Des Downunder On Sundays

By Desmond Rutherford | ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA -- Holy Wars & Equality Rights

You can hold all the traditional values you want, but nothing will make those values rational, sane or relevant to reality, if they have been born of superstition. Sadly, in the eyes of the religious conformists, it seems that rational values are non-traditional.

The upsurge in violence and intimidation against LGBTQ people and other minorities is not just physical, it is soul destroying. Natural physiological traits are being touted as aberrant and alterable behaviour, with individuals being asked to comply with impossible demands. Many people are feeling their rights as human beings are being threatened; threatened to the point of homosexual existence not even being acknowledged.

At the heart of many if not most cultures, is the need for freedom and respect…for the right of human equality for all. Individuals must have these conditions met if they are to find a satisfactory meaning for their individual existence. It matters not which God you worship, which prophet you hold in the highest regard, or whether you believe in none; these are the human values of freedom and respect held most dear by human beings.

Over thousands of years, for centuries at a time, religious organisations have sought to superimpose religious tenets on Mankind’s thoughts of freedom, if not their freedom of thought. Yet still, individuals have managed to find measures of freedom in their thinking, providing their cultures with new prophets, leaders and thinkers. These rebellious thinkers have overturned the traditional practices of trading in souls, and money, in the temples of hope and despair; replacing them with love, compassion and respect for humanity at large.

Time and time again, organised religions have hanged, tortured and crucified the messengers of truth, freedom and love, for no other reason than that their priests desperately clung to traditional judgemental values that should never have been previously assigned to their god's 'will'.

Religions, with their gods galore, have, throughout humanity's long struggle with reality, been used to enslave women and men of any and all races to control individuals and their cultures. Awareness of one's own consciousness has been regarded as heresy, when in fact it is our most valuable intellectual attribute in our search for meaning and our recognition of reality.

Our natural compassion for each other in misfortune is ripped from us by the priests of power and corruption, and replaced with guilt for even being alive. The cultural ancestors of those priests revelled in human sacrifice as they ripped the heart out of human life and replaced it with fear, in those who still breathed.

Today's religions are demanding our obedience to old beliefs, manipulatively designating them as ‘traditional values’. Those beliefs have been superimposed on the innocence of young minds, in order to substantiate and perpetuate lies, and rumours of lies, in gospels long revealed as mere gossip spoken within the courts of dishonest necromancers.

Whole generations of our fellow humans, our ancestors, our forefathers, have been used as slaves to build temples to the irrational ideas and beliefs of charlatans. Men have been duped into fighting wars in the name of those ideas and beliefs. Living human beings suffered, slaughtered in the cause of beliefs now falsely touted as traditional values.

Slowly, ever so damned slowly, Mankind is crawling out from under the burden of subjugation to selfishness, tyranny, slavery and authoritarianism; demanding the right to be free, to live without being used by someone else. That is what equality really means; that each man is an end in himself and must not be a means for anyone else's ends. Humans are, individually, an end in themselves, regardless of gender, race, sexuality or belief. In this view of equality, we acknowledge our differences, our right to be different.

Only, if we are able to be different, without being threatened for being different or treated as unequal; only then, are we equal.

Sadly, atrociously, abominably, globally, we have tried to force equality to be regarded as sameness. Instead of celebrating our differences, we have tried to make everyone the 'same', and mistakenly, call that sameness, equality. We are misled into regarding each other as being the same, ignoring the wonders of our differences. It’s as if we are merely cogs in the mechanism of our society, expected to function the same as everyone else. We have become things, afraid of being different, when we should be celebrating our universal uniqueness. The best we can hope for is to be recognised as a great person after our life has ended, either in Earthly memorials or religious ‘rewards’ in the 'afterlife'.

Religions, as well as political and economic social structures, want us to have the same common beliefs, desires and goals, when we should really be seeking our own individual life answers, our own meaning for existence.

After the unimaginable horrors of religious driven persecutions, with genocide of whole civilisations, killings of non-believers and individuals who were just different, religious inquisition has finally been brought into question, if not disrepute. It is not surprising, therefore, that separation of religion and state has been introduced by secular governments. For some time now, since the end of World War II, religious organisations have been increasingly appalled by the freedoms that progressive secular democracies have allowed in their communities. Civil rights, civil marriage and birth control are but three examples that many religious leaders warn will bring about the end of civilisation.

