Came across this video today which reminded me of some of the comments I receive regularly on my blog posts.
Dawkins calls it hate-mail; I prefer to think of it as funny-mail because it’s generally quite amusing and it does leave me scratching my head sometimes trying to come up with witty rejoinders.
I am glad for it however, because everyone has the right to express themselves…
When I abandoned religion all those years ago, I believed that I had also discarded my susceptibility to emotional weakness, and thus the ability to hate. So, over the years I kept telling myself that the revulsion and anger I felt towards certain things, was just a feeling of annoyance…not hate.
However, recently I’ve had to admit that I really actually hate politicians, the law (as in the police)…………. and trucks. Yes trucks, as in vehicles that transport freight (and in South Africa, everything else imaginable).
It’s really easy to hate politicians; in fact it’s an obligation for all intelligent South Africans. But how can one hate trucks? It seems so pointless to hate an inanimate object which cannot feel your hatred, much less amend its objectionable behaviour to appease you. It would make more sense to hate the drivers and owners of trucks, than the trucks themselves. But as a motorist on South African roads, confronted with yet another truck that’s broken down and holding up traffic, it’s natural to think out loud, “Damn truck!” or more likely scream out loud “I fucking hate trucks!” I’m pretty sure nobody shouts out “Damn driver!” or “I hate that fucking driver of that fucking truck and maybe the fucking owner too!” Okay, this is South Africa, so there’s bound to be one or two who would, but they’re as irrelevant as those who love politicians, or the police who shoot to kill.
Taxis are pretty annoying; lots of people probably hate them too, but they don’t come to a complete halt for hours on end, across two whole lanes, backing up traffic for hours. Which happens with freakish regularity, several times a day (not the same truck, obviously), usually in peak traffic in the mornings and afternoons. And if they’re not broken down, they are either travelling too slow in the wrong lane, have lost their load on the road (for some reason beer is a very popular load to lose), or the idiot driver is trying to overtake another slow truck…on an incline of all places.
So why do trucks break down with such frequency? Are they badly designed? Are truck drivers as reckless with their trucks as politicians are with our tax money or South African cocks cops with their guns?
I suspect it has something to do with the maintenance of these vehicles. Since the state-owned rail freight company hiked its tariffs all those years ago, almost everything is being transported by road these days. And the owners and operators in a highly competitive trucking industry are literally cutting each others throats for business, resulting in hardly anything being budgeted for maintenance of the trucks. What we have then is poorly maintained trucks on our roads which naturally break down at the most inconvenient of times.
What about the other annoying truck related incidences on our roads. Trucks that lose their loads, probably do so because of overloading, poor maintenance or simply through negligence in securing the freight. Why do truck drivers think that they can overtake on an incline without hogging the road and annoying the hell out of other motorists? Who knows? They’re truck drivers, not engineers.
The solution to this problem is very simple. The enforcement of steep fines for trucks that break down. I suggest that fines be as high as R10 000 for a first incident and then climbing dramatically for subsequent infringements by the same owner or operator. If you consider the lost time and productivity that these breakdowns cause to the economy, the frustration and even personal losses sustained by other motorists when they miss flights, important appointments, even job interviews, I think the fines are an imperative. It would teach the owners to look after their shit.
The other benefit of hefty fines for truck owners, is that the traffic cocks cops don’t have to harass ordinary motorists as much as they do, to generate revenue for their Metro Council employers. So with all that extra dough coming in from the errant trucking industry, it would leave fat-arsed traffic cocks cops free to lose weight or do some real work. So instead of lazing in the shade of a tree, or behind a bush, (c)overtly manning speed cameras all day long, they could actually actively manage traffic safety.
This Sunday, while with a group of friends who get together once or twice a month to provide food aid to orphaned or abandoned kids, we drove past a Mosque in a rundown area called Grasmere. I think it was towards the middle of the day and the call to prayer was being sounded through loudspeakers, probably mounted on one of the minarets. One of my friends quite uncharacteristically remarked that these Mosques were springing up everywhere, and that he hated the Muslims for their militant behaviour and the spreading of Islam. My friend is religious of course, but his religious allegiance is not important; the hatred shown toward a competing faith is.
I must have surprised the others in the car for the rebuke I offered, because they are all aware of my irreligious or Atheist stance. I commented that one should not hate a man for his religious beliefs, but rather hate what his religion and his religious teachers or clerics make him believe. Before I could continue exhorting my abhorrence of the word “hate” we came to our turn-off to the children’s Place of Safety and the subject changed to something else. Since Sunday, several incidents have made me reflect on hatred, justification for hatred, and religion, Islam in particular.
When I got home that Sunday, I came across an article and a video in the online heraldsun, an Australian publication, “It’s OK to hit your wife, says Melbourne Islamic cleric.” The video clearly shows Islamic cleric Samir Abu Hamza instructing his male followers “…to hit their wives as a last resort, but they were not to make them bleed or become bruised. ” In case you’re thinking I’ve resorted to some sort of quote mining to deliberately distort his meaning and intention, the video available together with the article is quite clear that this is what he said. He went on to state that “If the husband was to ask her for a sexual relationship and she is preparing the bread on the stove she must leave it and come and respond to her husband, she must respond,” in a clear reference to a man’s right to demand sex from his wife.
Apart from the fact that this disgustingly patriarchal attitude belonged in times long gone by, why is it that clerics from the Abrahamic religions, but more especially Islam getting involved in the domestic affairs of men and women? It’s bad enough that clerics make wild pronouncements on prophets and gods, but this insidious need to pronounce on the private lives of adherents as well, is quite frankly, alarming. Is the hold of religious clerics on their congregations so tenuous, that they need to now control every aspect of your life to ensure total and utter submission and compliance? Are the clerics merely re-iterating what is written in the Koran? I found three English translations at ConversationalAtheist, for the Koranic verse that refers to (governs?) wife beating, and although they differ only slightly, they clearly condone such behaviour. What drives a cleric to re-inforce behaviour that is universally condemned as unacceptable? His religious conviction? His unquestioning belief? His religion? Or his teacher before him? The vicious cycle continues…
Over the last few days I’ve been conducting an online discussion via the comments page on one of my previous blogs “The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know…,” with a young Muslim women from Singapore Malaysia, I think. She’s obviously a bright young women, but some of her naive religious beliefs are quite depressing; frightening actually. It’s quite clear that her thinking has been moulded by her religious instructors, the clerics. She like so many others, people from all religions are quite oblivious that their religious “panel-beating” shows clearly when they defend their beliefs.
Now I don’t want to create the impression that Islam is the worst religion by singling it out for attention; all the other religions are on the same footing when it comes to perpetuating irrational beliefs and behaviour. The point I’m trying to get across is that religion needs the clerics to keep it alive; and these are the people we need to despise, not hate.
Lenny Says 