Why do you care?

When people learn of my atheism and how strongly I feel about my position they often ask me why I care about what other people believe. This is, in my opinion, a perfectly valid question. If religion was as benign as some like to make it out to be, I probably would not care what people believed. After all, there could be people who believe in the tooth fairy and I wouldn't devote any time to thinking about that. I certainly wouldn't write a blog about it.

First, most religions are not benign. It's easy to point to the Inquisition, to child raping clergy or to September 11, 2001 as examples of the evils of religion. The common defence for these sorts of things is that these were acts of extremists and are not reflective of mainstream religion. An argument against extremism would be self-evident. I am arguing that moderate or even "cultural" christianity is harmful and even deadly. There are a number of ways this is so. There is one area in particular that I will argue one in this blog.

Almost 20 years ago, I got the opportunity to travel to Brazil and one of the things that I saw there was one of the many "favelas" or slums of Rio de Janeiro. I have never since seen poverty and conditions of living such as I saw there. There were streams of raw sewage going down the street. There were also scarcely clothed, unsupervised and apparently undernourished children all around.

Ironically, on the drive to Rio de Janeiro, we stopped at a large Catholic Basilica. Evidently, the largest Catholic church in the world outside the Vatican is in Brazil. Brazil is very much a Catholic country. Estimates put adherants of catholicism at about 75% of the population. Protestants are 15%. Are the catholic and christian attitudes about sex and/or birth control at least partially to blame for the poverty in that country?

From www.catholic.com:

In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, "Human Life"), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence.

Contraception is "any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act [sexual intercourse], or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible". This includes sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods, spermicides, coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), the Pill, and all other such methods.

One could argue that just because the church teaches against birth control does not mean that individual adherants do not practice birth control anyway. This is probably largely true of more affluent believers. However, in a most hypocritical example of christian piety, the religious in the West have used their influence to make it much more difficult for families in the third world to have the luxury of ignoring church teaching as they have enjoyed.

Sadly, in 2010, the government of Canada altered it's position on foreign aid. The government followed a conservative position in the US of giving aid only on the condition that the money not go to provide abortions. When Aid groups protested such a move, Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth advised aid groups to "Shut the fuck up on this issue".

From The Star, published On Mon May 03 2010:

“If you push it, there will be more backlash,” said Ruth, who fears that outrage will push her boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to take further measures against abortion and family planning – abroad, or maybe even in Canada. “This is now a political football. This is not about women’s health in this country.”

No, it's not about women's health in Canada. What, though, about women in the third world? What about the women in those favelas in Brazil who are chained to the animal cycle of reproduction and forced to produce children whom they cannot feed?

Here in a nutshell is what is wrong with even "cultural Christianity".  In the 2001 Canadian census, 77% of people identified as being Christians. Does this statistic means that 77% of Canadians are actually practicing Christians? In a country of 30 million people, are there actually 22 .5 million people attending church on any given Sunday? Data taken from the Millennium Study by Taylor Nelson Sofres Intersearch in 1999 showed that only 20% of Canadians regularly attend church. That essentially amounts to 57% of people in Canada claiming a Christianity when asked by a poll that they do not appear to actually practice.

In a democracy, politicians do what they believe to be popular or at least what will not shoot them in the foot come the next election. Since the statistics are so skewed, isn't it reasonable to assume that politicians would feel better about enacting a policy that 77% rather than at best 20% of voters would agree with?

I care about these things because I have seen how the sometimes well-meaning positions of the religious have disastrous consequences in the real world. It seems especially cruel to me for churches in these impoverished countries to preach to uneducated people that there is another life to come that will be much better than this one and that the God that will provide this greater life for them doesn't want them to practice birth control. The twisted result is that their condition in this world, the only world that we know exists, is made more and more miserable. The promised world-to-come never does.

Is it not preferable to give up the superstitions about the next world and get down to the serious business of improving the world that we actually do live in?