j'accuse

 Ever since I read, many years ago,  Shirley Jackson's short story, "The  Lottery," I have

been haunted by the dangers inherent in our easy acceptance of unsubstantiated claims. I

know many think that it is essentially harmless to accept imaginative and comforting

scenarios as true, even if there is a lack of measurable evidence, but I think this has

the potential to create the most horrifying possibilities and that most of the inhuman

acts man has committed against his fellow man can be traced to this and this alone.

     As one example, a few years ago, in France, a mother, impatient with doctors -- her

daughter had a tumour removed from her brain and now had fits of epilepsy -- sought help

from that vast storehouse of unproven knowledge by calling  in the local priest. He, after

examining the girl, decided that a devil resided in her. Under his direction the mother

and the girl's brothers held her down and poured water down her throat to drown the devil.

The terrible screams and struggling that entailed more firmly convinced them that a devil

indeed was being successfully exorcised, for they knew their sweet girl would never curse

like that, and,  towards the end, when they could no longer force water into her, they

shoved a towel into the girl's mouth  and resumed their grisly task till, in her muzzled

agony, she mercifully died. The mother and her sons were charged with manslaughter.

 But who could blame them? They only had the girl's interest at heart. This is the

terrible thing about unsubstantiated claims-- these people, I am sure, loved the girl and

she, in turn, loved them back, yet they could not have tortured her more terribly  than

could some evil Bernardo. In all innocence, their compassionate faces became visions of

horror in the nightmare the girl had to face in her final hours.

  Similarly, when young women were burned at the stake, it was often justified as being

necessary to free their souls from eternal damnation. Once you can declare that a woman

has a devil within her, anything goes-- the devil has her tongue and we can only hear

its pleas, not hers.   Even today, there are preachers who create images of a child running

around in a woman's belly, crying: " Help me, kind sir, help me." in order to arouse their

more impressionable subjects to cruel acts.

I believe that almost all the most horrific crimes committed by we humans against our own

kind are rooted in unsubstantiated beliefs. No one could have slaughtered six million

people during the Nazi era, nor could anyone have continued to butcher women and children

in Bosnia, unless they had first been incited to do so by false and lurid stories about

their potential victims.

    Someone once said that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

I don't think so.All it takes for evil to triumph is for a society to tolerate the

propagation of information that has not been substantiated by empirical evidence.

And this is my main objection to organized religion.Because of  its nature, it insists

that we can believe in things without evidence-- this to me is its great crime; and it

symbolizes, in my opinion, the terrible Pandora's box that could eventually destroy us

all.

     If religious leaders had only had the decency, the guts, to slowly concede step by

step -- as we humans unearthed ever more information about this magnificent universe --

the superstitious parts that no longer made sense, that were no longer needed, religion

could have become the most unifying and emotionally rewarding force for the good of

mankind.

     When we gather in a church and listen to the hymns we can feel the empathy that such

a social gathering can emote. We can easily visualize that some ancient need of our

species was to gather together and thus encourage mutual cooperation and help.  Instead,

this powerful force for unity has been turned into a justification to slaughter those who

do not share our rigid dogma. The  priest's exhortation to believe without evidence

justifies almost anything.  What could have been the most useful tool of human culture has

been turned into a breeding ground of bigotry and hatred.

     Gays are hunted and beaten, Jewish Synagogues are set on fire, many people live in

tortured shame, obsessed with John's exhortation to "cut off thy offending hand," women

are treated as evil temptresses and untrustworthy and are often murdered for 'disloyalty,'

all because of some religious parable or another. What one religious leader might pardon,