Let's Talk Real Dirty!

Background. Stickman of www.stickmanbangkok.com asked his writers if we could write something a bit more controversial. This is my response.

Oooh! I love it when you talk dirty Stickman. Your call to us writers to get a bit more controversial had me in goose bumps. So much so that I couldn’t sleep thinking about it. Here it is, 3 am and I’m banging out a story for you.

What are the two most controversial subjects? Why politics and religion of course, so I am going to wrap them both up in a rant that has been on my mind for a long time. So here goes. Hang on to your seats, because this is going to be a doozy.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic. My mother was a rabid catholic who forced us kids to go to church every Sunday. Since I also went to a catholic school I had religion rammed down my throat by the nuns every day too. But as I progressed through primary school I began to question things. I just couldn’t reconcile the teachings with what went on in my life. I can’t remember too many days when I didn’t get at least one beating at home or school. These weren’t just a quick cuff across the ears or something. No. At school it was a cane across the back of the legs or across the middle joints of my fingers. I still have broken veins there as a result. I was just a normal high-spirited kid. I wasn’t doing anything evil. I guess the nuns had a different viewpoint. I remember one told me I would go to hell if I looked down a woman’s cleavage. Oh, oh! I’m doomed!

The beatings at home were sometimes even more savage, especially if my mother lost her temper, which was often. Out would come Dad’s belt, or a piece of wood, or whatever was handy, and she would lay it on for all she was worth. Now she’s old she complains that I live too far away and I never go and see her. I wonder why?

What finally made me realize that the Catholics were not for me was the day I watched the local priest tie the school bully to a pole in the schoolyard and horsewhip the kid in front of the whole school. Now don’t get me wrong. That kid was the bane of our lives. He would beat us smaller kids up all the time. What really got me thinking though was that I was watching a ‘man of god’ who smoked like a chimney, had a severe drinking problem, and bet the takings from the collection plate on the horses beating up a 12 year old. Everyone knew about the priest’s peccadilloes, but no one would say anything. He should have been setting an example of love and caring. Instead, he was worse than many of the ‘sinners’ who went into his confessional box.

Although I continued going to church every Sunday until well into my early teens, it was only to appease my mother. I had no interest in the boring sermons, the smelly incense, and the bullying priest.

It wasn’t until I left home that I made the final break. From then on I took very little interest in religion, until I ran into a bunch of do-gooder Salvation Army people one day when I was in my early twenties. I was going through a bad time and they helped me get back on my feet. I was tempted to join them at first. But their tacky uniforms and the hymn singing on street corners playing badly out of tune instruments to a bunch of jeering sinners didn’t really turn me on.

A couple of years later I was wandering through Hyde Park in Sydney when I spotted a large crowd gathered around one of the soapbox speakers. He wasn’t much to look at. Webster had bad teeth and terrible halitosis, a gift from the British National Health. His clothes were very English working class. Not very clean, and a bit threadbare. His oratory, however, was incredible. He claimed to be a Warlock in the Wicca religion. It was obvious he was well read. He could discourse on a wide variety of topics. The big attraction, though, was how he handled hecklers. Webster would shoot them down in flames with a pointedly amusing retort that left most of them dumbstruck. It was a pleasure to watch him in action.

I got to know him and he invited me to join the after speech soirees at his home. There I met about 20 other seekers like myself. Perhaps Webster could enlighten us.

I listened to him for months, absorbing the wisdom he had culled from the ancient Druid religion. He was watching me too, and one day he pulled me aside and told me that he didn’t think I believed in him enough. He was right. After he told us one day that we should never have inoculations I started having my doubts. When I asked what he proposed instead, he said to use natural healing instead. If natural healing was so wonderful, I asked myself, why hadn’t it eliminated smallpox, measles, and so on long ago? Soon after that I left Webster and his crew of adoring acolytes. I was just too much of a doubter. I needed rational answers that would guide my life. I didn’t need a self-styled guru who demanded total belief and obedience.

However, being a Wiccan did have its advantages at least once. One day a Mormon duo knocked on my door hoping to sell me their brand of tripe. I opened the door, recognized the black trousers, white shirts and black nametag and told them not to waste their breath. I was a Wiccan Warlock. You should have seen the looks on their faces! They backed down the stairs intoning that I was evil, the devil, a blight on mankind, and so on.

