American Wanderlust

I'm a global citizen, educator, and former union leader; with an academic background in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Cities around the world feel like my home. I'm a professional Educator. I believe in Solidarity, wherever I am. Notes from my travels, research, and encounters tend to end up here.

Yet another reason to hate religion…

yeah, there are a lot of them. The piousness with which virtually all major religions (I am leaving a possible exception for some forms of Buddhist thought) allow their followers to look down on those with any other set of values or beliefs, the ways in which religions inherently create division instead of human unity and thus provide a historical basis for ignorance, war, and self/sectarian centered mentality. But the one that I am irritated by today is actually kind of innocuous seeming, and probably just irritates me because it is a current source of inconvenience, rather than it being a major critique of the ways in which religions interact with the world around them. Days of rest.

Call it the sabbath or shabatt, the concept of the “day f rest” is really fucking inconvenient. It shuts a society down for at least one day, and quite often for two days (with the whole “dusk to dusk” restive period most prominent in fundamentalist Judaism, but also in Islam). It would be one thing if that was what the majority in that society wanted, but it seems to me that in every country I have been in these religiously sanctioned “norms” have done little more than make life harder for people. Today, I was trying to get out of the city of Dohuk and into a neighboring village by share-taxi, essentially what it sounds like, a taxi that transports 4 people and the driver in able to share the cost of the driver’s labor and of fuel. But. Of course. It was a day of rest. So the drivers were all sitting desperately waiting for people to come in the desert heat, as was I, and nobody showed up for my destination. About two carloads left for the more major neighboring cities, but that was all. Which sucks for me, but also for the drivers, who couldn’t get any work, and for everyone else who is forced to accept that they won’t be able to get anywhere in northern Iraq on Fridays and Saturdays (apparently), or, if they will, they will have to wait substantially longer than normal.

I didn’t realise this would be an issue in Iraq, because observance of the days of rest was not nearly as pronounced as in other societies which obsess over it, the most notable one being the entity of Israel, in which virtually every shop is closed, and fundamentalist Jews have even firebombed businesses that attempted to stay open (most notably Intel, which expected its outsourced Israeli engineers to keep the same hours as in the US in order to enable to enable the most efficient collaboration).

Now, I am biased on this issue, but honestly everyone is. I think that for a society to make any concession to religion in inherently wrong. Numerous studies have shown that the average IQ’s and other gauges of intelligence are higher among non-believers than the faithful (I don’t have an internet connection as I type this but just run those keywords through the Guardian, the Independent, or another moderately secular publication). As such, it drives me fucking apeshit (not evidencibly. I’m just slightly irritated. But still) to see a modern, comparatively secular people like the Kurds of Iraq following a tradition as silly as giving up not just one, but two days of productivity, even as they claim time and time again that their region is fast becoming the “new Dubai,” a budding business and cultural (I am not sure the real Dubai even qualifies on the latter claim… maybe Doha?) capital of the region.

Thank god I live in New York, which, despite being stuck as a part of one of the most alarmingly religiously obsessed nations in the Western world, manages to understand that progress and life aren’t going to stop for anyone’s beliefs.

Andrew