Karen Rubin, Columnist
The common element to all orthodox religions is the way they oppress, subjugate, even enslave but in every case control women. Doesn’t matter who you pray to, this is the common element. It is why “Morality Police” in Iran murdered a 22-year old woman who failed to wear the hijab properly, why in Pakistan a woman could be stoned to death if she is raped, why Orthodox Jews similarly force women to cover up and stay separate from men and allow their husbands to refuse them a divorce, why Christians are content to kill women to “save” the fetus. I could go on.
This is an age-old tactic. Women who were healers and midwives or merely uppity were persecuted, tortured to confess and accuse others and murdered for being witches in Europe for a century, a crusade that spread to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Witchcraft became a capital offense by male theocrats who felt threatened by the women who challenged their authority and were a convenient scapegoat for ills and failures in the eyes of men who wanted to keep them in their place. Because they could. And so the witchhunts began.
And now we see the 21st century incarnation in Texas, which unleashed vigilantes to hunt women for exercising their reproductive freedom. Texas is now looking to make abortion a capital offense, as are Republicans in other states seeking to ban abortion without any exceptions, not even for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. Women who miscarry are already being prosecuted.
When you weigh the benefits of organized, institutionalized religion over the evils, such as the Crusades or the Holocaust, which were “justified” on the basis that non-believers were less than humans, “savages” undeserving of life or liberty, I would suggest that the “moral” order that religion is supposed to provide society can just as easily come from a combination of humanism and the old-time religion of naturalism (derisively known as paganism).
Institutionalized religion has always been used to subjugate people and give religious leaders and those absolutist rulers who claimed to be ordained power and control, whether theocracy was official or just demagoguery. It’s amazing what you can get people to do if they think it is in God’s name, by God’s order, to win salvation in the next life no matter how miserable this life is. It’s called “blind faith.” Karl Marx was right when he said “religion is the opiate of the people.” He could have also said, “Religion is the opiate of the oppressed and the crown and shield of the oppressors.”
How many of these tyrants in demigod robes claim to be the son of God or somehow bestowed divine right? Politicians have continued to weaponize religion (or use it like a cloak of invisibility or invincibility for wrongdoing), using it to win elections, and have realized a winning strategy was to turn everything into a culture (religious) war. It’s not even subtle anymore: “Jesus, guns, babies” is now the campaign slogan and rallying cry for hundreds of Republican candidates.
Climate change is one of those existential issues that has been turned into a totem of tribal allegiance.
I recall a commercial in the 1990s featuring Newt Gingrich (the architect of the Conservatives’ Contract with America) and Nancy Pelosi saying they disagreed on mostly everything, but they agreed on the need to address climate change.
But that changed when Christians saw advantage in making common cause with Capitalists (whose god is the Almighty Dollar), and used religion to justify “man’s dominion over nature.” This suggests that climate disasters are all part of God’s plan (and in any case, have happened over and over since Noah’s flood) or that the destruction is somehow deserved by sinful citizens (except when it happens to Florida), and embrace the idea of apocalypse as the fast-track to joining God in heaven.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Hurricane Ian a storm of “biblical proportions” – as if that somehow lessens the culpability for the failed human policies and forces that made the storm that much more powerful and destructive.
Xiye Bastida, co-Founder of Re-Earth Initiative, a native American climate activist, spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative of her ancestors’ belief in the sacred spirits of nature – earth, moon, sky – and the requirement to evaluate their actions in terms of respect for their ancestors and the impact on the 7th generation, not the me, mine, now.
“I was raised with the philosophy of reciprocity from Mother Earth – if we take, we must give back. We think of past generations to insure stability of future generations,” she said.
Then she asked: “We have the ability to see the world in a different way – how climate impacts are affecting the most vulnerable, the response insufficient, but so far we haven’t had the courage to change perspective. Why is that? How can we find the courage, the determination, a different world view?”
And the answer to her question came to me: return to the religion of your ancestors. Religiosity is what it will take to engender the same fervor and devotion to the existential cause of saving the planet.
More of us need to put our spiritual devotion toward Mother Nature, the earth, sky, sun, water, fire, seeing these as what is sacred, deserving of our fealty, respect and care.
