Society’s Scourge … One of Them, Anyway
By Jim Koury
Remember when you were a young child, sitting around the kitchen table or wherever, and you heard the pronouncement, “To keep the peace, do not talk about politics or religion.” I am here to tell you I am about to tackle one of those taboo topics today – Religion. To sum it up right at the beginning, and this is my perspective, mind you, religion is the scourge of society, at least one of them anyway. It is the one I am talking about in today’s column.
I want first to state that I do know religion plays a vital role in the lives of many. Millions of folks worldwide find comfort and solace in their belief systems. That is all well and good. I certainly accept and respect that. It just is not something that accords me any degree of personal comfort, nor do I wish to coerce others who hold religion near and dear to abandon it or force them to do so. I also expect the same courtesy from them.
What I cannot accept is when individuals and, most significantly, governments use religion as a weapon and a means to inflict harm upon another human being or attempt to force those beliefs on non-believers. I also cannot accept religion as a driving force in legislative initiatives that cause those who find it all a bunch of bunk to adhere to and attempt to relegate whole classes of people to second-class status because of who or what they are. If you want religion, keep it in church on Sunday! Knock yourselves out with it. Leave me and millions of others alone who find it a charade and one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on humankind.
As a child, I practiced Catholicism. Or at least, my parents, out of obligation to their upbringing, mandated I practice it. My mother would always say that until we were Confirmed, that was how it would be. After that, she said we were free to do as we chose. Therefore, I was baptized, given first Communion, and Confirmed into the faith, as were my brothers, albeit a bit more grudgingly than I. I did not attend Catholic School (thank heavens), but diligently attended Sunday School right after the 8 am Mass. The nuns, in their habits, bellowed the faith and drove it into our young, impressionable heads with their stern warnings of eternal damnation if we did not succumb. This routine continued every Sunday until I was Confirmed, at the time, in 6th grade. The omnipotent Bishop of the Diocese stood before us, lightly slapped our faces, and welcomed us all as adults in the Catholic faith.
I maintained my faith through college and after, while my family abandoned any semblance of adherence to the church’s rules and regulations, observance of Holy Days of Obligation, and all the other manufactured dictates promulgated by a group of men far away.
Then something changed. I came out as a gay man. I began questioning my life’s paradigms, as they no longer fit into the neat, tidy world I dutifully adhered to. I began to dispel the rigidity and uniformity in my belief systems that contradicted who I evolved into. They no longer served
my purpose, as I did not believe in many of the precepts and “truths” driven into my head as a child. More importantly, I shed the façade, or at least began to, that shrouded my truth. The fabricated life I wove to protect myself from others, knowing I like to have sex with other men, was falling apart around me. It caused much angst and turmoil within me, as I had to find something to replace it all with. I had little to grasp onto for comfort and solace. I began to forge a new worldview. I began to seek out other means of support, as religion was not cutting it.
The defining moment I abandoned my Catholic Faith is like a stone, solid and firm, in my memory. I sat in church one Sunday morning, listening to the Priest’s sermon. The particular Priest in question was a fire and brimstone guy who was very committed to the church and its teachings. He began to go off on the evils of homosexuality. Something clicked inside, and I felt rage at this man. How dare he tell me I am not worthy of salvation because of who I am! Fuck him, I said to myself. I then got up and walked out mid-Mass and never returned. Nor shall I ever. That moment was the final act of abandonment of a world of the past and my belief in the manufactured falsehoods of an institutional church.
From that point on, I realized that religion was a scourge on our society. Its rigidity of belief in an omnipotent force in the sky, maintaining the gates of heaven, and casting those not worthy of entrance into the eternal damnation of hell fell by the wayside. It is a lot of bullshit meant to control people. Religion cannot survive when it tolerates individuality and freedom of thought apart from what the faithful teach. It suppresses individualism, and it saddens me that so many abandon their ability to think freely and accept false truths from those who, many times, are as God-fearing as the devil himself and lead secret lives of adultery, sexual promiscuity and participate in actions they publicly deride as immoral. The hypocrisy of these people is astounding. It is a joke. In subsequent essays, I shall describe what has replaced the repressive confines of religious doctrine in my life that is much more conducive to who and what I am.
I find it wholly repugnant that the false prophets and the superficially pious attempt to dictate that all citizens adhere to what I perceive to be a vile Christian Nationalist movement—a movement promulgated by authoritarian-based politicians and others who are living in the 19th century. Our nation and society, generally, are on a dangerous precipice. Those who love the freedom of expression and individuality must take action to bring our country back from the edge and fall into a dangerous world antithesis to all that America represents.
The Republican Party, led by the Christian fascists that I speak of, represents no one but themselves and their cling to power. They care not for their fellow humans or the ramifications of their draconian policies and will continue in their attempts to force upon the citizens of our great nation. Unless we stop them! We must stop them! America can no longer endure the Neo-Nazi-inspired belief system that has become the Republican Party’s mantra under the leadership of that repulsive thing that was elected in 2016. I do not even want to mention its name and thus sully this article’s integrity. You all know of whom I speak!
I have faith that America will thrive again within the context of a free-thinking, and progressive society. I believe in its ability to relegate those who cling to their despicable, religious-inspired philosophies back under their rocks and into their cold, clammy caves once again. Preserving the individualist spirit that has defined our nation’s development must retake precedence. We must neuter those who support the degradation of that spirit through the use of authoritarian and religious dogma in government. Future generations of Americans will depend on our success.
Jim is the author of two books, Unredacted and Soul Journey, and also publishes an online publication, Diversity Rules Magazine. He resides in Upstate New York in the city where he was born, with his dog Lina and cat Critter.
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