WITH YOUR LEAVE, I’ll postpone continuing the 2010 11-Plus exam, which I began last week in sympathy with the children of Barbados, who faced the real thing on May 3, to respond to the NATION’s “youth” columnist Corey Worrell, who last Thursday promoted ignorance as praiseworthy in (1) declaring sex outside of marriage wrong and; (2) advocating sexual abstinence/ignorance until marriage.
If this is the youth view, God alone knows what the old fogeys must think; perhaps they require solemn hymns of praise prior to removal of outer garments.
Corey was responding to an episode of the local TV show, the gloriously misnamed Religious Reasoning. There is no such thing as “religious reasoning”; you might as well talk about frugal profligacy or straight-line circles. Religious belief is irrational. Any reasoning must lead to a rejection of all religious doctrine, none of which makes any logical sense.
No matter how fervently the believer believes in virgin birth, resurrection or prayer, for example, all collapse under rational consideration. One is, of course, free to believe whatever the hell one pleases, but one cannot claim a rational basis for same.
If Corey were only a guest on “Religious Imitation Reasoning”, I would dismiss the “debate” as summarily as I do the “learning” of the myriad Islamic scholars who fill libraries with “arguments” over whether God requires worshippers to touch foreheads or lips to the ground first.
People engaging in such a rationally meaningless pastime should concede they are quarrelling, not arguing, about belief, which can never be rationally proved; which means no such mock argument can be “won” or ”lost”, since it is not argument at all, merely the assertion as correct of the individual’s own belief.
A good Pentecostal may genuinely believe God made the Earth 6 000 years ago but the simple geographical fact remains that it is at least 4.5 billion years old.
Corey is a columnist in a newspaper that is not a religious publication and should be required to make his arguments on the basis of sense, not Bible verses. Sexual ignorance, no matter how supposedly Biblically sound, is no rational basis for a happy marriage.
A healthy sexual relationship is a far stronger foundation for marital bliss than 1 Corinthians 7.
When education was restricted to the clergy and nobility, peasants could be kept in line with mumbo-jumbo about God’s wishes. In modern, enlightened, liberal societies, citizens deserve more respect. The medieval Muslim declaration of the pig as “unclean” should lose its sacred nature in the age of refrigeration. Public policy – and debate – should be secular and rational; or the Muslim belief in the inferiority of women would have to be respected as profoundly as the Christian one that sex is wrong outside marriage; and stoning adulterers to death would not be far away.
Decisions about sexual behaviour, which may lead to pregnancy (the one fact in Corey’s entire column), should be based on sexual education, not sexual ignorance. Young people – and old ones, too – should not be misled into making uneducated choices about the most important decisions in life.
No matter how fervently anyone believes his version of God wants him to stay “pure” until marriage, the right of the citizen to make sensible adult choices should not be sacrificed.
• BC Pires is often inspired to speak in tongues. Email bc@caribsurf.com
