Religion: just another example of 'groupthink'?

Lately on Twitter, a particulary noisome little meme has been doing the rounds.  It's the notion that religion is just another group institution, and thus no more harmful than political affiliation, or following a football team.

This is wrong.

Hats off to the religion virus for evolving yet another survival mechanism.  Religion has already developed vertical transmission through indoctrination at an early age, along with the ability to pass itself off as basically good while simultaneously orchestrating a very great deal of evil.  Now the religion meme group seeks to deflect critical attention by crying, "Hey, guys, lay off; I'm just another type of groupthink."

Religion, through its adherents, seeks to accrue power in this world by making claims about the next.  Followers are promised rich rewards in the hereafter for acts carried out during (and especially at the end of) their lives.  Moreover, it is deemed disrespectful to question or to challenge assertions made in the name of religion.  This makes religion very different from political colours or loyalty to a football club, both of which are considered fair game for public haranguing.

Religion makes false claims about the origin and purpose of life.  It dulls curiosity and stifles inquiry, flatly stating that we already have all the information we can ever possibly need.  This is dangerous, and no other institution makes such an assertion.  Couple that with the immunity from criticism still afforded to religion by the current zeitgeist, and we have a problem indeed.

Educators seeking to encourage young people to think independently, and to appreciate the wonderful world around them, are constantly hogtied by the need to tiptoe respectfully around fenced-off religious territory.  I am not allowed to teach my students the truth about developmental biology, because local religiously-inspired laws favour the perpetuation of a ludicrous Babylonian creation myth.  The best I can hope to do is to encourage them to go and learn the truth for themselves, applying equitably critical scientific thinking to everything they encounter.  Some of them may begin to question the stultifying filth they were fed from infancy.

Genital mutilation of children is exclusively religious in origin.  False claims of improved hygiene or better mental health have long since been exposed.

In the UK, if a slaughterman were to slit the throat of a fully conscious animal and wait for it to bleed to death, he would be called to account before the law.  Unless, of course, he claimed that his religion required him to act with such brutal sadism, in which case the law would politely back off and leave him to get on with it.

No other institution is capable of, or would wish to associate itself with, such mediaeval barbarism.  Religion stands fairly and squarely in the dock.  Humanity will benefit from consigning religion to the archive of abandoned social aberrations.

Huckabee the Huckster

In the wake of last Friday's dreadful shooting in Connecticut, USA, in which twenty children and their teachers were slaughtered by a lone gunman, there has been no shortage of revolting drivel to deepen the world's sense of grief and shock.  Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, clearly implied that the tragedy would not have happened had schools continued to promulgate Christianity.

Mr Huckabee claims that God has been excluded from schools since 1963, and therefore bad things have happened in schools, including Friday's mass killing.  Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that God's behaviour as documented in the Old and New Testaments makes him a prime candidate for exclusion from any civilized school, Mr Huckabee presumably believes that God is omnipotent.  How, then, can God be excluded from anywhere?  Mr Huckabee must mean that God chose to allow children to be gunned down by a madman, because the ancestors of those children elected to separate religion from education half a century ago.

Such a being as Mr Huckabee's God is surely, in the eyes of any rational and compassionate observer, an evil, egocentric fiend of the first water.  If He has an issue with US education policy, why not arrange a revelation to the President?  Why does He feel the need to terrorise and then murder twenty innocent children, leaving their parents grief-stricken for the remainder of their ruined lives?

Friday's events were devastating, awful, indescribably tragic.  But it is also a tragedy that people like Mr Huckabee can broadcast such repulsive I-told-you-so condemnations, in pursuit of their own political agendas, when people are at their most sensitive and vulnerable.

Mr Huckabee opines that people will refrain from doing wrong only if they are afraid of standing before God.  Does he really believe that the only reason people do not rape and murder is because they are afraid of divine retribution?  If he were to discover that God does not exist, would he then become a murderer?

The Connecticut shooting was perpetrated by an individual human being, empowered by liberal gun laws.  In order to minimize the chance of repetition of this senseless carnage, we must look not to God, but to the reality of readily available, deadly weapons in a world where there are nasty people as well as nice ones.