When a 13-year-old girl died in Egypt last year after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) - mainly the cutting off of a part or all of the clitoris and/or sewing or burning the vagina shut - her demise was regarded by her grandfather as "God's will".
Some of the local men including her uncle were asked if they thought it was right to do this to the girl, particularly when FGM is now a criminal offense in their country. The men (and some women elders) proudly agreed that it was the right thing to do to her, because without this procedure "girls are full of lust".
I wish the BBC reporter who covered this story was brave enough to ask why a similar practice is not done on boys, and if the village elders think boys are less lustful than girls. Should the boys also be relieved of parts of their anatomies which one day will likely enable them to desire sex or to make sex pleasurable for them? Or is sex meant to be felt and enjoyed only by men?
Such bold discrimination against girls and women, despite the fact that it violates human, child, and women's rights, is customary and accepted mostly in the developing world. Although this story may horrify us upon hearing it, in our developing country, we tend to lean on tradition (and religion) in much the same way as the Egyptian grandfather and uncle of the mutilated girl child, to excuse our depravity and to cloak the things we are not brave enough to admit, address or speak out against, or the traditional things we cannot explain.
But tradition is a loaded gun and ignorance pulls the trigger.
Background and realization
I grew up in one religion, various churches. I descend from a long maternal line of deeply Anglican Christians, and an equally long paternal line of deeply Catholic Christians. All Christians. All religious. The use of incense in the Anglican Church is a tradition which I am still fond of because of many sentimental recollections, but this tradition does not take charge of my existence.
With a few dormant years in between, I followed along the path of an Anglican, practicing wholesome Catholicism and keeping traditions until one day I chose to take a closer look at the incense and at the idea of religion. I wanted mostly to comprehend why we rely so heavily on what people tell us without understanding those things for ourselves, and why, amongst the many religions of our country, there is so much disdain and disapproval of other religions.
Using the "God-given" conscience and free will I possess, I looked beyond the surface, beyond the routine and rituals, beyond the traditions, and at the people practicing them.
My discovery is that we have a serious problem with traditional defaults in our country - accepting things because that's the way they have always been, regardless of the evidence to support their questionable origins, weaknesses, or failures. And the ultimate discovery is that the things that cost us dearly as a nation are all rooted in our closely-held traditions.
Our traditional diet - content and volume - makes many of us sickly and obese. Our easy going and extremely laid-back nature makes many of us susceptible to corruption and subject to poverty.
The way we practice religious traditions by following along without seeking to understand their beginnings or ourselves (and others), or what these traditions really represent, makes us closed-minded to any alternative belief systems and intolerant of others based simply on their faiths.
Societal degeneration
The Bahamas is predominantly Christian, yet many of its people are able to kill, steal, molest, and rape so easily, often with no remorse or concern about the repercussions for themselves or the persons whom they subject to these acts. The criminals' deeds of violence only become inhumane to them when they're on the receiving end of punishment by the justice system, however rarely it works. And then they, too, lean on Christianity as the crutch in their arguments for mercy.
Our legal system is also rooted in layers of tradition, right down to the English wigs, and the only thing that seems to be progressing therein is the frequency of criminal activity brought before it and occurring inside of it, as well as the length of time it takes to administer punishment to the lawbreakers both external and internal to the system.
How does such a Christian society breed so many criminals, so many criminal supporters, and so many woefully neglectful and antiquated and failing practices hinged on tradition?
But the church's challenges and the challenges of Christianity don't end with the people on the outside of the church.
Unfortunately, a surprising number of non-Christian qualities are also being exhibited by the least expected persons: the Christian men of the church and, worse, of the cloth.
From factual accounts of female confidants, I know more than I care to about indiscretions of pastors making late night sex calls, sexting the night before delivering their sermons while lying next to their wives, engaging in premarital sex, getting girls and women in their congregations pregnant, and aborting the children they make outside of marriage.
And these men of power and inequality leave the women and girls they have utilized to carry the burden of these experiences, while they continue on with their sanctified lives.
The abuses of women in the church are stories which never seem to end and are seldom brought to light.
It seems as though every other month a new church is built and opened. We have more churches now than we did decades ago, yet we have more spiritual and ethical problems now than we did then: more anger, more hatred, more violence, more deceit, and more intolerance. How is that possible? Shouldn't we be better off as people with the flood of religious leaders and guidance around us?
Building bridges or barriers?
How effective is the church? What has the collective church been doing all this time the society has been spiraling out of control? And I refer to all denominations, because they all give the impression at some time or another that they are better than the others, more correct than the others, more righteous than the others.
Are the churches not the entities we rely on to carry the responsibility of establishing and maintaining morality? There are certainly enough of them and enough of their representatives, so what has gone so wrong with the work that they do? Have they, too, become self-serving?
Does Christianity not work the way it should? Are the people promoting it ineffective? Are the messages they deliver defective?
Do people seek more from their religion than just tradition?
The reality is that, by its very nature, religion is divisive, in spite of what any religion's specific teachings seek to portray. The practice of religion as tradition separates people in much the same way that skin colors and ethnicities do, and it's the reason wars have been fought for centuries and millennia, even within Christianity and even until now.
Of course, because religion is itself divisive does not mean people who practice religion have to be divisive, but the expectation of practicing something other than what is preached is perhaps marginal.
And the concept of separating oneself from the worst of something while still practicing the best of something is more than a juggling act for the average person: it only works when people understand why they practice religion in the first instance, instead of blindly following in its traditions.
A person's understanding of self, love for self and respect of self will determine that person's substance and the way they treat others - just having a religion or observing a tradition does not. We have already seen this ring true of many Christians in Christianity and many Muslims in Islam.
A church can provide guidelines for human moral development, as can a psychologist or psychiatrist, as can a mother or father, but there is no religion that by its mere existence makes a person equal to another, whole, right, or worthy. And the belief that one such religion exists is where many in the church - Christian or otherwise - fail in their traditional philosophy.
Religion fails and will always fail when it is practiced merely because it is tradition.
o Nicole Burrows is an academically trained economist. She can be contacted at: nicole.burrows@outlook.com or www.Facebook.com/NoelleEtc.
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