When your god tells you to go against the grain

MANY people in government and in caring society are trying to work out how to regulate and control churches and cults. This follows the recent horrific shootings that took place in the Eastern Cape, ending in a police station littered with bloody corpses, all apparently linked to a cult church.

The perpetrators will probably claim they acted at the instruction of some divine force. Throughout the centuries the most horrific atrocities have been committed in the name of religion – formal, official established religion, not just weird cults.

The Spanish Inquisition was not a freaky, breakaway incident by some wide-eyed weirdos. It was mainstream religion.

The burning of the witches of Salem and many examples of horrible rituals of human sacrifices to various gods go back thousands of years and are not confined to any race or religion.

In Oxford there’s a monument where so called “heretics” were burned at the stake for refusing to change one item of their belief. It seems the human race is often willing to commit violent atrocities as long as they do them in the name of some god.

What are we to do when your god tells you to do something my god disapproves of ?

It seems all too easy to set up your own religion in these easy-going times. Here in my sleepy little home town of Fish Hoek I can count at least a dozen different churches, each believing they have found “The Way” to reach salvation.

History has shown us that people are prepared to die defending their own Way.

How is a society to try and regulate something that does not conform to any generally accepted standard?

Like forbidding children to go to school, for instance. Children often see things more clearly than adults and there was a shining example of this was when Mark Twain once asked a small boy to define faith.

The boy said: “Faith is believing something when you know it ain’t so.”

Those who adhere to any particular religion become incensed in a certain way, or wear one’s hair in a particular style, or smoke a particular herb.

“This is what our God has commanded us to do,” they claim, “and who are you mere mortals to criticise the laws of our God?”

One of the basic human freedoms of which which are so supportive is the freedom to worship in the way we feel is right. Any lawmaker who tries to change that is heading for a deep and bitter fight. But who among us is qualified to decide exactly what any deity’s instructions are?

Last Laugh

A small boy whispered to his mother during the morning church service: “Mom, I think I am going to be sick?”

“Well, don’t be sick here,” she said, “Go outside into the garden.”

A moment later the child returned looking better. “Did you go into the garden?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t have to,” said the boy. “There was a box in the foyer with a sign on it saying: ‘For the Sick’, so I used it.”