Salem-News.com (May-18-2009 08:10)
Salem, Oregon
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may182009/stockholm_religion_5-18-09.php
Stockholm Religion
Commentary by Daniel Johnson Salem-News.com
We are a culture in deep denial, and I’m not talking about global warming.
(CALGARY, Alberta) - I am responding to the article by Abeer Mishkhas Khaleej, “Saudi Arabia: Under Age Marriage and the Law” of May 17, 2009.
In 2002 16-year old Bethany Hughes of Calgary was diagnosed with leukemia, which doctors said could only be treated with blood transfusions and chemotherapy. The Hughes’ were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not believe in blood transfusions and, because of her own, parentally inculcated, devout beliefs, Bethany did everything she could, even in her weakened state, to resist treatment, including pulling tubes out of her arms.
Seven months later, she was dead. David Gnam, the lawyer who had represented Bethany and her mother Arliss against the father to prevent medical intervention, reasonably pointed out that as a father he had to take responsibility for introducing her to the faith in the first place. After all, said Gnam, “he was the one teaching his daughter…”
I’ve recently considered a new perspective which I call Stockholm Religion. The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined after a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, Sweden where, at the end of six days of captivity after a failed bank robbery, several hostage victims actually resisted rescue attempts, and afterwards refused to testify against their captors.
This turns out to be a reasonable outcome from the hostage’s point of view. They identified with their captors as a defensive mechanism, out of fear of violence. (Can you see the implications for religion, here?) Small acts of kindness by the captors were magnified, since finding a reasonable perspective in a hostage situation is, by definition, impossible. Rescue attempts in such a situation can be seen as a threat, because it might appear likely that the hostage could be injured or killed. Religion in modern society is the Stockholm Syndrome writ large.
It is a harsh, but necessary thing to point out that, in reality, children are hostages to their parents. They are vulnerable, both physically and psychically. If parents teach their children that the world is flat, the children will not only uncritically take that on as a personal belief, but they will fight others psychologically, even physically, who disagree, because disagreement is an indirect attack against their parents on whom they are one hundred percent dependent. The correlation is nearly total: If parents believe in a particular religion, their children, as adults, will as well.
What made the connection for me was what some Muslim women say about their wearing head-to-toe coverings. They protested that they wore them willingly out of personal choice. But when you consider the violence, both threatened and actual, against women in Muslim societies, you know why they wear them and why they have to rationalize their actions. To admit that they are coerced in any way, would be an attack against their oppressors—the men who control Muslim society. So, they pretend they have a choice (and are not even aware that they are pretending). What else could most of them do?
We are a culture in deep denial, and I’m not talking about global warming. We need to pull our heads out of the sand and directly acknowledge that the killing of 16-year old Asqa Parvez of Mississauga, Ontario was a religiously-motivated murder and not, as Sahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association says was “the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed.”
Nor should we come to the sanguine conclusion of the National Post editorial that said:“for the moment we should not read too much into this family tragedy.” Au contraire, it is a family tragedy only secondarily and primarily a denial of the toxic role religion plays in our society.
IN 2003, 17-year old Ramandeep Atwal in British Columbia was stabbed to death by her Sikh father because she secretly dated, then moved in with, her non-Sikh boyfriend.
Clearly violence against young women is not solely a Muslim phenomenon or a pathology imported from other cultures. These three examples are from Muslim, Indian and North American religions. They are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of harm done to people at the hands of the family itself as proxy for religious authorities.
In 1851 the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “no child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy or religion, for wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity.”
Consider the myths that children in our society are exposed to in their early years: tooth fairy, Easter bunny, Santa Clause and God. No rational adult carries the first three into adulthood but belief in a mythological god persists. No person ever adopts the “true” religion; they adopt the religion of their parents. And with the thousands of gods and religions that have existed throughout history there is obviously no way that one of them could be true.
In a March 2006 speech in Toronto former president Bill Clinton talked about the threat to the world from religious fundamentalism saying that, “If we don’t walk away from that, we’re going to tear the world apart.” What is fundamentalism, though? It’s obviously in the eye of the beholder. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t see themselves as a threat because they believe they have the real deal while everyone else is misled or misguided. Ditto, the Muslims, Sikhs, Catholics, Jews,--the whole spectrum of religious variety.
Mr. Clinton almost said it. If it is okay to walk away from fundamentalism, it is equally okay to walk away from religion, per se. He didn’t draw the obvious conclusion that we need to walk away from religion itself as it is now practiced.
Comparing religions through history shows that virtually all faiths rest on a central story of a supernatural deity who suffers on earth, dies, then is resurrected to return to heaven. Scholars have made a list of more than 30 such deities which includes Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Bacchus, Orpheus, Hermes, Balder, Adonis, Hercules, Attis, Mithras, Tammuz of Syria, Thor (son of Odin), Beddru of Japan, Deva Tat of Siam, and many others.
What happened with Christianity is that Jesus, as opposed to all the mythological predecessors, was literalized and treated as an historical figure by the early church authorities. “The consequences of this”, says religious scholar and ordained Anglican priest Tom Harpur in his best selling book The Pagan Christ “were to prove very damaging over the centuries to come.” What was lost was “the deep, timeless spiritual truths behind or beyond the fictional packaging”.
The solution to global religious ineptitude is not the aggressive hostility of atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. The positive alternative says Harpur, is to embrace “a rational, cosmic faith” that “is the only thing that makes sense in our fast-changing pluralistic world.”
This is an orientation already embraced by many scientists, particularly astronomers and cosmologists who, by the nature of their disciplines, already hold a bigger perspective. As cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle believed, the universe itself possesses “a stunning property not possessed by any of its parts. It is able to reproduce itself and evolve. The collective system is alive. Its parts are just chemicals.” Or astronomer George A. Seielstad who argued that “since we comprehend what it means to be alive, we are the 'sensory organs' with which the living universe monitors its own 'physiology', if you will—taking its pulse and measuring its blood pressure. Without us, the universe is 'blind'. Our 'vision' into the future enables the universe to continue to live.”
Clearly the religions invented by illiterate desert tribesman of the Middle East thousands of years ago have no place in the 21st century.
Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place. Write to Dan at this address: [email protected]