I was getting up, out of bed, on Saturday morning. Half-naked and blurry-eyed, I was waiting for my pass at the bathroom. That’s when I read about Samuel Paty.
We get jaded. Death, disease, bombings, terror… it all becomes so mundane so quickly. Hundreds dead, hundreds of thousands homeless in Chinese rural flooding. Yemen turning into a hellscape under Saudi aggression. Syria that just won’t quit. The Lebanon blast kinda rocked your socks for a spell. All in the midst of a sweeping pandemic. But when I read about the teacher Samuel Paty, I got stuck. Brushing my teeth would have to wait.
There’s a conversation to be found here about cultural bias. About how relatively tiny tragedies seem bigger at home than colossal ones on the other side of the globe. It’s not like one beheaded teacher in a Paris suburb is more tragic than famished children wasting away in a refugee camp in the Yemen deserts. But even though I’m sensitive to that argument, that is not this conversation.
Maybe Samuel caught me off guard because I’m a liberal cretin, that believe that Freedom of Expression is one of the most important privileges that western society has distilled. Maybe that’s just because I’m a writer and journalist, and Freedom of Expression is one of my most treasured parachutes. Maybe it’s because I work as a teacher. Maybe it’s because I recognize the labour of trying to teach children from diverse cultures and families the core tenets that are supposed to keep western culture together. The same cultures that people flock, and fight, and die to get to. Maybe this attack touched me more than the Charlie Hebdo attack of 2015 because I recurrently imagine myself having to stand up to an armed child, or a school assault. Maybe it touched me because I have time and time again imagined myself bleeding out because of some disgruntled and misguided toon of a person who believed that their destitution was enough to warrant murder. Maybe it’s because I shudder at the thought of the nationalists, the populists, the isolationists, and how they might use this atrocity to fan flames of hatred and conflate zealotry and madness with culture or ethnicity just to drive the world a little bit further into fear and distrust.
And maybe, this murder stuck with me because I’m an atheist. Maybe it struck me a little harder than they usually do because I do not believe that people deserve to have their heads severed because of make-believe. Maybe I froze in my morning routine because I don’t think that your Allah, or Jesus Christ or Krishna for that matter, is any greater than some Dumbledore or Aslan. Maybe it pains me a little more this time because I don’t think that anyone deserves to die over Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
No. No, I do not have to respect your faith. I do not have to respect your religion. You tell yourself stories to give yourself meaning? You imagine an almighty patriarch to validate your pain and suffering? You convince yourself that there’s an invisible judgement, up in the sky, just so that you won’t act like a fucking prick? Whatever floats your poop, mate. Your faith is yours. I don’t mind it as long as you keep it in your pants where it belongs. But that’s not what the ardently religious always keep it, is it? The US has been descending into a Christian evangelistic asylum for decades. The BJP is turning secular India into a war-zone for the persecution of Muslims by way of state-sponsored Buddhist nationalism. And every few years apart, some madcap motherfucker kills a bunch of Europeans on some barmy quest for a gaggle of virgins and a meet-n-greet with his supposedly almighty maker.
The problem with religion, this viral make-belief among the downtrodden and the weak-willed, isn’t that it exists. It’s that people don’t keep their faith to themselves as they aught to.
Oh no – express your faith however you want. Sing hymns. Tell your stories. Keep to your schedule of prostrating yourself to your outsources moral compass. I don’t mind. But don’t expect anyone to agree with you. Don’t expect the world to accommodate to your blanket explanation for the world’s mysteries. Your Gods don’t live here. They live in your head, as an insipid attempt to make the world coherent with some sort of childish meta-logic. My big problem with religion is when some of you lot believe that it is your sole responsibility to manifest your imagination into the world among other people. Because at the end of the day, these holy wars, these divides among the faithful, seem fundamentally no different to me than the console wars of the nineties. Where idiot children battled it out over which set of plastic dreams were the best, just because their egos were too fragile to imagine that there’s a different way of realising one’s imaginations than their own.
Maybe the brutal murder of a teacher in north-western Paris struck me in that particular way because #JeSuisSamuel. Maybe I got lost on the way through my morning routine because a middle-aged Frenchman depressingly enough stirs me more than dispossessed and dying people in, for example, occupied Palestine do. Or maybe it struck me because I do not think that anyone’s make-belief a priori deserves a single solitary inch of our collective reality.
/Sebastian Lindberg 20/10-2020
WastedWords 