I remained a skeptic after that and got on with my life. I traveled and one day I ended up here in Thailand. At first, I thought the Buddhist way of life might be what I was looking for. I went to one of the big temples and met some of the western monks to discuss the Dharma with them. I found some of it very enlightening, but I was still very wary of any organized religion. Thai Buddhism was very organized. I didn’t fancy the regime of denial imposed on the monks. That wasn’t for me. In addition, I found some of the western monks were somewhat naïve. I was pretty sure that some of them couldn’t cope with everyday life and had retreated to the monk hood as a way to avoid life’s hardships. In my mind, they were the walking dead. They had devoted their lives to preparing for death.

Ok. So what was next? I’d looked at two of the three great religions in depth. Neither of them offered me what I was looking for. So one day I went to the Pakistani Embassy and asked if I could have a Koran to study. I was greeted politely and shown into a drab room with a table, two chairs, and walls painted halfway up in institutional green. I sat there patiently wondering what would happen next. The door opened and a dapper man in his mid-thirties with a thin moustache walked in. He introduced himself and asked me if I would mind answering some questions. I had no problem with that, and told him so.

He asked me about my religious beliefs.
Currently none, but I was a seeker, I assured him.

If they gave me a copy of the Koran would I look after it and ensure that it was never desecrated?
Sure thing, I told him. I want to read it to get some insight into Islam.

Did I think I would convert to Islam?
Well, I can’t answer that right now. My first step is to read the Koran and then think about it.

Would I like to meet with a mullah and have him instruct me in the Koran?
No, not right now. I wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s time at this stage. If, after reading the Koran, I felt I would benefit from further instruction I would return to arrange further instruction and discussion.

And on it went. Eventually, he led me out to reception where a brand new copy of a beautifully bound Koran awaited me. I was asked to sign a book acknowledging that I had taken delivery, and I was ushered out the door by the still smiling dapper man.

I returned home and started to read. I had read the Bible for many years, so when I opened the Koran I was immediately struck by the similarities in the two books. The Koran uses much more flowery language, but the basic story is the same. My old friend the Archangel Gabriel is a very powerful figure in the Koran. He seems to be the avenging arm of Allah. As I read the Suras I got a feel for the philosophy behind Islam. Both the Bible and the Koran have some very violent people and events in them. The Old Testament matches the Koran pretty well there. However, the Bible does preach a lot more peace and love. The Koran dwells more on forcefully converting others to Islam. I don’t recall reading that women were inferior to men and that they should be wrapped completely in black, either. In fact, the Koran talks about women as equals. I wonder why Muslim women don’t do something about gaining their freedom from the tyranny their men have imposed on them?

After considerable thought I realized that Islam was not what I was seeking either. So that left me back to being an atheist again.

Now, one of the problems we atheists face is that we don’t have anywhere we can meet to discuss our non-beliefs. We have no organization. It’s difficult to talk about a belief you don’t have, so we tend to be left out in the cold. Whenever I’m asked what religion I am I have to answer ‘none’, which raises a few eyebrows. Although, if I think having a religion might sway my questioner to do what I want I might say I am Buddhist. I’m not lying. I really do think that Buddhism offers a lot more than the other organized religions. I’m just not the joining type who enjoys going to temples and following worshiping formulas. I prefer to think for myself.

Now, this brings me to the political part of my rant. I believe that governments are elected to run a country efficiently. They should not interfere in our personal lives. They should make sure that the infrastructure is maintained so that it functions properly, and they should collect enough taxes to ensure that they can do their jobs well. That’s all.

Somewhere along the line we seem to have lost sight of what politicians really are. Back in the last couple of centuries, governments tried various social experiments to ‘help’ their constituents. These all failed spectacularly, and in many cases the experiments killed many of the people they were supposed to help.

Then we had the big social revolution of the 1960’s and ‘70’s. I was there and I was a part of it. So many of us were such idealists. We were going to make the world a better place. Of course, you had to smoke dope and drop LSD to really get into the right state to start changing the world. Then along came Charles Manson, Black September, the Munich Olympics massacre, and so on. Suddenly, idealism went down the drain and we stumbled towards the beginning of the 21^st Century.

Along came Bush and his Neocons. Oh my! They narrowly squeaked into power, some would say by stealing the Presidency. No matter. They were in and they took control. The problem was, a large number of Americans were grumbling about it. How to fix the problem?

