Liberals & accommodationists...

Please, O liberals and accommodationists, get your heads around these few points before you start defending religion. 

1. People have no automatic right to believe what they want.

In fact it's not always possible to choose what to believe. A close friend might be guilty of murder. I might not want to believe him capable of such an act but the evidence may force me to. I am duty bound to examine my beliefs and adapt them to fit what I can know about reality. More importantly, believing what you want doesn't necessarily affect just you. If you believe God ordered mankind to eat only halal slaughtered meat, your belief increases animal suffering. If you believe your daughter will please God more without a clitoris or labia, your belief ruins her life. Beliefs affect actions, and are therefore not immune from criticism. 

2. Religion is not all about being nice to people. 

It is almost universally assumed that real religion is something good and virtuous. Starting from that assumption, it follows that no bad act can be inspired by religion. Since no one can deny that bad acts happen, and that some of those who do bad things claim to be motivated to do so by their religion, it follows that bad people must have misunderstood their religion or must be acting on a perverted version of it. All this special pleading falls away, at a stroke, once we drop the initial false assumption of niceness.

3. Religion instils tribalism from an early age.

Children are taught, by religious parents and educators, that they belong to an in-group, while those of other religions form an out-group. God favours the in-group over all others. There is nothing nice about such an idea. 

4. Religion is not race, and is not hereditary. 

Religion is often confused with race, because, in an overwhelmingly large proportion of cases, a person's religion turns out to be the same as that of their parents. But that is not the same as saying that religion is unalterably inherited, like DNA. A child taken at birth from its natural parents, for whatever reason, would not automatically find itself believing the same things its parents believed. Children become religious through indoctrination, not through reproduction. 

5. Those who claim to be religious often fail to evaluate the ethics of their own words and actions. 

It is as though people think, "I am religious, and therefore a nice person. Consequently I do not need to monitor what I say or do, because the very fact that I am a religious person means that what I say and do must be good." They then go on to spout dreadful racism (a case in point is a British teacher, and self-confessed Christian, whom I heard to say that he certainly didn't want an Indian person teaching his daughter) or commit the most vile acts of murder and sadism (check out the news virtually any week).  

6. The moderate religious majority creates the background against which religiously inspired violence can be justified in the minds of those who commit it. 

Who claims that the Aztecs, tearing out the beating heart of a fresh victim each day to propitiate their preferred deity, were following an extremist perversion of their religion? Yet, after every case of religiously inspired violence reported in the media, liberals and accommodationists repeat their chorused trope that atrocities have nothing to do with religion. Thus, the root cause of the problem remains unaddressed, and the bombings, shootings and beheadings are not only authorised but guaranteed. Instead, we need to look at education, and aim for a state of affairs whereby any belief not founded on reliable evidence is open to robust questioning and evaluation. Nothing need be sacred. If you think that is impossible, look at religions of the past that no-one follows any more. The sun god Ra held sway over a large part of the civilized world for thousands of years - longer than Christianity - but who worships him now? Today's religions will eventually go the same way. Proper education could have an impact within a generation. 

Religiously Inspired Violence: perhaps a sign of doubt, not certitude

Among the sales-pitch hooks of Catholicism, this gambit is a common one: certainty through faith is not a prerequisite; the desire to believe is enough for Mother Church.

Help thou mine unbelief!
Mark 9:24

The long, dark night of the soul is surely not peculiar to Christianity.  Rare indeed must be the believer who has never doubted, for a moment, the existence of his revered, omnipotent big brother, who will protect him from death, who will set right all injustices against his followers, who will wipe away the tears and lead his flock into sunlit meadows. Apart from the truly brainless, who never think and never question anything they are told (a tiny minority, I hope and think likely), all theists must have had doubts at some point. Perhaps, in at least a few, those niggling, nagging, naysaying voices persist for a disturbingly long time. Perhaps, in some cases, more numerous than we imagine, they never go away.

A lifetime of unanswered prayer will do little to assuage the indecision. The theist wants, oh so wants to be sure he will survive his own extinction; that his foes will suffer eternal torment, and that his loved ones will share his eternal bliss. But his rational mind will not lie quiescent. What if it is all a story? Why doesn't god come forth and show himself? Where might the doubter seek solace, and what peevish behaviours might his never-sleeping subconscious serve up, in answer to the doubting whispers?

I contend that a frustrated desire to believe will favour two consequences. Firstly, the wannabe believer will seek reinforcement and reassurance from all quarters. Routine company of other believers, to whom it is natural to suppose faith comes much more easily than it does to oneself, together with rabidly-obsessive adherence to many-times-daily ritual, is the first of these. Which religion comes most readily to mind when you read the last sentence? Dubious acolytes will tend to gravitate towards patriarchal leader figures, founts of certitude based on quotations from ancient texts and supposed scholarly research.

