "what documents"?...In another part of the world, Indian jets attacked an alleged Islamic terrorist base inside Pakistan, in retaliation for recent terrorist attacks in India. The Pakistani government claims that the planes stuck nothing. India and Pakistan have been rivals since the two countries were separated in 1947 into Islamic Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. They have fought no fewer than four wars, both have a nuclear arsenal, and both nations are devout in the practice of their majority religions. Elsewhere, aggression by predominantly Christian America in predominantly Islamic Afghanistan continues, as always, with many of the American troops currently deployed not having even been from when the American war in Afghanistan began, decades ago. Lest we omit any of the world's great religions from the enumeration of combat zones, the Jewish state of Israel, with its secret nuclear arsenal, continues to make live miserable for Palestinian Muslims, a situation so well known as to scarcely need mention. None of these conflict is over religion, directly. All of them, like all human conflict, is over resources, specifically land, and the minerals which lay beneath it. And yet, in each of these war zones, there is a long standing enmity between nations whose cultures are heavily, deeply entangled with one religion or another in particular. In each case the religion closely associated with the national government of the warring country is one of the world's major organized, traditional religions. In each case the most vocal, ardent proponents of war are the most ardent, devout members and practitioners of the various religions. There is a definite, irrefutable correlation between religious fervor and devotion, and willingness and desire to use violence as a means of furthering the interests of religion throughout national policy. What good, then, is organized religion, other than to perpetuate violence and conflict? Would it not be better for human harmony if the world's major religions would either fade away and vanish, or, if they would dissolve into an amorphous, disorganized, atomized mass, and be replaced with a situation wherein all seven point five billion people simply go about their own religious business, each with a unique personal faith? To remove religion from the realm of national policy and international affairs, would that not be a preferable alternative? Imagine a future in which the only universal faith is the faith of humanity to gain more insights into the nature of the universe and to increase human health, happiness, harmony, and prosperity through science, not religion. A universal priesthood of believers in reason, fact, and science, a world of mathematicians, chemists, physicists, biologists, everyone embracing science as the means of obtaining truth. Imagine, as john Lennon once did, no religion.