Wallet

Thursday November 3, 2005 - 4:27PM EDT

Its no secret that I want all relgious practice to go away. But why I ask myself? Of course there are the various occurances that I don't agree with. Things that go against practical judgement and common sense. But at the crux of my dislike lies something else. It is a matter of priority. Seems like these people who are religious put religion above everything else. They are muslim, christian, jewish, hindu, sikh, etc. before everything else. When I hear these clowns preach about wanting to make people understand them (muslim, christian or whatever). I am baffled at their insistance on the importance of being part of this religious group. It is like they ignore everything else that comes before religion. They ignore basic aspects of being a human sometimes. How being apart of this group hold such high priority is beyond me. Sometimes that high priority can fracture basic human bonds of friendship. How in the hell does that happen. I just don't understand how it is taken so seriously that nothing can trump it. I don't even take the theory of gravity as seriously as some people take religion. Fuck man what the hell is wrong with people. I thought about this while reading an article about some muslims who were questioned for praying at a football game. It is a shame no doubt, but you have to look at this more broadly than a simple discrimination case. Sidenote: the founding fathers of this country were so brillant with their seperation of church of state insitance that everyday I come to appreciate it even more. They had an insight that many people today still don't posses. One of the people who was praying was saying how he grew up in New York and always comes to Giants games and whatnot. He was professing his belonging to american culture, rightfully so. Then he began to say something about wanted to teach people what it is to be a muslim. I don't get where his priority lies. I guess New Yorker is large category with the subset of muslim. But what happens when aspects of the subset overtake the larger classification. That being a muslim is more important than being a New Yorker. Religion is at its core such a private thing. But when it enters into the large public sphere, especially esoteric pratices it causes problems right away. More dangerous is the ideaology that enters the public sphere but you don't even notice that normally, which makes it so dangerous. This is where I think the insight of seperation of church and state came from. The general public psyche has a priorities that is different from the individual. They do both however share a similar structure I think. Something like being able to walk around and not be killed is part of both the public and private priority set. We humans live in a society based on this shared public priority set. You know where this is going, what I am explaining is obvious. Clashes happen, blah blah blah. The thing I want to articulate is that with the closer interaction of different societies priority sets are in greater variance then they ever have been and more clashes occur. Religion is becoming more and more of a clashing priority because in the public psyche it is dropping further and further down on the priority list (praise jesus it is). With larger human populations other things have become more and more important to survival and maintaining an increasingly complex modern society in. Even among homogenous religious populations they will have the same problems as they grow larger populations. Religion is a private priority, very little in it relates to basic human survival. The rule of law on the other hand helps to keep your ass alive and not dealing with meatheads wanting to take your food. This is what the founding fathers saw. They saw that there were far more important things to live in a stable world then what religion one practiced. So they had to remove it from the public space as much as they could because it contained very little in holding a nation together. It would do more to tear it apart than anything. Besides some religious ideas fly in the face of rationality anyway. Like what is the deal with major religions and discounting women. Furthermore what is the deal with some women accepting that trash. They subscribe to an idealogy that specifically denies them a fair break. I hate that shit. Even more annoying is some american women being subordinate in a religion. This is the land of fighting for a fair break. I don't know how seriously I could take anyone championing equality that subscribes to certain religious ideas. I should really go read some feminist literature to get a sense of what it is about before commenting. But it seems to me that sometimes people either discount or criticize feminism because of a lack of understaning of its core concepts. Which coincedently I probably don't know myself. That at is core wasn't getting women into men's school or women playing sports. It was getting women to not be subordinate. To stand up as much as men do. To be counted and not discounted. To stop playing the second banana. It is a mental change which should be followed by those concrete examples I give. Don't focus on the examples as evidence. The advancement of womens rights is benificial to all peoples not just women. I'll kick the next person that laments the "loss" of "nicities" as a consequence to the women's movement, even as just a joke.