Of Priests and Prostates, Cabbages and
Kings...
(July
1, 2005)
I was at my doctor's for a check-up the other
day, and while having a certain male gland checked out (OK, it was the
prostate), it came up in conversation that one of the preventive
measures against an enlarged prostate among older men—who don't
tend to use it as much, especially if they are single—can be
regular masturbation.
Since my father died of prostate cancer at age
67, it would seem that a healthy prostate can literally become a matter
of life or death. On the way home, I reflected that I had been brought
up to fear that masturbation was a mortal sin, punishable by an
infinity of torment in Hell. I'm not sure if the seriousness of that
act has since been downgraded by the Church, though I believe not
officially. It occurred to me that not only was my doctor counseling
possible eternal damnation, but that if I were a conscientious believer
I might have to choose between the risk of a life cut short as my
father's was, and the threat of hellfire. I was struck by the dichotomy
of those two conflicting influences which many of us have had upon our
minds: the doctor and the priest, science and religion, fact and
fantasy. If I were a believer, which would I choose? Between the
rational and the irrational, which implantation would overpower the
other? Would I surrender to fear or to common sense?
As an aside, while on the drive home I found
myself imagining this scene in heaven:
God, watching: "Gabriel, sinner # 6,201,489,375 just
masturbated. Reserve a place in Hell for him if he doesn't repent."
Gabriel, getting out his record book for the umpteenth time that
day: "It's becoming crowded down
there, Sire."
God: "Get the contractors to
expand the 38th Quadrant....Have we done a temperature check there,
lately?"
Gabriel: "That reminds me,
Sire. Peter was complaining the other day that he can't handle the
workload at the gate, what with all the checks and re-routing that has
to be done. He made some remark about the disadvantages of
overpopulation. I think we'll have to double the number of his
assistants. Fortunately we've got a good-sized pool of saints to draw
from. Seems they've got a lot of time on their hands—"
God: "As long as it doesn't take too much time
away
from their worship duties. They're not getting bored with that, I hope!
I didn't send my Son to be slaughtered for a bunch of ingrates who
can't even sustain enthusiastic worship for a fraction of eternity."
Gabriel: "Maybe we should reinstitute the sex hour—[at God's
scowl] just a thought, Sire, just a thought...."
In an Op-Ed piece for the latest Free
Inquiry (June/July 2005), Robert Price, commenting on the new Pope
("The Grand Inquisitor Takes the Throne"), says that
"People have the right to swallow
oppressive dogmas if they want to, if they have been gulled all their
lives by Ratzinger and his ilk. But why do they do it? It is safe to
say that each of them has not made a conscious decision to trade in his
or her intellectual autonomy for unthinking submission to a party line.
Few even realize that this is what is at stake. But you'd think that,
after a while, believers would realize the cruelty of their
ecclesiastical masters and revolt. Mother Church tells them not to have
sex without having kids. No, no to birth control. This is cruel enough.
But then some poor couple wants nothing more than to have kids, whom
they fully intend to baptize, doing their duty to refill the ranks. And
they want to try artificial insemination. But what does the Church tell
them? Too bad! Can't use those newfangled methods! It's almost as if
the curia were trying to figure out how best to frustrate their hapless
minions at every turn." [p.16-17]
Why is it that religious morality is so often irrational, so often
inimical to the well-being of everything from the individual psyche to
the planet we live on? Why is "the will of God" regularly interpreted
in such repressive, self-destructive ways? Probably the most
catastrophic decision in the history of religion was made in 1964, when
Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical against artificial birth control.
The infallible Pontiff (no doubt influenced by counselors like Joseph
Ratzinger—now
Pontiff himself—who must,
too, have been infallible at the time) decided that God did not want
any check on the production of more human beings. At the same time, He
did not want to encourage more enjoyment of the human body He Himself
created than was necessary. He definitely could not countenance sex
outside of marriage—preferably
Roman Catholic marriage, and unsullied by prior divorce. This
pontifical infallibility made the Vatican proclamation impossible to
retract or to modify in future, regardless of the consequences, such as
the
ruination of the planet through overpopulation, or the spread of AIDS
and other human suffering through the banning of any use of
contraceptives. Moreover, it required that the Church actively work to
implement God's wishes, to interfere and foil as much as possible any
international efforts to put a check on population or give women
control over their own fertility. This task, for the last forty years,
the Vatican has undertaken with single-minded vigor.
In the days following my visit to the doctor,
my mind explored the implications of the religious view. God develops a
world with science and rationality in it. (So one presumes, since he
supposedly created everything.) Then he sets up a moral system at odds
with both. By the mid-20th century, it was starting to be recognized
that the effects of overpopulation would eventually place the world in
a position to self-destruct. At the same time, science had found a way
to control that population, with other beneficial effects as
corollaries, such as less risk to women's health, or a check on the
spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. Humanity's inventiveness, its
greater understanding of how our bodies worked, how nature could be
guided and engineered to our greater well-being and advantage, promised
a
better future than anything the world had yet seen. In stepped
religion.
None of this is permissible. It is all against the will of God. Of
course, the deleterious effects extend far beyond matters of sex and
overpopulation. Religion is invariably founded on ancient writings,
hallowed traditions, petrified prejudices. Modern science and social
enlightenment rarely find themselves in sync with those primitive
foundations, and so religion must try to impede science and derail
social
progress. New understandings of our biological origins must be
suppressed. Segments of society which don't behave according to that
ancient ignorance and prejudice have to be ostracized.
Rival communities and nations who claim a different set of cosmological
imaginings and salvation processes are dismissed as infidels.
Those to whom we have voluntarily given this
pervasive psychological power over us (voluntarily, for religion is not
necessary for a rational, functioning society or the creation of laws
to govern human behavior, despite what religionists claim), have thrown
a monkeywrench into our personal lives and the life of nature itself,
delivering it with oppressive doses of fear, guilt, and anxiety. The
basis of that power is the proclamation of a world-view that is pure
fantasy, unsupported by science or reason, founded on ignorance and
superstition, injurious to our mental health and much else. With it, we
compromise our intellects, our pleasure, our pride, our progress; and
we cripple the minds of our children in the process of indoctrinating
them
too into this haunted, ugly universe.
As Robert Price asks, why do we submit to it?
Why do we not revolt? Some of us, of course, do. But we are voices
crying in the wilderness as far as the great majority of society is
concerned.
Religion forces us to devise an ever more
precarious belief structure of jerry-built explanations and buttresses.
One crazy idea requires another crazy idea to shore it up, and so on in
succession. If there is
apparent evil in a world created by a benevolent God, it has to be our
fault, not His. God would not have created us evil, therefore we fell
and need redemption. If baptism is required for salvation, then infants
or fetuses that die before this rite can be performed cannot be saved.
If this seems heartless and cruel, one has to claim that
Original Sin makes all souls, even the unborn, worthy of damnation—though
perhaps God, in His mercy, will consign the unbaptized infant or
unborn to a non-suffering (if lonely) Limbo for eternity. If we face
the prospect of an eternal punishment, it must be that God, though
loving, feels the need to test us, to give us "free will" to make that
fateful choice. Of course, we must be inculcated with evil impulses to
make it a
fair fight. God also lets loose a demonic agent Satan as part of the
system,
to wreak havoc, to mislead us, to tempt us toward damnation. (Logic
forced the ancient Gnostics to postulate that since the world was so
evil and imperfect, a perfect God could not have created it, and so
they gave that role to an evil demigod.)
The Christian Bible is entirely the story of
the origin and course of evil in a
God-directed universe, and how he has arranged to save us from that
evil
as well as from the world he has created us into. Such a salvation
depends on a
heavenly Savior Son—humanity
cannot save itself—sent by a
sanguinary minded God to be blood-sacrificed. (This was primitive
religion's
means of communing with and placating deities; if "salvation" had been
invented in the 20th century, it would have been through something
quite different, though perhaps entailing aspects just as horrific).
This panorama includes an assortment of angels and demons, a cosmic
struggle between forces of good and evil, an apocalyptic upheaval and
destruction. The Christian message alienates us from our bodies and
from the world we live
in, filling our lives with dread and obsessive self-censure. All that
is good in the human condition is denied to our own capacity and
extrapolated onto an external entity; the bad is left to our own
responsibility. It requires us to regard ourselves as inherent sinners,
resident
aliens, the deserving of whom are awaiting transport to a spiritual
Utopia, leaving behind legions of the damned. (It goes without saying
that the purported message of "love" gets swamped and buried—as well
as rendered hypocritical—under all
this insidious nonsense, which in any case
doesn't require such a wrapping to appeal to the rational and
humanistic mind.)
Such is the package carried by religion as it
knocks at our door. And we have given it admittance. St. Paul
accompanies the priest to help in the sales pitch, declaring as he did
in 1 Corinthians that the "wisdom of the world" has been trumped by the
wisdom of God. Though it looks like nothing so much as "sheer folly" to
the wise man, to the scientist, to the rationalist, it is nevertheless
God's system of salvation. St. Paul knows it, because it was delivered
to him by the Deity Himself.
The most profound insight modern science has
given us, the critical knowledge that all previous ages and
philosophies have lacked, is that we have gotten where we are through
evolution. Life was not created, it evolved. God or gods were not
involved, or necessary. There are no eternal, immutable "truths"
except the laws of nature, the workings of matter. Life and its
manifestations, including the human, are neither good nor evil. The
concepts of good and evil, love and hate, desirable and undesirable,
are our own products, and we are free to do with them what we will. But
it is also a law of nature, of sorts, that what we have come to judge
"good" is ultimately what is most beneficial, and so in the end,
according to the principles of evolution, that is what we will choose—and to a
great extent have already done so.
Successful life will select for the good. It is a greater guarantee for
the triumph of "goodness" than all the
imagined divine dictates of all the religions in history.
The irony and the paradox, of course, is that
evolution has also given us religion. It has produced the mentality in
human society which thus far has largely misinterpreted everything
about ourselves and the world we live in. This is not necessarily
surprising, as evolution, without mind or direction, tries all things
for survival; it adapts to
its current surroundings to best advantage at the moment. But like
modern scientific discoveries of how to understand and control our
bodies and our environment, the discovery of evolution itself has
finally enabled us to come to an understanding about our own nature and
what to do with it. (Which
is not to say that we have learned everything there is to know, or that
evolution's course has reached its end). It is a
profound change of outlook, and most people have not yet come to terms
with it. Many, in fact, are putting up a fierce resistance. They
realize what's at stake. It has become a life and death struggle for
the fantasies they hold dear. But by denying our evolutionary origins,
by refusing to abandon the old unfounded scenarios, we forestall
universal human cooperation and the sense of the unity of life, we
impede the progress toward bettering our lot and carrying ourselves
further, toward gaining freedom from fear and ignorance. We distract
our
attention from the only world we have, the only destiny we can
confidently claim. And we create a lot of unnecessary misery for
ourselves along the way.
Doctor or priest? Science or religion? I prefer a
sane and verifiable reality. But even for those who as yet are
unable or unwilling to abandon belief in a supernatural dimension or
higher power, we can surely do better than what Christianity and other
religions have given us thus far.
Earl Doherty
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