God doesn’t climb up to the Balcony very often. I figure the Lord (good Lord, bad Lord? I don’t know) has better things to do than visit an obscure man living quietly with his family on the California coast. But since I’ve been reading Christopher Hitchens, religion is on my mind, and I can’t help but ruminate on my own religious background and experience. Not that I can identify the year, month, week or day when the notion of a God, benevolent or otherwise, became impossible for me to accept. It must have been the moment when my questions about religion far outnumbered the answers religion offered.
I don’t believe that religious faith is a prerequisite for ethical or moral behavior in the world. Quite the contrary, some of the most unethical and immoral people can easily quote scripture, wear religious medallions, cross themselves for no particular reason or bow their heads in prayer at the dinner table, and then proceed to lie, cheat, steal and kill. Look at all the sexual scandals and child abuse episodes in the Catholic Church for a perfect illustration of my point. Priests known to the church hierarchy to be dangerous and predatory were protected rather than prosecuted.
My mother was raised a Catholic and so, carrying on the family practice, my brother and I were baptized into the faith without being consulted beforehand or given any other option. This seems cruel and unusual to me now, and is the reason my wife and I didn’t baptize our children. Having stood in the delivery room when they came into this world, all purplish-blue and covered with blood and fluid, it was perfectly clear to me that they arrived completely innocent, with no proverbial sin to pay for. When they’ve had an opportunity to consider the notion of religion for themselves they are welcome to adopt a faith and practice it. I will no doubt be disappointed if this should happen, but I won’t stand in the way or try to change their minds. If they choose to put faith in biblical fables like Adam & Eve or the Ten Commandments or Moses and the burning bush, that’s their choice, though I would obviously be far happier if they choose to believe in reason, skepticism and rational inquiry.
Religion is most obnoxious when it comes to sex. I was poking around a website called Catholic Answers and found this gem regarding contraception and procreation:
“Contraception is wrong because it’s a deliberate violation of the design God built into the human race, often referred to as "natural law." The natural law purpose of sex is procreation. The pleasure that sexual intercourse provides is an additional blessing from God, intended to offer the possibility of new life while strengthening the bond of intimacy, respect, and love between husband and wife. The loving environment this bond creates is the perfect setting for nurturing children.
But sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, and even harmful to the spouses, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. God’s gift of the sex act, along with its pleasure and intimacy, must not be abused by deliberately frustrating its natural end—procreation.”
Well, isn’t that nice? Infantile, but very nice.
First of all, I don’t buy the proposition that God was involved in any way, shape or form in the design of the human species. Forget the six days to create the universe and everything in it; forget as well that humankind was forged in God’s image. Only humans, operating under the delusion of following God’s will, would place absurd and impossible prohibitions on something as pleasurable as sex. More often than not humans fuck for pure pleasure, not procreation, and I see nothing wrong with this. More marriages run off track because sex isn’t pleasurable rather than the other way around. How many times have you heard a married person complain that his or her sex life is too good?
I often see the unfortunate and inevitable result of religious indoctrination like that promulgated by the likes of Catholic Answers on the side of Santa Barbara where I live, near the eponymous high school or on the corner of Milpas and Cota streets. The sight is common: a Hispanic mother in her early to mid-20’s, pushing a baby stroller, with two young kids trailing behind and another in her belly. Quite possibly poor to begin with, she becomes poorer still every time she has another child. Perhaps she believes the tripe that bearing a lot of children is her duty and renders her rich in the eye of God, and that foregoing birth control scores her piety points and punches her ticket to heaven, but when it comes to feeding and clothing and educating her brood, she will receive no practical help from God.
Christopher Hitchens liked to say that religion was necessary when mankind was in its infancy, unable to rationally explain the workings of the physical world. When a volcano erupted or an earthquake rattled the ground, the explanation that the gods were angry made some sense. But just as children outgrow their fear of monsters hiding in the bedroom closet, our species matured and invented complex methods of scientific inquiry and rational analysis to explain the mysteries of the world.
I have no axe to grind with believers as long as they refrain from imposing their faith on me. I don’t appreciate having a posse of Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on my door, but neither do I run them off with a pitchfork. Faith and atheism can coexist. What really boils my blood is watching American political aspirants – regardless of party affiliation – pander to and grovel before the Christian faithful. Every candidate tries to out “Jesus” his or her opponents, clearly forgetting Article VI of the Constitution. Adding God to the corrosive cocktail of money and influence peddling only makes our political process more of a travesty.
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