Happy Whatever

So during the Sydney hostage crisis, we had the agency TV set to Sky. As I took two minutes to catch up, a Muslim colleague came to stand beside me. “It’s Muslims like that who give Muslims a bad name,” he said, shaking his head. But it wasn’t really a Muslim who took the hostages. It was by all accounts a crazy person. I’d guess that 99.9% of Muslims aren’t crazy. Therefore, not all crazy people are Muslim.

                  By the time I got back to my desk, #Illridewithyou was trending. I don’t get teary much, but this outpouring of support for those regular people who happened to be Muslims really touched me. Jeez, we should have gone to live in Oz ten years ago, I thought. As a friend of mine commented on Facebook, the Australians might be completely delusional about rugby and cricket, but this was something truly special. Apparently it’s called “mateship”, my Brisbanite editor Lynda tells me.

                  And then, the next day, all this good stuff was undermined by a bunch of total arseholes snapping selfies of themselves on Martin Place. Grinning as if they had just burned through the corporate lunch account, or were on their way to the circus. Sometimes the human race really sucks.

                  It might sound a little glib, but the ideal workplace should be a microcosm of society. In my real job at our ad agency, we have Muslims and Christians and Jews and Hindus and atheists and probably one or two Pastafarian members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster all spending their daylight hours there. Respecting each other and working together and getting things done as professionally as possible, and then laughing and hugging each other at beer o’clock on Fridays and at our various agency get-togethers. Those 10 or so working hours a day, those celebratory occasions, are when religion is forgotten, or at least when belief systems and their entrenched animosities are set aside.

                  The oldest extant version of the Christian Bible resides in the British Museum. It’s dated at approximately 500 years AD. It’s in Greek. It was written by a phalanx of authors, mostly unknown, and most of whom never spoke or wrote Greek. If you work in the ad industry, you will know, by hard experience, that the difference between the one-page client brief and what is relayed to the creative team a day later can be two completely different things. So, how much can be changed within a thousand or so pages, over 500 years? How much has actually been expunged, added, or altered over that time? From the exclusions of the many parts of the Apocrypha, to the mistranslations, to the ecclesiastical editing brought about to bolster the agenda of whomever was boss of the Church at the time?

                  Has religion brought about more wars than anything else? Probably not, if you did the numbers. But it has caused so much hurt, so much pain. Two dead in Sydney. The next day, over a hundred Pakistani pupils slaughtered by the Taliban. And God – ha! – only knows what Boko Haram has been up to in the last twenty-four hours.

                  For what? The roots of all modern religions (Pastafarians aside) lie in Bronze Age superstitions that have barely evolved over 5,000 years, and are today neatly packaged in explosive little parcels for different tastes. And all of that in the face of simple logic, basic empiricism, rudimentary science, and the proven laws of nature.

                  We were in Mauritius a few years ago, and on an outing from our wonderfully fake resort, we passed a Catholic church. Outside, twice life-sized, a sculpture showed Christ on the cross, hang-headed with bright crimson blood running from his hands, feet and chest. My youngest, who is Jewish as my wife is, was horrified. I dug into my Catholic past and tried to explain. The more I tried to clarify the mythology, the less sense it made to her.

We were on our way to a Hindu temple, which was populated by blue elephants and beings with banana-bunches of extraneous arms. My daughter was no less puzzled about the crucifixion sculpture than she was about the Hindu gods. Such is the innocence, and the impartiality, we've all lost.

                  If only we were more concerned with our fellow beings, on a practical, tangible, day-to-day basis, than we are with trying furiously to bat for the particular fairy-tale that makes us each feel warmest and fuzziest, we’d be on to a damned fine thing. As they say, having a religion is like having a penis. It’s okay to have one, but don’t whip it out in public, don't thrust it on anyone, least of all small children or your dinner guests. Don't think with it. Don’t compare sizes. And don’t ever try to write laws with it.

                  Merry Whatever, everyone.