Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Why Submit to the Tyranny of Priests and Preachers?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Submission!
If Christians have a personal relationship with God, as they always boast, why do they submit to the tyranny of priests and preachers? In doing so they are ignoring the words of their first missionary, the self-appointed apostle to the gentiles, Paul (Gal 1:5) who cries out that Christians should not submit to the yoke of religious slavery. He was hardly sincere since religious slavery was what he preached, and so these words were ignored. Christians have an immense capacity for ignoring those parts of the word of God that they do not like. So, they submitted and to this day remain slaves to their various churches and ministers.
The obvious answer is that these people have no personal relationship with God, or none that they can recognize without the reassurance of a professional Christian egging them on. They have no choice but to submit to the slavery of the churches because, without them, they would not have a clue about God or religion, proving that God is not talking to them. Religion is slavery and was never anything else but.
Many people, especially ignorant ones, cannot cope with freedom. They do not know what to do when they are free to do as they wish. They turn to religion precisely to be told what to do—to become slaves. They willingly submit to slavery because they are too ignorant to decide what to do for themselves. That is why churches always thrive on ignorance, and why secular education is so essential to freedom that it has to be compulsory for children. The challenge for teachers and especially for parents is how to make pupils realise that school work is not some obscure punishment but is for their own benefit in offering them far more choices in their future lives. Children that appreciate the benefits to them will be more responsive pupils, and will be likely to be free of religious illusions.
When children succeed in avoiding being educated, then future freedom is in danger. Part of the reason is that people taught religions like Christianity, because they do not have the wherewithal to make up their own minds, always want to make up other people’s minds too. Because they are unable to make a decision without a priest behind them, they think everyone else ought to be the same. Naturally, this is a view that the churches are happy to promote. It is better that children should be obliged to submit to the authority of a secular school than that adults should be obliged to submit to those who think they know better. It’s name is fascism, and it is an outlook traditionally favoured by Christian churches, even if not by all Christians.
The purpose of religion is obedience and submission, and so the worst sins have always been disobedience and rebellion. Christians will argue that it is liberating to owe “unreserved allegiance” to God. Freud pointed out that patriarchal religion was an extension into adulthood of the need for a father figure. Previously, forces of nature that might inspire fear had to be propitiated for good fortune, but patriarchal religions substituted fear of paternal rejection for all of these. To earn the Father’s love, He had to be obeyed. God, of course, can be heard only through his spokesmen—priests and prophets. So, unreserved allegiance to God is unreserved allegiance to those who are speaking for God—certain, historically unscrupulous, men.
Gordon W Allport, a professor of psychology at Harvard, tried to give a positive affirmation of Christianity by admitting it was a throwback to childhood, but nevertheless was the organizing principle of their lives, conferring meaning amid confusion. It is, in other words, providing spoon-fed solutions to people who have not been taught to think for themselves. What is worse is that the solutions are false ones. They are no more than charms given the authority of God’s man—the priest or minister. Allport is actually merely repeating what the priest wants us to know but in a guise apparently justified by psychology. Wayne E Oates writes:
For a sheer lack of purpose and sense of worthlessness in the mature years, many adults will regress to an earlier more immature way of meeting life. Particularly is this true of religion.
Yet Wayne E Oates cites Allport as saying that children are too immature to formulate a religious world view, though ministers constantly urge Christians to be like children. Freud adds that popular religion was “so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality”, that “it was painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life”. No professional Christian really wants his sheep to start behaving like kids again, but he does want them to obey him like children. That is the only sense meant. People have to be immature enough to be unquestioning. Obedience once more.
Allport apparently says an adult needs “a comprehensive belief system capable of relating him to existence as a whole”. The rationalist has to ask why a supposed scientist has to imagine that such a belief system must be a religious one. Science offers a much sounder belief system. It did for Freud and it has for many who are psychologically mature. It would do for the children too, if they were not constantly deluded by the tricksters and sweet-talkers who pretend they have God’s mobile phone number.
Others will say that submission to God curbs our aggressions, yet the evidence is that Christian societies are often more murderous than societies without this supposedly highly ethical religion. Though Christianity is the world’s largest religion, there are still many more people in the world who are not Christian. They generally behave no more aggressively than Christian ones. 55 million people were killed in the World War, far more than any death toll of any other war. It was mainly fought between Christian countries. Ethics are not the point of religion. Submission is.
