Let’s start today’s column off with a little wager: I bet my god has bigger balls than yours.
You see, I am a Pastafarian. You would never know it by looking at me, but I face constant ridicule and persecution for my belief that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How can I stand the religious hate-mongering? Because my god has reached out and touched me with his noodly appendage.
Now say I was to go around claiming that this deity who I believe in had spoken to me and given me certain codes of conduct that all people were to live by. Not just that, but also that any man-made laws would be second in authority to the laws that were given to me by the deity that only I could see or hear. You’d probably say to yourself, “What a shame, he was such a nice boy,” watching as the men in white coats took me away to a padded room to sit and think for awhile.
You may think I’m crazy. But if so, then why does the Judeo-Christian Bible continue to have such a strong influence over this great country’s legislation? It’s 2011, and with all of America’s progress (and I use that term loosely) in advancing our society in recent decades, the U.S. government has only just come around to promoting equality for gay Americans, for example.
To have a country where the people are ruled by a state religion or where the state religion influences policy-making is known as a theocracy. Some of you may think that this is a thing of the past, but I can think of one of the world’s best-known and most influential theocratic governments off the top of my head. It is in a country called Iran, and the majority of the world (including many other Muslim countries) is terrified of them, mainly because their leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is bat-shit crazy.
In Iran, as with many other Muslim theocracies, the law of the land is Islam, and it is used to make and enforce laws that are clearly out of date in a modern society, but which no one will object to because they believe (or are forced to believe that) they are in some way divine law.
Now I don’t know about you, but seeing America, (in my opinion) the greatest country in the world continuously falling victim to the same religious influence that plagues the poor people of Iran just makes me sick to my stomach.
The most important and governing document of our land is called the Constitution, and most certainly not the Bible. If it wasn’t so scary, I would probably piss myself from laughing at all of the right-wing Americans who get off on condemning the threat of Islam without actually seeing how threatened our American civil liberties are by Judeo-Christian ideologues.
Still, as I mentioned earlier, it appears that some aspects of the American government are beginning to break free from the influence of religion, and focusing more on the Constitution and providing equal rights for all Americans. And even if things like the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are just the beginning, I will allow myself a brief moment of optimism for the future of American policy-making.
At the same time, however, I am equally fearful for the future of several countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. As oppressed people continue to fight to overthrow their respective monarchies and dictatorships, an opportunistic and dangerous group known as the “Muslim Brotherhood” stands poised to potentially take power in the midst of all the unrest. Theocracy in the place of autocracy is not progress — again, look to Iran for a harsh example.
As we face the threats that religious fundamentalism brings to the Christian America and the Muslim Middle East, I sincerely hope that we can stand together to bring about an age when people are ruled and governed by reason and logic, and leave the invisible men in the sky (or invisible pink unicorns for some of you) out of the business of running people’s lives.
Or at the very least, let’s have a rational and sensible deity telling us how to live. Like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Glory be to his noodly goodness.
R’amen.