It takes a lot to get me angry. But if I look for it on the Internet, I can find it. When reading about Lisa McPherson – who died as a result of Scientology – my blood boils and my fists contract. When I read a website that documents “3,254 people killed, 235,558 injured and over $455,070,000 in economic damages” from quack medicine, frauds and snake-oil merchants who are simply there to make a quick buck, I am ready to burst.
I want to address the question of being involved in sceptical circles, in being (a kind of) social critic. Why do it? “Why do you care about these things?”
I don’t care who you are, dear reader.
I don’t care what your religion, culture, nation or background is. I don’t care what you think of atheism, secularism. I do, however, care about you as a human being. I do care that we try to live as a respectable species, fighting for knowledge, fighting for equality everywhere – all the time. Make no mistake, I want to see past the barriers of incredulity, set up by trenches of ancient ideologies and barbed-wires of recent quackery.
I raise this, to raise your eyes. To raise your voice. I want you to speak out. If you value others’ lives, if you value the gift of reason, if you want to see some peace filter through the nonsense, I am calling upon you to raise your voice. Be it in any words of any format: Through keyboards, microphones or telephones. Be it in talks, conferences, papers, radio-shows.
I am angry and I want you to be angry. We shouldn’t have to settle for 130 children dying each year because their parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses. We should fight, shout and keep kicking as we hear about Muslim women being killed for leaving abusive husbands, when we hear that “[m]ore than 25 … “honor killings” have been confirmed in Britain’s Muslim community in recent years”. We should raise our fists against the retardation of sensibility when reading:
In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.
[Or] The president of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, a renowned center of Islamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in a television interview: “It’s not really beating,” Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. “It’s more like punching.”
Why should we remain silent about these things? No longer should people have to die from this. No longer should Muslim women have to face charges of death, stoning or flogging for being raped.
Words can be bullets, no less than ideas can be foundations for change. I don’t care who you are, at this moment, and I ask you to not care who I am either. In this time, we must be able to recognise idiocy, lunacy and the proud march of unreason that parades through our streets, in our backyards, crushing whoever so steps in its path.
And there is little way to stop it, as it contorts into something new. My own president caused undue harm in denying the link between HIV and AIDs. He was supported by the ever-horrid Minister of Health who stated eating fresh fruit and vegetables could prevent AIDS.
Reason comes in fits and spurts, it seems. Dominating every aspect of our lives is a fertile ground for unreason, some parts in full bloom others already seeded. There’s a great deal of it to be torn down, so that we are able to not only lead lives, but actually save them. It is time to start being more aware of the nonsense out there. Please, help us fight this. We may be fighting against certain people and their very bad ideas, but we are also fighting for every single human being to live as a fully-fledged individual, regardless of race, creed, culture.
I don’t care who you are, but if you have fingers or a voice, you can start changing the tide today.
EDIT – The question remains: Why do I care and why should you? Am I pessimistic, negative or cynical?
No! On the contrary: My reason for raising these points of retarded lecherous thinking is to show that we can do better. I believe, quite strongly, that we are better than these things. We are capable of greater good and greater kindness. Instead a lot of people are more worried about other people’s dress-sense, sexual relations, and other vicarious interferences, than they are about happiness, fulfilment and basic respect.
We need to connect on what we know (we are all humans with similar loves, hates, desires) rather than kill each other on what we can not know (god, the afterlife, and paradise). We can do better, I really believe we can. That is why I care and so should you.
