God's Law?

I don’t have any problem with God. I don’t happen to believe in most religions’ idea of a God but I’ve never seen proof that one doesn’t exist, so I’m happy to give other people their room to believe. Religion is a personal thing.

Up to a point, I also accept organised religion: So long as it is voluntary. However when people start deciding what others should believe, when people start making statements and writing books, claiming they are the words of God, that is when my concern starts. It worries me greatly: Even the holiest men are still men. Men are fallible. Words are imprecise. The meanings of ‘holy’ scripture changes in translation and with time. And just how do you check the authenticity of the author’s claim to divine inspiration? Neither the Torah nor the Bible nor the Koran were faxed direct from God’s desk, with his signature at the bottom!

Most of the major religions in the world today claim to be the one true path to God/Enlightenment/Heaven. Since they each require different things from their adherents, they clearly cannot all be right and none of them can actually prove their claim. So, either none of them are correct or the one true God is actually a sadist, condemning the majority of his creation to damnation. (But then, would you want to go to a sadist’s implementation of Heaven anyway??)

You can understand then, that I am somewhat alarmed when religious morals are enshrined in a country’s legal code as Indonesia is doing and other countries have already done. What makes the Indonesia story even more disturbing is that, according to their Justice Ministry, the prohibited actions (kissing in public and unmarried co-habitation) are only crimes if the people observing them are not happy about it. That sounds like rule-by-lynch-mob to me!

Wikipedia has an interesting article on Sharia law and how it is interpreted but it also shows how the ‘law’, which in my mind should always be clear and unequivocal, is often uncertain because of differences in translation and interpretation. That is not a good basis for a legal system.

Not that Christianity is any better than Islam. If you read the Old Testament of the Christian Bible you get very different ‘law’ than if you read the New Testament… and that’s before you even consider the inconsistent behaviour of Christ’s ‘representatives’ on earth.

Law’s written to govern nomadic peoples in the Middle-East, 1500-3000 years ago, are mostly not relevant to modern society. Keep religion a personal matter. Just because you believe something strongly doesn’t mean that other people have to as well.