Religion, what is it good for? Let them kill each other.
Two songs 100 years and poles apart, epitomizes the moralistic quandary of the most powerful country on earth. Caught between religious zealots bent on violence and rational egalitarians committed to peace, America is at the crossroads and must choose between the musical epistles of Arthur Sullivan’s 1871 “Onward Christian Soldiers” and John Lennon’s 1971 “Imagine”. What will it be?
The battle hymn of 1871 is deeply rooted in shocking atrocities one of which was the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 that pitted Christian against Christian. The entire population of the town of Beziers in Southern France was slaughtered but, before the carnage began a crusader general asked the papal legate Arnaud-Amaury how to distinguish a Cathar from the innocent and his reply was: “Kill them all and God will know which are his.”
John Lennon imagined a world without religion. How about a world without God?
Faith my friends is not about belief, it’s an institution for people who have a need to feel superior to every other living thing. At the slightest provocation they invoke “divine rights” to summarily dismiss proofs and facts. They hate questions, talk in tongues and forgive themselves whenever they feel like it.
If they wish to believe that an invisible white male is responsible for every top quark, Higgs bosun, and DNA strand in the universe, then I say, be my guest, everyone has the right to be absurd. Believing in the Easter Bunny isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but ramming thousand-year-old writings of cave dwelling, woman hating, old hermits down other people’s throats is a wicked, wicked thing.
Those infernal flag waving evangelicals who keep their children deep within the darkness of the cave should be charged with abuse. They must step into the light. They must know that Jefferson, while drafting the declaration of independence said: “The last king should be strangled by the entrails of the last priest”. Let them kill each other. Religion, what is it good for?
