12.16.05
I usually spend my kilobytes espousing on the poison of religion that has infected our modern society, but today I have something to praise rather than decry. I had the distinct privilege today of watching the latest episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, entitled "Alien (7x11)," and was thrilled to finally see a realistic depiction in the mainstream media of the detrimental effect that religion has on American culture.
Congratulations are in order for Jose Molina, the writer who penned this incisive episode. As usual, the story wove its way through several iterations before coming to its eventual conclusion. The episode opens with bloody 12-year-old Sean Hamill being pushed out of a car onto a hospital driveway; Hamill awakens to discover that his injury -- a stab-wound to the back inflicted with a pair of scissors -- has rendered him paralyzed from the waist down; detectives Benson and Stabler work the evidence trail back to one of Hamill's Catholic school classmates, eight-year-old Emma Boyd, who after some work confesses to the crime.
Law & Order: SVU has never been noted for a predictable, formulaic approach to story-telling, and so naturally the story doesn't end there. Benson and Stabler soon learn that Emma has been the subject of repeated bullying by her classmates -- foremost from Mr. Hamill -- because she happens to have a pair of lesbians for mothers. For the simple reason of being the daughter of a lesbian, Emma is terrorized by her Catholic school classmates, who badger her with constant declarations that her mothers are going to Hell.
Hamill himself declared that Emma was a "dyke" because her mothers are lesbians; when she replied that she was not a lesbian, Hamill insisted that she prove it and tried to force her to kiss him. When Emma pulled away -- a perfectly reasonable reaction to a sexual assault -- Hamill used a pair of scissors to slice off her ponytail; Emma thus responded to years of undeserved discrimination and prejudice by shanking Hamill with the same pair of scissors.
When faced with evidence of Hamill's systematic and sadistic abuse of Emma, Hamill's attorney pleads out the eight-year-old, who is sentenced to recieve strict counseling. The more pressing issue -- the one that presents a real concern to the public -- thus comes to the front; the methodical bigotry sanctioned by the religious institutions in this country. Superstitious fanatics like Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps -- and in this fictional episode, Sean Hamill and Emma's own grandmother, Debra Boyd -- espouse religious rhetoric that claims that homosexuality is a "sin" and that those who practice it are "going to Hell."
The plain truth is that religious institutions and their followers are participating in organized hate crimes by terrorizing those with whose lifestyles they are instructed to disagree. Yet this disagreement stems from vague passages in the Bible -- references to the citizens of "Sodom," for instance, are taken to indicate homosexuals -- despite the fact that we have adequately established that the Bible is nothing more than a poorly-written collaborative novel.
The fact of the matter is that there are no such things as "sins," because there is no such thing as "Right" or "Wrong"; there are only the things that we decide as a society will be legal or illegal. Notions such as "Right" and "Wrong" are based in the faulty premise that there is a God who dictates that some things are acceptable -- thus "Right" -- and that some things are not -- thus "Wrong." Since we have adequately established that there is no God -- or, at worst, there is no God that actively cares what happens on this planet -- then we are forced to accept that notions like "Right" and "Wrong" do not actually exist. "Sins," then, are the mystic inventions of those who wish to control the actions of their fellow humans by telling them what is "Wrong" and calling it a "Sin."
The only "sins" that have actually been legislated into law are Commandment #6 -- "Thou shalt not kill" -- Commandment #8 -- "Thou shalt not steal" -- and Commandment #9 -- "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" -- and the injunction against killing does not apply at all times. Take, for instance, the 1,004 individuals that the United States government has murdered under the auspices of the death penalty since 1977; or consider the 30,000 civilian Iraqi deaths that have resulted from President Bush's ill-conceived conquering of Iraq. Those deaths are a direct result of actions that Bush knew would result in death, and yet he is not subject to the legal ramifications of those actions.
Murder and theft have been legislated because they are crimes that disrupt the current of social interaction, not because the are inherently "Wrong." The essence of theft is the "taking of personal property with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it;" in theory, then, the government steals of every American when it takes income tax out of their paychecks, because given a choice, the vast majority of Americans would not volunteer that money. Thus it is taken against their wills, indicating theft; clearly, theft is not "Wrong," but only illegal, and only in certain circumstances.
Likewise, the essence of murder is the "act of ending a life with premeditated intent;" thus is capital punishment state-sanctioned murder, as is the death toll incurred from waging war. Additionally, the Sixth Commandment does not distinguish between animals and humans -- which are essentially nothing more than animals as well -- when it states that "thou shalt not kill"; thus, according to the Bible, stepping on a spider is a violation of the Commandments, as is hunting a deer, or hitting a squirrel with a car.
Further, the legislation based on Commandment #9, which is legally called perjury, is a crime against the court; it has no religious basis at all. Lying before a court of law would undoubtedly have been deemed a crime whether a Commandment prohibited it or not. The crime of perjury actually stems from Commandment #3 which prohibits anyone from taking the name of God in vain; Contrary to popular opinion, this does not bar the use of the phrases "Goddamnit" or "Jesus Christ," but rather prohibits witnesses from invoking God as a witness and then lying.
At the historical time that the Commandments were invented, few means of ascertaining the veracity of a witness's claims in a legal court existed; since forensic science did not exist at all, these means were limited to direct testimony by material witnesses, and the act of "swearing by God" that one was telling the truth. Thus, that act of calling God as a witness -- by claiming ones statements "in the name of God" -- was given actual legal weight and taken as "proof" -- essentially the only available proof outside of corroborating witness testimony -- that a witness was telling the truth.
Thus we see that "taking the name of God" in vain was never a crime against any God, but a crime against the court, which had at that time no means other then the invocation of this fictional deity character to lend credence to witness statements. Now that forensic science can establish the truth about an event, "taking God's name" is an outmoded form of evidence. The remaining seven Commandments, on the other hand, are largely meaningless.
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