Religions > Atheism > News: Horror movie right there on your TV, shockin' me right outta my brain!
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Michael Gray" |
| Date: |
19 Jan 2007 05:01:52 AM |
| Object: |
News: Horror movie right there on your TV, shockin' me right outta my brain! |
Deliver us from the god delusion that imperils our humanity
by David Williamson, The Australian
Reposted from:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21002684-7583,00.html
"BACK in the 1970s the Australian band Skyhooks, one of the most
inventive and intelligent pop groups we've had, wrote a song called
Horror Movie that suggested you don't have to go to the cinema for
your horror. It was "right there on your TV".
If anything, the horror that we see on our nightly news, particularly
on SBS, has got worse since then. Item after item highlights the human
capacity for violence, depravity, irrationality, hatred, indifference,
arrogance, intolerance and greed.
The media, of course, tend to highlight the worst of human behaviour
as that's what attracts attention. We are also capable of behaving
warmly, decently, honestly, compassionately, thoughtfully and
tactfully, but the horror of the dark side of human nature is no less
disturbing because it's only part of the story, especially when it's
shoved in your face night after night.
What I would love to see in 2007 is the horror movie become somewhat
less horrific.
I would like to think that in 2007 clear, rational and powerful ideas
with heaps of evidence to back them up would impinge on the minds of
those who are generating those horror movies on television.
Given humanity's seemingly limited capacity to act rationally, this
is, of course, a pretty forlorn hope, but hope tends to peak at the
start of every new year, when we briefly believe that the personal and
societal mistakes of the past year needn't be repeated.
My fantasy for 2007 is that religious extremists of the Christian,
Muslim and Jewish faiths in particular will sit down and read Richard
Dawkins's book The God Delusion and be sufficiently impressed by its
argument and evidence to acknowledge that belief in a god of any kind
is a delusion that has wreaked untold damage on the world since the
dawn of recorded time.
As Dawkins points out, it's not hard to see why that delusion is so
widespread and fervently held. Evolution has built into our psyches a
strong tendency to obey authority. At the start of our lives our
parents are obeyed because their wisdom is necessary for our survival,
and this transfers later in life to other authority figures. The
ultimate authority figure is God, or whatever your religion calls its
head honcho.
It's also easy to understand that a fear of death and, even worse, a
fear of insignificance makes it comforting to think that there is this
very partisan God up there who cares deeply about you and all your
co-religionists and promises you a wonderful afterlife denied to all
adherents of "false" gods.
The belief that your group has its own special god inevitably leads
you to feel superior to, and angry about, people who have chosen the
"wrong" god. A prescriptive set of ideas on how to behave dictated
from on high may be a clear and simple way to structure life, but when
those instructions include denigrating or wreaking harm on others
simply because they aren't a part of your group, the moral authority
of such rules is zero.
Anything that purports to absolve one from making personal moral
decisions based on the concepts of humanity and justice has to be
highly suspect.
Even in a free and secular society such as ours, where vigorous debate
is considered an essential component of our capacity to make important
decisions, there is a tendency to treat anyone who has religious
beliefs as somehow beyond criticism.
If a Christian believes that the earth was created by God exactly 6000
years ago, then they are often said to be entitled to that belief
because it is a product of their faith. To point out that it's arrant
nonsense, given the overwhelming evidence available that the earth is
much older than that, is considered by many to be bad form.
For Jewish settlers in the West Bank to claim that God has given them
a mandate to build houses on other people's land is equally ridiculous
but nevertheless used as a justification for a practice that is
helping to poison any hope that the horror movie we call the Middle
East will come to an end.
A Muslim extremist who believes that his God is greenlighting the
random killing of infidels has to be viewed, by any rational analysis,
as an extremely malignant product of religion. Yet many so-called
moderate Muslims still seem to regard these extremists as some kind of
cultural heroes, or if not that, then someone whose behaviour is
understandable given the supposed indignities that Christian nations
have forced on Muslims.
There are undoubted psychological benefits of religious belief in
terms of increased self-esteem and group solidarity, but they come at
great cost.
Adherence to a particular religion is another variant of irrational
tribal behaviour, no different in essence to the nationalism that has
also generated so many horror movies through the ages.
It no doubt made many Germans feel good to believe they were members
of the master race, and in our age the tendency of the US to feel a
moral and cultural superiority to the rest of the world wreaks its own
kind of havoc. Ultimately, to believe you are a superior human being
on the basis of any kind of tribal affiliation is a luxury the world
can no longer afford.
It makes no more sense to believe that being an Australian makes one
inherently superior to a person from any other nation than it does to
believe that being a supporter of the Collingwood football team makes
one a profoundly more acceptable human being than someone who supports
Carlton.
My hope for 2007 is that the world will draw just a fraction closer to
realising that we are all part of one big tribe on a very fragile
planet, and that people who parrot the prejudices of their particular
creed will start to realise how toxic their belief system is to any
hope that the innate decency of humanity will ultimately triumph."
David Williamson is an Australian playwright.
--
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