"His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain
Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name"
Nine Inch Nails - Heresy
I might go in depth as to the hypocrisy of using construction cranes born of secular engineering to build edifices of religious brainwashing like the Masjid al-Haram in the first place, laugh at Allah's impotence in building his own damn palaces, but that's not my focus right now.
A decade ago, I might have taken some morbid curiosity in hearing the mindless sheep try to justify a hundred and eleven deaths among the faithful in the safest abode of their faith as an act of god. You can hear some of the most astoundingly circuitous and self-contradictory rationalizations in such cases as minds crippled by a lifetime of dependence on the comfort of moral authority twist themselves in knots looking for gods in sandstorms. I've found that I don't do that anymore. After a while their tortured unreason becomes too macabre to entertain anyone but the sadistic fatcats pulling the strings of such social control mechanisms as religion. There is no use in addressing the faithful. Their minds, their individuality, their being is gone, effaced, steamrolled by lifetimes of kneeling and chanting, by merciless indoctrination through childhood emotional and often physical abuse. I want to take this opportunity to address another social group: the apologists.
You false humanists, those of you who adopt the sick patronizing view that even though you don't personally believe in gods or at least in personified religion, you would keep faith alive for the peace of mind it offers others not as enlightened as you, justify this. Justify one hundred and eleven deaths. Justify the deaths of those who felt compelled to be there, not for personal growth born of their own individual understanding of the world, not as part of a self-actualizing program of aesthetic, scientific or ethical development but for the fear of being flayed alive and boiled in piss for all eternity if they don't constantly express their obedience to religious authority or for the mercenary motivation of forty virgins and a mule or whatever the fuck imams promise those they subjugate these days.
Had a crane fallen on an overcrowded movie set documenting the history of religion, or on a convention center in which religious artifacts were being sold for their historic and aesthetic value, or on a school in which the human ape's weakness for authoritarianism is explained to allow individuals to protect themselves from such control, it would have been a disaster.
Had five hundred people been killed or injured in some street brawl over the distribution of natural resources, had this been some mining accident in which five hundred miners died to extract copper or molybdenum or whatever else keeps our economy going these days, had there been any actual productivity or intellectual advancement or anything at all real been the cause of the gathering, we could at least say the price was too great.
There is no trade-off here. This is not a setback in humanistic growth. It's not a flip of a sine wave but a deeper dip of one of humanity's lowest points. It's an accidental wrong taking place in the midst of a much greater intentional wrongdoing. A hundred and eleven people died performing a mindless stone-age ritual of abject, sadomasochistic submission before a horde of robed and perfumed charlatans. To all you apologists: if you're going to support this, take the mantle of divinity upon yourselves. It suits you just as well as it does those you protect. Look at the next hundred and eleven people you meet on the street and imagine bashing their heads in with a sledgehammer after - after! - making them give you their wallets and making them kneel before you to kiss your feet.
There is no difference between you doing so yourselves and passing the buck to some chanting con-artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment