"Christian Europe will never allow Muslim Turkey to join the European Union." These words, spoken by a client of mine during a discussion, clearly illustrate the division arising from the strict adherence to religion.
While religion is a spiritual matter, the leaders of the various beliefs have, over the centuries, been too concerned with the material world. I ask:
- How exactly does abstaining from pork but eating fish improve my chances of meeting the creator of both pig and fish?
- Does wrapping up the human form in a chador show greater appreciation of the supreme being’s work?
- How does the use or non-use of a condom improve my chances of slipping into heaven?
- Why should a religion be led solely by the male half of humankind if god breathed live into men and women?
Religions today are akin to football supporters' clubs, more intent on increasing membership than on the edification of mankind’s spirit. This is so evident in their willingness to resort to the numbers game when trying to justify the validity of their belief: X hundreds of millions believe in “our” god, or, believers of “our” faith are growing by Y percent annually. With so many zeros in the statistics, there must be one hell of a gridlock on the road to heaven.
Some more maths. Take the thousands of religious rules that exist worldwide, multiply them by the billions of adherents and the result is an equation of extreme complexity.
This related article might interest you: Burning of the Books
Suha Arafat, the wife of the late Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, is facing the possibility of having an international arrest warrant issued against her by the Tunisian government. Without going into the merits of the case, I can't help noticing how prompt she is in trying to rope in religion to her defence. Only last week, in my post Merry Christmas, I commented that "Many on this island shuddered upon hearing the words "Islam" and "sharia", immediately fearing that Maltese Catholicism was facing a new threat." Ms Arafat is finely attuned to Maltese fears and sentiments so, with an Islamist party emerging victorious in recent Tunisian elections, she stated (as quoted in today's timesofmalta.com), “I have the Madonna of Malta, she’s with me. I always pray to her and I know she knows that I’m innocent and she will not let me down.”