Alan Ross on religion

Dec 2 2007 by Ken Oxley, Sunday Sun

AS I get older, I find myself becoming more fervently anti-religion.

As fewer of us find it relevant, the people who head up these organisations seem to get more extreme and entrenched in their views of right and wrong.

Let’s be clear, I don’t discriminate. Methodists or Muslims, Pagans, Protestants, Catholics or Hindus, Sikhs, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Plymouth Brethren or Scientologists, makes no difference to me.

If I’ve left your particular brand out, I apologise. Consider your sect included.

The horrors that have been perpetrated down the ages in the name of religion, and those that continue to this day, should make us thoroughly ashamed, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said recently.

He’ll be drummed out of his church any day now, since he seems a reasonable, civilised person.

Which brings me to the vexed question of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were in the news again recently thanks to the high-profile death of a mother in childbirth who signed a piece of paper refusing blood transfusions.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. My eldest sister had become a Witness a few years before she died . . . which she did largely as a result of refusing blood during an operation.

At her funeral, the preacher, or whatever he called himself, felt it appropriate to embark on a sort of recruiting drive, stressing how much Kathie had found friendship among that particular batch of Godbotherers. Would we like to join up? Er, no.

Yet it was two Jehovah’s Witnesses who used to visit my elderly parents regularly when they were in the early stages of dementia, and were unfailingly kind to them, long after it became clear that they weren’t interested in joining their ranks.

I have a JW neighbour across the street who seems as affable and decent a person as you could wish to meet. Why is it that the good things well-meaning people do in religion’s name is so often outweighed by all the other stuff that comes with membership?