How convenient. A bunch of Islamic terrorists provided the answer by flying planes into a bunch of buildings. Suddenly, we began hearing about ‘Al Qaeda’. What was this shadowy organization? Oh yeah! Someone called Osama Bin Laden ran it. The trouble is, Osama was an ex-CIA man. He was trained by them, armed by them, and then he broke away from them. So why not pin it all on this ungrateful ingrate? Another problem was that Al Qaeda didn’t actually exist. It still doesn’t exist. Osama doesn’t have an organization. He merely funds any disgruntled ‘terrorist’ who wants to make a statement and hopefully kill himself in the process.

After 9/11 we see the American Constitution being disregarded, a new government organization with the decidedly Nazi sounding name of ‘Homeland Security’ to ‘protect US citizens from terrorist attack’. Unfortunately, the new laws seem to affect American freedoms more adversely than any terrorist. Then it’s hey ho! Off we go to war against a former ally who became a convenient scapegoat for everything. The problem was, Saddam wasn’t cooperating! Where were the WMD’s Bush and his band of merry fakers had promised us?

No problem. We’ll just keep telling people that we are still looking and when we find a few scraps of old chemical weapons from the 1980’s we’ll tell everyone we found them. Yep! That will work if we keep repeating it enough. We’ll wrap it up in good ol’ Christian ‘faith’ as well, and tell the non-believers that they are the heretics and the bad guys. Repeating the lie until everyone believed it worked for the Nazis and the Communists, didn’t it?

Now, you might have noticed that when Bush came to power, several governments around the world changed at about the same time. Blair in the UK, Howard in Australia, Taksin right here, Koizumi in Japan, and so on. They have all become the little lap dogs of the American prez. When he says poop, they ask how long do you want it, sir?

Like Mr Bush, they have tried to socially reengineer their countries to conform to their extremely conservative agendas. Here, we are not allowed to buy booze or cigarettes at certain times of the day. It doesn’t matter that these are far worse and more addictive than the drugs sold by the thousand plus ‘drug dealers’ who were killed to eliminate the drug trade. They are dead, so who cares? I haven’t noticed any reduction in drunkenness as a result. We just have to go shopping earlier to get our fixings if we want them. Or wait until the early evening to start our debauchery again. Has anyone noticed a reduction in the drug trade either? Nowadays it’s just much better organized and not so well publicized. The kingpins weren’t killed were they? The bluenoses spoil my video movies by blacking out people drinking and smoking, and nipples. But the violence remains in all its graphic gruesomness.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Governments around the world these days are more concerned with telling us how to behave and to do their bidding. Instead, they should be providing the basic requirements to make our lives comfortable and hassle free. Sure, here in Thailand we have a nice new BTS and MRT (the Sky Train and Underground rail systems were both planned and started long before the current government came to power). We have lots of new highways, some of which our grandchildren will still be paying for because of the vast amount of public funding that ‘disappeared’. The expressways that were supposed to link up in Bang Na is a graphic example. And we have the 30 Baht medical scheme that provides such basic medical service it’s probably safer to stay home to die instead.

In America they have a new way to control the populace: Fear.

Fear of the terrorists, that shadowy bunch of people no one has ever been able to find. Maybe some of those people in Gitmo are terrorists. Are they a part of Al Qaeda? I doubt it. Even Osama seems too slippery to be caught. Then again, perhaps no one really wants to catch him. It might be too embarrassing.

The security people who are supposed to be responsible for ensuring the safety of the people have swallowed the lies whole. They are constantly looking for terrorists, while people’s basic human rights and freedoms have gradually been whittled down. These days, you can be arrested in the US simply because someone ‘thinks’ you might be a terrorist, or because you said something that sounded vaguely like something a ‘terrorist’ might say.

It’s a sad world, my friends. Our governments have taken over the role of our consciences, but without any of the common sense we would normally apply. They have tried to impose not only their moral values on us, but their religious beliefs as well. What have we done? Have we let the devil into our midst? Is it too late to reverse things?

Don’t ask me. I’m no one and I don’t even believe in God, or the devil. But I do have a strong belief in mankind. I think the current worldwide political situation is an aberration. Once the main players are sidelined things will get better. We may never go back to the security and comfort we enjoyed before Bush and Co. It is up to us to try though, isn’t it?