This past week, my grandson’s close friend and fraternity brother at U Chicago was shot in the neck by a stray bullet, while riding the L from a summer internship in downtown Chicago. A random bullet severed his cervical spinal column. Rushed to the hospital, placed on a ventilator, his family asked him to blink if he wanted to remain on life support. He was alert and his mother, herself a physician, told him he would not be able to eat, talk, or breathe off a ventilator. He responded that if he had to live that way, pull the plug. A rising junior at a solid institution, died a meaningless death.
Recently, a condominium collapsed not far from my home burying alive around 150 people whist they slept. Some of them were religious Jews who probably said a prayer to God before bedtime; some were secular or religious Christians who also said their nightly prayer.
Some of those people attended daily religious services, hoping their prayers would be answered. A friend of mine, deeply religious said she would “pray for them.”
The first hurricane of the season has passed by Miami; part of an insensitive, uncaring universe, surrounding us in a web of uncertainty. The hurricane will do damage elsewhere, nature randomly choosing another unfortunate destination. People will pray that it does not hit their location, that it goes elsewhere. But aren’t they indirectly praying that other people suffer instead of themselves?
If you are a deist, you believe that a force greater than yourself has created a mountain of chaos—the universe where there is no predestination, no plan, only a random lottery that determines where we are born, where our supposed choices take us, what sort of government will govern us, how we do not really understand the choices we make. Like the man who walks down the sidewalk, a plant pot drops from a window above, killing him, or just misses because he has passed by a moment earlier. By some accident of biology, we are born, fortunately not in Afghanistan.
Religion offers comfort to those who believe that prayer will cohere friends around them, and the habit of observing primitive dietary rules will cement their beliefs to a ritual that will strengthen their tribe. Catholics eat fish on Friday and a biscuit that represents the body of Christ. Jews will not eat pork or shrimp or mix meat and dairy, because of rules set forth in a Bronze age text of unknown authorship. Muslims will not eat pork. People belonging to organized religious groups thank whatever god they pray to will answer their prayers which are essentially selfish desires to make them stronger, to be protected in war, for victory over the enemy, to survive disease, to have the courage to move on or to be charitable, to help others, to give them a sense of community. Or does it create a parochialism that either anathematizes them to other communities, makes them different, or a likely scapegoat for people in other tribes? When disaster strikes, they achieve solace in thanking God for sparing them. If they die, loved ones say prayers to strengthen their own resilience.
Does this delusion really create order in a chaotic world?
If one argues about the survival of Jews, one could conclude that Judaism survived as a result of extraneous hate which prevented them from owning property or land, caused them to become moneylenders because the Church prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans to other Christians. Therefore, Jews were the only ones who could do so, ergo the perverse anti-Semitic trope that Jews were greedy merchants of finance.
I wonder how many people in the Champlain towers said prayers before going to sleep, how many Jewish children of the two million murdered during the Holocaust said “shema Yisrael,” before being gassed to death, incinerated by unspeakably evil people who had been indoctrinated to believe that those children were subhuman rodents--it was their duty to exterminate them. Those Nazis followed their own religion, that of a murderous cult. They did not evolve quickly; their religious indoctrination having followed 2000 years of church liturgy that said Jews were Christ killers, using the blood of Christian children to bake Matzos on Passover. Generations of Jews guilty of the death of Christ, himself born a Jew and dying a Jew. One cannot argue with the cult of Trump. It has become its own abandonment of reason, its own religion. His adherents believe his lies and attend his rallies as though they were a religious service. Jewish Zealots believe that God gave them the land of Judea and Samaria, when it was the British and French promising the and to two disparate peoples at the dissolution of the Ottoman empire which had ruled the land for centuries. The Ottomans picked the wrong side in the First World War. One cannot argue with religion.
Human moral codes historically evolved before religion; polytheistic religions were certainly more tolerant than monotheistic, the latter of which is responsible for the a priori negation of other faiths. Organized religion only evolved in the last 5000 years, on the evolutionary scale, an instant, on a geologic scale, a millisecond. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Yet during those 5000 years, it provided the justification for war, pogroms, crusades, charlatans, false prophets, and flocks of lemmings abandoning their sense of reason to hate others.
Granted, religion also aspires for people to be good, love thy neighbor, but has it succeeded? Evangelicals made a Faustian deal with a scoundrel and grifter, because they believed he would appoint a Supreme Court that would enforce an abnegation of the Founder’s strictures of separation of church and state, and that more of the country would join their megachurches, hypnotizing their congregations, compelling the flock to give the preacher a bigger house and a Rolex. Politicians fixated on these beliefs, unctuously cater to these fantasies so they can win elections. They do not understand the framer’s intent: Freedom from religion. Ergo, the thriving of religion in this nation, and aspirational tolerance of others. No state religion.
Elites like the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, thought that the common people were not able to govern themselves or devise our financial system, so he did it himself. He did not believe that some supernatural force would do it for him. Nor did he believe that evil would be dispelled by prayer.
Thomas Jefferson said to keep the preachers away from politics. Jefferson understood human frailty and, for his time, thought that the people should govern themselves, but God should be left to theologians, not politicians; the theologians would keep the illiterate masses quiet, including his slaves.
Abraham Lincoln never mentioned the trinity, and some people thought he was a Jew. He was not, but he invoked God in many of his speeches; perhaps he understood that his countrymen were not yet ready to liberate themselves from superstition so biblical allusions provoked loyalty in constituents or contributed profundity to his utterances. Or perhaps he was a deist as many at the time accused him.
Religion is an excellent germination point for hypocrisy; giving those who profess it the opportunity to manipulate the flock, to incite people not to think for themselves or develop their own philosophy of life. That is--to think for themselves. They demagogy of theology.
As science advances exponentially, religion has become more and more irrelevant, more difficult to reconcile with reality. A majority of young people today do not attend religious services. They engage in the new religions of Sports, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder. They seek meaning in a life that many find meaningless.
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