By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
The common element to all orthodox religions is the way they oppress, subjugate, even enslave but in every case control women. Doesn’t matter who you pray to, this is the common element. It is why “Morality Police” in Iran murdered a 22-year old woman who failed to wear the hijab properly, why in Pakistan a woman could be stoned to death if she is raped, why Orthodox Jews similarly force women to cover up and stay separate from men and permit their husbands to refuse them a divorce, why Christians are content to kill women to “save” the fetus. I could go on.
This is an age-old tactic. Women who were healers and midwives or merely uppity were persecuted, tortured to confess and accuse others and murdered for being witches in Europe for a century, a crusade that spread to Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Witchcraft became a capital offense by male theocrats who felt threatened by the women who challenged their authority, were a convenient scapegoat for ills and failures and wanted to keep them in their place. Because they could. And so the witchhunts began.
And now we see the 21st century incarnation, in Texas, which unleashed vigilantes to hunt women for exercising their reproductive freedom, is now looking to make abortion a capital offense, as are Christo Fascist Republicans in other states that are seeking to ban abortion without any exceptions, not even for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. Women who miscarry are already being prosecuted.
When you weigh the benefits of organized, institutionalized religion over the evils (Crusades, pogroms, Inquisition, genocide, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust, witchhunts and general persecution and discrimination), “justified” on the basis that non-believers were less than humans, “savages” undeserving of life or liberty, I would suggest that the “moral” order that religion is supposed to provide society can just as easily come from a combination of humanism and the old, old time religion of naturalism (derisively known as paganism).
And where is the unified humanity that is supposed to come from monotheism? Why is belief in One Supreme Being is supposed to be the mark of “civilization.” Indigenous peoples of the Americas were far more civilized in their behavior to each other and to the spirits they worshipped – the earth, the moon, the stars, the sky – than those who burned women (witches) at the stake by the thousands, committed genocide of indigenous peoples, enslaved people they considered savages for their beliefs and mounted endless wars in the name of (their) God.
I frankly don’t understand how those subjugated peoples who had their own spiritual order that served them well for tens of thousands of years – the indigenous tribes of the Americans, the Africans brought here as chattel slaves – are Christian today, when Christianity was used as the excuse for displacement, extermination, genocide, subjugation, enslavement. It’s why Cassius Clay became Mohammad Ali.
Institutionalized religion has always been used to subjugate people and give religious leaders and those absolutist rulers who claimed to be ordained, power and control, whether theocracy was official or just demagoguery. It’s amazing what you can get people to do if they think it is in God’s name, by God’s order, to win salvation in the next life no matter how miserable this life is. It’s called “blind faith.” Karl Marx was right when he said “Religion is the opiate of the people.” He could have also said, “Religion is the opiate of the oppressed and the crown and shield of the oppressors.”
How many of these tyrants in demigod robes claim to be the son of God, or somehow bestowed divine right.
Politicians have continued to weaponize religion (or use it like a cloak of invisibility or invincibility for wrong-doing), using it to win elections and have realized a winning strategy was to turn everything into a culture (religious) war. It’s not even subtle anymore: “Jesus, guns, babies,” is now the campaign slogan and rallying cry for hundreds of Republican candidates.
Climate Change is one of those existential issues that has been turned into a totem of tribal allegiance.
I recall a TV commercial in the 1990s featuring Newt Gingrich (the architect of the Conservatives’ Contract on America) and Nancy Pelosi saying they disagreed on mostly everything, but they agreed on the need to address climate change.
But that changed when Christians saw advantage in making common cause with Capitalists (whose god is the Almighty Dollar), and used religion to justify “man’s dominion over nature,” suggest that climate disasters are all part of God’s plan (and in any case, have happened over and over since Noah’s flood) or that the destruction is somehow deserved by sinful citizens (except when it happens to Florida), and embrace the idea of apocalypse as the fast-track to joining God in heaven, as the ticket to evade a transition from Big Oil’s power and profit to clean, renewable and decentralized, home-grown energy. The problems of this world are insignificant because if you are sufficiently faithful (that is obedient, or if not, contribute enough to the church, temple or synagogue), there is a greater reward later.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called Hurricane Ian a storm of “biblical proportions” – as if that somehow lessens the culpability for the failed human policies and forces that made the storm that much more powerful and destructive.
But this country isn’t supposed to be a theocracy.
Xiye Bastida, Co-Founder of Re-Earth Initiative, a native American climate activist, spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative of her ancestors’ belief in the sacred spirits of nature – earth, moon, sky - and the requirement to evaluate their actions in terms of respect for their ancestors and the impact on the 7th generation, not the me, mine, now.
“I was raised with the philosophy of reciprocity from Mother Earth – if we take, we must give back. We think of past generations to insure stability of future generations.”
Then she asked what it will take to get the leaders to act to protect the earth from climate change? “We have the ability to see the world in a different way – how climate impacts are affecting the most vulnerable, the response insufficient, but so far we haven’t had the courage to change perspective. Why is that? How can we find the courage, the determination, a different world view?”
And the answer to her question came to me: return to the religion of your ancestors. Religiousity is what it will take to engender the same fervor and devotion to the existential cause of saving the planet, Mother Earth.
More of us need to put our spiritual devotion toward Mother Nature, the earth, sky, sun, water, fire, seeing these as what is sacred, deserving of our fealty, respect and care.
“The plants, the trees have life, they have a spirit, that’s why we have to respect it and protect it,” Briceida Iglesias, an indigenous climate activist in Panama, declared in “The Guardians of the Future” (New York Times, Oct. 2).
Actually, there is a modern religious movement that embraces exactly this: Bright.
“The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view,” Daniel C. Dennett wrote in a column, “The Bright Stuff” in the New York Times, July 12, 2003.
Dennett continued, “Many of the nation's clergy members are closet brights, I suspect. We are, in fact, the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don't trust God to save humanity from its follies.”
(That’s pretty much what I am, but I would add Humanist but I haven’t yet thought of a clever name, but would suggest that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were in this camp.)
But, Dennett noted, “From the White House down, bright-bashing is seen as a low-risk vote-getter. And, of course, the assault isn't only rhetorical: the Bush administration has advocated changes in government rules and policies to increase the role of religious organizations in daily life, a serious subversion of the Constitution.” (Recall Bush opened the Office of Faith Based Initiatives.) “It is time to halt this erosion and to take a stand: the United States is not a religious state, it is a secular state that tolerates all religions and -- yes -- all manner of nonreligious ethical beliefs as well.”
Remind the Supreme Court. Instead of castrating the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to issue regulations to protect us against the existential Climate Crisis, or blocking the government’s ability to mandate what will protect the rest of us from a deadly pandemic, or denying a woman autonomy and self-determination and even the ability to save her own life, the Christo Fascist SCOTUS6 should respect our religion and the planet.
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