Religion never changes
Graham Templeton
2007 is the 45th anniversary of the release of the oral polio vaccine. Forty-five years have passed since polio has been easily and cheaply preventable. The worldwide charitable distribution of the polio vaccine has been called the current generation’s ultimate act of kindness.
However, there are still currently four countries remaining in which polio has not been eradicated: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. It must, therefore, be a matter of only months before these four are also added to the list of nations no longer forced to watch their fellow citizens crippled and killed by this horrible degenerative disease. Or will it be longer?
The fact is that these four nations have had no shortage of free, easy access to the vaccine. In fact, Nigeria has seen the widespread dissemination of the vaccine paid for in full by the charitable donations of other countries. Charity workers and local townships saw to it that no Nigerian had to walk far to arrive at his or her free local vaccination site. If all it takes is a short trip and a couple drops of liquid on the tongue to eliminate polio, why hasn’t this happened yet?
The most plausible answer is religion. These, the most uniformly religious nations on earth, began to resist treatment after vaccination commenced with a rather underwhelming turnout for the first round of drops. The second round of drops, which seal the immunization deal, saw even lower participation.
This was because mullahs of the outer townships and the small cities were spreading fear. The vaccine, they claimed, was a Western ploy and, more specifically, a stratagem against Muslims. It contained chemicals designed to make its recipients infertile and, even worse, was a source of AIDS. For countries with unlimited trust in their religious leaders — countries wracked even more severely by AIDS than polio — the mullahs’ rumours were all the convincing people needed to reject the vaccine. Perhaps there was also a hint of determinism thrown in as well — a rather Christian sense of the impropriety of fighting a disease sent from God himself.
National health workers have spent the past few decades raging against this social dilemma. The workers wander through towns where they come face-to-face with the broken and jittering forms of children deformed by polio. They have to come to terms with the fact that the vaccine capable of saving an infected child has been freely available to the child’s parents long since the child was born. This is what religion does. All four countries that resist the oral polio vaccine do so because of their religious leaders’ ignorance. But this religious tendency to victimize its own adherents is certainly not limited to the world’s second-largest monotheism.
Let’s skip time frames from the recent past to the present. Let’s change religions from Islam to Christianity. Let’s swap epidemics from polio to AIDS and rampant, insupportable pregnancy rates.
On September 26 of this year, Catholic Archbishop Francisco Chimoio made an announcement to his constituency in Mozambique that went beyond the familiar Catholic view that condoms are both sinful and ineffective. Being rather bolder than usual, he argued, in a manner similar to the Muslim leaders mentioned above, that both European condoms and anti-AIDS retroviral medication were being deliberately spiked with HIV.
Yes. The Catholic Church that once seemed so quaint in our secular society is no longer content to prey on the ignorance of the world’s least-fortunate regions by claiming that condoms are laced with holes, utterly ineffective, and, of course, a one-way ticket to eternal torture. They have now graduated to actively promulgating the bewildering idea that birth control and AIDS mediation actually cause AIDS. Now, if we somehow manage to get past the gobsmacking inanity of lacing anti-AIDS medication with HIV, we still come up against the alleged motivation driving these unnamed European devils. In the archbishop’s own words, it is the goal of these hypothetical murderers “to finish quickly the African people.”
This runs through the entirety of religious belief. Travel to any decent-sized population of orthodox Jews, and you’ll probably come up against at least a couple of references to the disgusting and pedophilic rite of peri’ah metsitsa, in which a mohel sucks the freshly severed foreskin from the penis of a baby Jewish boy. Because of their deranged beliefs about pre-marital sex, Christians in our very own country have recently been fighting the inoculation against the human papilloma virus, which can drastically reduce the rates of cervical cancer. Only religion could devalue human life to the point that a parent would view cervical tumors as a valid deterrent to underage sex. And don’t think for a moment that the Eastern polytheisms and the Asian spiritualities are blameless in this regard, either. If you’re interested, and have a strong stomach, look into what was going on in pre-invasion Tibet, back when the Buddhists had control of the country.
The basic thesis is this: these are not misuses of religion; these are not basic human faults being pushed through the religious filter. These are actions caused by religion, done for religion, and continued because of religion. It is certainly true, if you happen to be religious, that your version of faith is potentially better than the examples given above because you are less of a fundamentalist. But that hardly seems to be an argument in favour of religion. If religion becomes progressively better as it becomes more diluted by secular reason, then religion is the poison and basic humanity is the cure. And while your rather benign, castrated version of the true faith is unlikely to spawn any suicide bombers, you still hitch your ideological wagon to these fools and murderers.
And yet, people act put-off when I sneer at SFU’s newly expanded Interfaith Centre. Here’s a news flash: so long as your nonsensical philosophical beliefs continue to be the main source of misery in the world, you’ll not get to have the market cornered on outrage. I claim the right to be offended by your hateful fantasy, and I absolutely refuse to silently accept the proposition that religion is deserving of respect.
[ The opinions presented here are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Peak. This space is here for the exchange of ideas and opinions. Articles should be 1000-1200 words. For more information, call our Features Editor at 291-4630 or e-mail peak_features(at)mail(dot)peak(dot)sfu(dot)ca. Say anything, the last word is yours! ]