The Opium of the People?

At the time that he wrote his famous line: “Religion is the opium of the people” it cannot be denied that in many ways, Marx spoke the truth. Religion had, for centuries, long been used as a tool to keep the social order in place. During the enclosures in Britain, when the greater part of the rural population was illiterate, village parsons gave sermons threatening people with hell if they failed to obey and respect their ‘masters’ (no matter how cruel those masters were). In the Middle Ages, the illiterate people were, by means of pictures of hell (which must have come from the most macabre and unspiritual minds as many of them are more horrific than the worst horror films shown today) the consequences of not obeying their king. Basically, the message was, “You cannot think for yourself. You must obey those whom God has placed over you or you will spend eternity undergoing the most horrendous tortures imaginable....oh and, by the way, God is love!” And people believed it.

Surely a belief is the most powerful force there is, and when that belief is associated with the most basic and most prominent aspect of ourselves – our spirituality, who we really are, our view of what God/the Divine/Life is – the concoction is more powerful than sticking your fingers into an electric socket. Powerful people learned that very early in our history and used it to their own ends. Even the Emperor Constantine realised that the best way to control the Roman empire was to use religion, and hence the world became Christian, with a message very far removed from the message of the Galilean who first preached it. Terrorists today still kill innocent people when their spirituality is warped into the notion that they are doing God’s work.


But, paradoxically, some of the most powerful people on earth – the kings of the past – were more bound by that belief than by the masses who felt themselves wronged and to whom Marx was preaching. This, it seems to me, is a great and much misunderstood tragedy. A great many people, even now, condemn Charles I of Britain, Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia for clinging to their autocracies, yet
each of them was a devout man: a Protestant, a Catholic and an Orthodox king, all raised from their earliest years that they must accept their God-given role, as surely as the workers, the illiterate peasants and the masses must accept theirs. The Victorian hymn sung often in churches said:

“The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate.
He [God] made their lofty standing,
He made their low estate.”

It was all God’s will. Neither Louis XVI nor Nicholas II wanted power at all. They were obeying the belief instilled in them since childhood, that God had called them to sacrifice everything for this. They were no different, in that respect, from the drugged masses about whom Marx was writing. However, very few people condemn the drugged masses – on the contrary, there is great sympathy for the poor and downtrodden who chose to remain in that state through some mistaken belief that God wanted them to suffer.
Many people, however, speak glibly of Nicholas and Louis as arrogant and stubborn, whereas they were devoutly following what they saw to be their duty and they, along with Charles I, were literally martyred for their beliefs.

Much good came from religion in the past – education, the establishment of hospitals, schools and orphanages – but most of that came from individual thinkers within the institution of religion (and often encountered initially a great deal of resistance from the hierarchy of religion – how many saints met opposition from bishops!). Much good comes for some from religion now – the creation of communities and bringing people together, but the history of it is of so much manipulation and – to my mind – the greatest crime of all, depriving people of their immediate connection with the Divine.

It seems to me often, looking at Nature and Creation as the surest expression of what the Divine is, that religion is lacking. The word, coming from its Latin root ‘re-ligio’ means to reconnect with the Divine. When I was at school it was defined as a ‘measuring stick’ – something ordered and against which we measured how well we were doing, which so suited the interpretation of Empires when everything needed to be kept in line – the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate – but Nature, along with the orderliness of tides, planets, seasons etc. is absolutely wild as well: the chaos of overgrown gardens, the intermingling of colour at this time of year, the lavish wastefulness of leaves being shed year after year, the variety of creatures...And nowhere do you see a dog telling a cow that, “My way is the right way. I have the Truth”, or a daffodil telling an oak tree, “You are appointed as God’s king and must rule me.” Humans are so odd – and nowhere more so than in our powerful beliefs which are at the heart of all that is good in the world, and all that is catastrophic.

Saints and Suffering - an oxymoron!

As a child, I loved reading the lives of the saints. They intrigued, inspired and utterly fascinated and absorbed me but something always bothered me: so many of them suffered from horrendous and grotesque illnesses. Those who weren't mauled by lions for the entertainment of the Roman mob, or hanged,drawn and quartered, or cannibalized or crucified upside down, or flayed alive or beheaded, often developed mysterious growths, tuberculosis and consumption and a large percentage of them died at a young age. Of course, the books and the images - young men pierced by arrows or saintly virgins holding their eyes (or even their breasts!) on a platter to show the means of martyrdom! - were quick to point out, that these saintly people were so holy because they participated in the suffering of Christ.

It's a heady concoction for a child. To go several times a week into a church and see the crucified Jesus with nails protruding from his hands, his body writhing in agony, and then to be told, "This is because you are a sinner and God loves you so much!" To hear that 'He gives His crown of thorns to his friends" creates the weirdest notions of Love and of who or what God is. This loving Father, whom we were to worship, somehow can only be appeased by suffering? This God who is omnipotent, somehow requires His children to endure all kinds of agony in order to be cleansed? When my mother wanted me to be cleansed, she put me in a bath and quoted poetry to me, then hugged me dry in a towel. But the Supreme Parent saw His (there was never any Her in it) children as needing cleansing by feeling such guilt that they could only assuage it by tremendous physical suffering.

Good grief! What an utterly nasty and unnecessary concoction that was! Look what it did: the child abuse scandals coming from various parts of the world, instigated by those in positions of religious authority! The burning and murder of many men and women as witches. The burning of heretics. The massacre of Jewish people not only by Hitler's holocaust, but by other so-called Christian nations - even here in the north of England (with a timely excuse for a scapegoat that 'the Jews killed Christ' while quite forgetting that Jesus was Jewish! The centuries of religious feuding and wars. And not one single word of it comes from the mouth of any of the truly spiritual founders of any of the most prominent religions. Had suffering been something required, would Jesus, for example, have cured so many people? Of course not, he would have patted them on the head and said, "Your suffering is good and holy!"

To this day, all the time, I hear 'religious' people saying, "Those who suffer are close to God.." and so many well-meaning people resign themselves to the will of a tyrannical God and think that is good, while others pander to the illness and think it is a sign of sanctity. Well, I utterly refute it! God is synonymous with Life. Does Life ever think it needs to destroy itself? It wouldn't make sense. The saints who suffered and died young, did so because they believed it was holy to do that. They brought their own illnesses on themselves by the belief that it was what God wanted. To my mind Life is Life. Life is the freedom to express our gifts fully, without any need to appease a stroppy Deity. That Life, the Life that lives through us, that expresses so purely and beautifully in Nature, in the love between people, in all that is healthy and pure and whole is what we call God. Surely, this whole notion of God was born of a series of minds that had so many issues of their own about guilt, and somehow they infiltrated the whole religious world and led people to suffer or inflict suffering on others through some totally bizarre notion that that is pleasing to this idol, who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Buddha's vision or to Jesus' vision or Mohammed's vision, or to the vision of the great Sikh, Hindu or Judaic visionaries.

There is nothing holy or 'whole' in suffering. It is surely not the Divine view at all. Well...I watch the ducks on the lake at Temple Newsam and this is how it seems to me...