Humanity over Religion

How do society, culture, and religion remain intertwined when humanity itself begins to diverge?

How do society, culture, and religion intertwine when humanity itself begins to diverge?

It is not dignified to humiliate someone like this. What is dignified is ensuring punishment through legal means. In other countries, you’ll find many cases of sexual harassment, yet serious crimes like rape are less frequent. That’s because even suggestive remarks or intentional physical contact without consent can lead to legal action for sexual misconduct.

A large portion of boys in Bangladesh never get the chance to understand girls, as they lack co-education and have been segregated from a young age. As a result, they don’t learn that girls are human beings too, with full rights to give or withhold consent. They don’t learn that one can propose love – or even intimacy – respectfully. They imagine girls are constantly “hot” from lack of male contact, and that if a boy approaches or desires them, they’ll eagerly agree. They even think that if they lie next to a girl at night, she’ll climb onto his chest in her sleep!

In the Netherlands – a country with a largely non-religious population – five prisons now stand empty due to a lack of inmates. Two thousand prison staff have no work. Meanwhile, in countries where religion dominates and minorities are attacked, displaced, and sacred sites are burned, prisons overflow far beyond capacity. So much for their moral values. They say crime rises due to lack of religious values.

As of 2017, 50.7% of people in the Netherlands publicly declared they have no religion. That number has likely reached 55% by now. Most of the rest inherited religion by birth but don’t practice it.

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The following was written in 2018

Bangladesh is home to Asia’s largest prison. You may have felt proud hearing this after the new central prison was built. Perhaps. Our prisons already hold far more inmates than their capacity. If all criminals were brought under the law, we’d need ten times more prisons.

On the other hand, many European countries known as the most peaceful in the world – like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, and Germany – are shutting down prisons due to a lack of criminals. To keep staff employed, they’ve even imported inmates from abroad. Strange but true – these countries have set such examples.

In countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, even new prisons can’t accommodate the rising number of inmates. A recent report showed that Bangladesh’s prisons, with a capacity of 34,796, currently hold 69,774 inmates – and the number keeps growing. Recent special operations have added thousands more. This single statistic comparing Europe and Bangladesh reveals how deeply crime has embedded itself in our society. It shows how “civilized” and “developed” we truly are, how grounded our civic duties are in morality, and how well our state, government, political parties, and social institutions are cultivating civilized citizens.

European countries were in a much worse state 150-200 years ago in terms of crime. They engaged in piracy and colonial plunder. So perhaps it will take us another 150-200 years to reach their current level of civilization.

And here’s the irony – we often say that to reduce crime, people need social values, morality, and religious education. Yet in those European countries, 90% of people don’t believe in or follow any organized religion. So how did they reach such high standards of morality, humanity, and social civility?