The Future of Barbarism

There is a growing conversation between non-believers and the moderates of the religious world, predominantly in the interest of self-preservation in the age of mutually assured destruction, and this conversation circles around the future of religion and how to ensure that the future is less, perhaps, abrasive. In my estimation there are two conditions to this argument which, if you'll allow the phrase, murder this argument in the street of public discourse.

The first is the assumption by the religious that their chosen text is, in fact, infallible. So long as this is the assumption, there can be no common ground. Even for moderates. This is where the word "tolerance" gets its power as a tool of the moderate cause, when its utterance should be abhorred. For example, one shining sliver of the Decalogue proclaims that, "Thou shalt not have no other gods before me". Buried in this proclamation are three assumptions; 1. Thou shalt be Jew/Christian/Muslim, and if not, thou art lesser. 2. Thou shalt, in fact, have a god. If not, thou art not (art'nt?) lesser, thou art essentially non-existent. And 3. If thou havest other gods, it's totally cool, just knowest where thou's bread art buttered. Now, because of the infallibility of this commandment, the religious may be able to "tolerate"people with other beliefs, but they can never accept them. No matter how urgently they are compelled (read:forced) to love their neighbor.

So, because the religious person is the owner of the ultimate truth, what good is a secular argument that comes from a fallible and faulted soul? Due to this, at any point of deep-rooted departure, any true schism between what is reasonable and what is religious, the holyman can simply shrug his shoulders and tap his book, thus claiming authority. Ultimate authority.

The problem of infallibility leads directly into the second issue with any true type of progressivism-- and this is a problem rooted within the literature itself--  these books were written by men who didn't know better. This is an admission which must be made regardless of whether one believes the authors' hands were divinely driven or no. No page of the Bible mentions DNA. The Torah clearly avoids germ theory. I'll not mention the Koran's take on the women's movement. Sure, this may seem like a trivial charge. But imagine looking no further than Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" when trying to debate race relations. What's the problem? The human genome has been sequenced, fully putting to rest any hope for a claim of superiority springing from the tint of one's flesh. It's bullshit.

In this vein, the very nomenclature of religious texts is impregnated with assumptions, biases, and claims from ignorance which are no longer of any appreciable value to any society. Let alone a first world nation. Don't give credence to the retarding effects of a simple set of subtle language-based assumptions? Note the importance of female virginity peppered throughout the Bible and contemplate that in regard to the dichotomy, observable in contemporary popular culture, between male sexuality and female sexuality.

Because of these two hinges of the religious world-view, I fear it may be a fair claim to say that the religious future, and the future of religions, will be prone to relapses into their barbaric past much more so than open to progressing into a world where they are not necessary to a cohesive world view.

That is, we are more likely to get more events reminiscent of Charlie Hebdo and 9/11 while struggling towards tolerance than we are to enjoy peace and acceptance.

ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.