Our new religion has no official title; you can call it whatever you like, just so long as you learn to abide by its rules, writes DAVID ADAMS.
CONTRARY TO a popular myth, religion is not dying out in Ireland, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter. Christianity may well be on its last legs, but there won’t be any religious vacuum as a result; that is all too eagerly being filled.
We are in the throes of replacing a once all-pervasive, all-powerful belief system with another one. Increasingly now, we are worshipping at a different altar from before.
Our new religion has no official title; you can call it whatever you like or nothing at all, just so long as you learn to abide by its rules. I tend to think of it as post-rationalism.
Insofar as it can be described at all, post-rationalism eschews logic and common sense, so anything that seems blindingly obvious must be totally wrong.
Previous ethical and moral guidelines can be turned on their heads at will: a fixed idea of right and wrong is so passé nowadays.
There is no longer such a thing as personal responsibility: someone or something else is always at least partially to blame, almost invariably the culprit being that amorphous source of all our ills, “society”.
The violent thug or career criminal cannot simply be a bad person anymore. His behaviour must stem from an unhappy or abusive childhood or, failing that, he is the hapless product of some other terrible hand dealt him by society.
Never, but never, can he be held wholly responsible for his own actions.
There is no such a thing as personal failure either, just a failure by society to ensure that every individual reaches his or her full potential and achieves happiness. Hence, in Northern Ireland, we are told by opponents of academic selection that children do not fail exams, but, rather, that exams fail children.
There seems to be two underlying ideas at play here.
First, there is a belief that with proper scholastic nurturing there is no limit to any child’s academic potential. Examination results tend to buck this theory so, for that reason alone, exams have to be dumped.
Second is the belief that a child will be psychologically damaged by the experience of having failed at something (or, if you prefer, damaged by the experience of something having failed him or her).
This latter conviction has led inexorably to the point where in many schools it is now virtually impossible for children to fail at anything, even sports. On school sports-days, there are only first winners, second winners, third winners and so on. How all of this is supposed to prepare young people for adulthood, of which failure and disappointment are an intrinsic part, has not yet been fully explained, but doubtless it will be.
Post-rationalism requires that certain words be stripped of all but their most narrow interpretation. For example, “understanding” now means only “to show sympathy with and tolerance of” something or other.
This type of understanding can either abound or be non-existent, depending on the subject.
There is any amount of understanding for the actions of terrorists (from gunmen to suicide bombers and launchers of rockets) and their supposed motivations, but none at all for the governments trying to thwart them.
For, according to the new religion, it is invariably those same governments and their lackeys who are responsible for creating the conditions that have left these people with no option but to resort to violence.
If no one is to be held personally responsible for his or her own actions, and no one can be adjudged a bad person, it follows then, as surely as night comes after day, that a terrorist can only be motivated by high ideals. Blame for terrorism has to lie somewhere, so why not with governments.
Everyone is considered equally a victim now: the perpetrator is a victim of environment and cruel circumstance, and the person he has robbed, left lying in a bloody heap or blown to pieces, is by extension then a victim of the same things.
“Culture” (as in foreign varieties) is a word employed as a great explainer-away of awkward anomalies that arise which seem to challenge the post-rationalist world view.
Many of those who previously lobbied in support of equal rights for women and gays have remained silent about the terrible abuses suffered by these and other groups at the hands of some of post-rationalism’s new best friends from less enlightened parts of the world.
If questioned on the issue, the post-rationalist will invariably mumble something about our needing to respect and to not interfere with the “cultural traditions” and “local customs” of others. Other words have been stretched almost to breaking point in their everyday application; one such is “truth”, which is essentially meaningless now.
We are told that regardless of circumstance, everyone has his or her own equally valid truth, which again fits neatly with the perpetrator-as-victim mindset.
Unsurprisingly, a side-effect of this stretching of the working definition of truth has been the rendering of the word “perspective” virtually redundant.
I’m no great fan of religions of any type, and have been particularly critical of Christianity in the past, but I’m bound to say, I much prefer the old religion to the new one.