When faith-based promises meet evidence-based outcomes
In the long-running drama series “Religion vs Reality,” we’ve reached the season where the plot holes become too obvious to ignore. Religious teachings about sexuality have been promising one outcome while reality has been delivering another, and the audience is starting to ask uncomfortable questions about the writing.
The central conflict of religion versus reality is that one side is playing by rules written thousands of years ago, while the other side is just doing what humans have always done while technology and social norms evolve. It’s like watching someone try to win at chess by insisting the pieces should move according to checkers rules.
What makes this rematch particularly entertaining is watching religious institutions double down on approaches that observably don’t work. Abstinence-only education fails? Obviously we need more abstinence-only education. Teen pregnancy rates higher in religious communities? Clearly we’re not shaming people hard enough. It’s the “beatings will continue until morale improves” approach to spiritual guidance.
The reality side of this equation doesn’t even need to try. It just exists, generating data that contradicts religious narratives with the inevitability of gravity. You can deny gravity all you want, but it’s still going to pull you down when you jump off a building.
The Isle of Man’s contribution to the religion versus reality showdown appears to be pretending that geographic isolation also creates isolation from human nature. This strategy has worked exactly as well as you’d expect, which is to say not at all, but points for consistency.
The sequel nobody wanted keeps getting renewed because religious institutions have a vested interest in maintaining the narrative, even when the narrative has more plot holes than a time travel movie. Admitting that their approach doesn’t work would require fundamental reassessment, and that’s much harder than just insisting reality is wrong.
SOURCE: https://spintaxi.com/religion-vs-reality/
SOURCE: Bohiney Magazine (Religion vs Reality: The Sequel Nobody Wanted)
Gina Mann