To the editor,
Re: An antidote for hopelessness exists, Letters, March 13.
I was dismayed to see a rather hateful letter published in your latest edition.
One part even boldly stated that Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong, and used the excuse of God and religion to justify it all. It read like something that would be shouted by a priest during the Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials. I am not saying God and religion are bad, but that they shouldn’t be used as a cover for bigotry. One only needs to look back on a thousand years of history to see that.
I hope someday the letter writer comes out of his time warp and joins the rest of us in the 21st century, leaving the 16th century behind.
Oliver James, Nanaimo
To the editor,
Re: An antidote for hopelessness exists, Letters, March 13.
I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed that hilariously funny letter. How brilliantly absurd. I truly admire the way the writer uses the common, shallow aphorisms of religiosity to cleverly expose the jingoistic mindset required to subscribe to such nonsense.
He wisely employs the shopworn denials of the blinkered spiritualists to show up their own logical bankruptcy – imagine the suspension of disbelief required to posit that Darwin was wrong. His technique of blithely glossing over some facts while getting others dead wrong is impeccably wrought and masterfully executed. I especially enjoyed his mock indignation about the “latest revelations of sex scandals” without acknowledging the fact that they are the result of the atrociously un-Christian behaviour of ‘good, God-fearing men.’
I also liked the way he falsely implies a cause-and-effect relationship between drug use and the decline of organized religion. After all, as a practice, the use of drugs among humans goes back much farther than organized religion.
It is triumphantly crowned by that masterpiece of Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ that “God is the only antidote for hopelessness.” Religion has been the root cause of almost all of the misery that is human history and the sooner we can get past it – like the notion of a flat Earth – the better.
So I commend you on recognizing the value of this ingenious piece of satire.
P.L. Reid, Nanaimo
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