Breakaway churches have rejected such notions, concentrating on the peaceful and compassionate aspects of religious messages. Messages of compassion and love, similar to that attributed to Jesus Christ, can be found in the texts of many religions. These peaceful aspects of religious comfort are not being denied, nor confronted here.

Today however, organised religions, like many Christian-based churches, have reverted to their previous positions of trying to control people through fear. They call for LGBTQ people to be deprived of their human right to be treated equally, as married couples. What's more, the ‘pious’ princes of sanctimony, along with those reactionary and deceitful 'family' organisations, have as a minimum demanded that LGBTQ people be legislatively forbidden the right to marry, if not having reference of their very existence suppressed.

Whatever the ancient cultural traditional values might actually have been, we have within our grasp, globally, as human beings, the ability to validate and value difference, as a genuine, natural, wholesome attribute of our development into loving sentient creatures.

We are involved in life, and that includes our differences…our ability to see and accept those differences as unique components of humanity, equally and without being threatening or threatened; threatened for being different.

As LGBTQ people, including our allies and supporters, our dispute with religion is a fight much greater than they want. It is in fact a Holy war of religious beliefs versus human ethics; ethics that the clergy wish would go away. They have the audacity to proclaim that they are the source and guardians of morality. Did they truly have any morality whatsoever, any sense of ethics, when they tortured, burned and stoned men and women and children for being what they called ‘heretics’? Where was their God when they committed these atrocities? Where are their messages of 'we are sorry', for the crusades and their missions to convert 'heathens', under pain of death?

Why have the religions made no real advance in converting LGBTQ people? Why are so many LGBTQ people agnostics or atheists?

Religions have made many attempts to convert or hold LGBTQ people as prisoners of fear and faith, to little avail. The very fact of being gay means that LGBTQ people must go through a period of self examination, when culture and the forces of religious belief contradict their self-knowledge.

Individuals who self question will likely uncover the culturally selective suppression of reality. This is part of the reason why such people are so creative, and so many reject religion in favour of being atheists or agnostics. They have questioned religion, and life itself, and found that the truth of their own experience is more in line with reality than the deviously devilish morals and myths of so-called 'traditional values'.

Religions know this, at least intuitively, and their final solution is to condemn all sexual expression, outside of sanctified matrimony, as a sin. Fear and sex are tied together in a mental prohibition of the physical pleasures, to avoid the religion’s condemnation. Is it any wonder that the celibate priests celebrate choir practice?

The covert mission to achieve social control, through spreading religious doctrine becomes obvious to those who reject the religion, consult historical facts, or relate to reality. Once people are awakened to the reality of freedom; freedom from the concept of sin, it is very difficult to reconvert them to a religion of oppressions, myths and fear based superstitions.

Like many before us; including even some saints and 'holy' men, and the persons of science who rebelled against organised religion, critical free thinking individuals are listening to, and questioning, religious dogma and finding it seriously deficient in terms of reasoning, morality and ethics. With insight into the subterfuge of faith and belief, people are justified in demanding the right to be accepted as the human beings they are, without threat or ridicule.

Wherever self questioning people challenge cultural conformity, they rebel against untruth, and against distortion of reality.

Religions detest this, and their hate for us is evident in their every claim that they 'love' us one minute, and want to deny us our physiological needs in the next. They know that the truth our questioning brings forth is dangerous to their continued existence; not because we would violently attack them, but because we are proof of their lies, their denial of Mankind's ability to live without their misguided war on peace and love. We are proof of a destiny where love and peace are not shackled by ignorance.

No religion, no culture, no society has the right to demand that we be threatened or manipulated by fear, particularly fear of being different. No person should be treated as the means for someone else's ends. That is slavery, as is being kept unaware of the right to be free of another's demands.

When religion no longer threatens us for being human, and instead encourages our natural compassion and freedom to love; in short, when religions practice ethics without hypocrisy, then we can talk about freedom for religion. Until then, we have every right to expect, and ensure, our protection from religious indoctrination, fear, persecution and warmongering.

Holy Wars are not about traditional human values of freedom and equality; they are insane crusades to intimidate and force everyone to conform to the same belief. That’s not equality or freedom.