The second, and unquestionably the more dangerous, consequence is likely to be a powerful urge to vilify and attack other unbelievers. For one thing, the presence of infidels is a permanent, standing reminder of one's own potential for infidelity. Lash out at the unbeliever, the embodiment of your own projected doubts. Destroy them all, and affirm your own status, in your own eyes, as a true follower for evermore. By stamping out the infidel, you stamp out your own misgivings. Wipe them from the face of the earth, until only the yes-men remain, mirroring our own desired perception of ourselves, welded unshakeably to the brotherhood.

Shifting the Zeitgeist

Who decides which traditions and mores may change, and which should remain unaltered?

Public opinion is not fixed. Minds change. Cultures evolve. History shows a general, if erratic, trend toward the positive and the constructive. Slavery was once a legally recognised system through which humans were the disposable property of other humans. Slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world. What was once accepted as normal, right and proper is now (almost) universally abhorred.

Apartheid in South Africa was enforced through legislation from 1948 to 1994. During that time, school teachers in the UK were forbidden to comment upon the system. Now, it is globally condemned as a gross contravention of human rights.

Slavery and apartheid are just two examples of mindsets that humankind has done well to drop. No-one in their right mind would want to bring either of them back. We all agree that we are better off without them. National socialism and fascism, along with communism and brutal dictatorship, are political ideologies that have been tried and proven to fail, now abandoned by nations interested in a prosperous, healthy future for their citizens.

Why, then, do we insist on clinging to, and protecting, mediaeval religious belief systems that continually prove themselves no less delinquent than those listed above? Neither a typical 19th century slave owner, who doubtless considered himself a benevolent employer, nor a South African farmer with a large, underpaid indigenous workforce, would have been likely to welcome reform with open arms. There would have been stolid resistance from those with a vested interest, and it was surely no mean task to divert the momentum of tradition. Yet, it was achieved.

After every suicide bombing, every beheading, every shooting perpetrated by scripture-shrieking thugs, the liberal progress-deniers come out in their droves to defend Islam, Christianity, Judaism and whatever other irrational belief system is the flavour of the day. People should be free to practise their own culture, they argue, and the rest of us have no right to stop them. It is fine for husbands and fathers to stultify the educational, social and working lives of their wives and daughters, because in their culture that is the way it has been done for a long time. TTWWADI. That's the way we've always done it. Well, you could have said the same about slavery in 1833, and about apartheid in 1994.

What makes religion different? Why can the most dreadful human rights abuses not only be allowed to continue, but actually be championed and protected by liberal accommodationists who do not themselves indulge in such behaviour?

It comes down to the almost universal assumption that religion is, at bottom, all about being nice to one another. That is why myopic liberals fail to accept the clear causal link between literal religious belief and suicide bombing. Because it is simply a given that religion = kindness and love, anyone who says religion causes violence must be simply wrong, having misunderstood something basic. The liberal defender might not have the first clue as to what has been misunderstood, nor how a true understanding might be achieved, but that doesn't matter. Religion is nice, and humane, and comforting, and noble, so any nasty things that appear to stem from religion must in fact stem from something else.

It is time for the zeitgeist to take another forward step. It has to become acceptable to say, loudly and clearly, that the solutions to mankind's problems cannot be found in a confused miscellany of texts, confected in centuries past. The notion that an omnipotent creator god spoke his final, unalterable words 1400 years ago to an illiterate peasant in a desert cave, and that all human laws and ways must flow from those words, is ridiculous, outdated and potentially extremely harmful. The liberal firewall of immunity around such a ludicrous assertion is a direct barrier to progress, to the safety of our children, and to the future of our civilization.

Germanwings Tragedy: Clouded Minds Miss the Point

The Twittersphere reverberates, in the aftermath of the dreadful loss of Germanwings 4U9525 on Tuesday, with popular knee-jerk buzzwords such as 'terrorist', hurled around by those who seem unable see wood for trees.

There is now no doubt that the first officer on the flight, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately flew the aircraft into terrain, locking the captain out of the flight deck when the latter went to the bathroom shortly after the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude. It has since become apparent that Lubitz suffered from depression, and that he was forced to take a career break to deal with a serious depressive episode.

A reporter set a number of Tweeters off on a rant when he asked what Lubitz's religious affiliations might have been. Everyone seems to have leapt to the conclusion that the reporter suspected Lubitz may have been an Islamist, bent on a fast track to paradise by carrying out a so-called terrorist attack.

I suspect the reporter may have been thinking along very different lines. The question in everyone's minds is this. We can understand a depressive seeing no way forward and resorting to suicide, but why take a planeload of innocent passengers - many of them children - with him?

I suggest that Lubitz's religious beliefs - I don't know whether he had any, but I would like to know - ought indeed to be investigated. If, like many people in today's world, he believed that death is not the end and that his passengers would go to a better place, then that is certainly a significant key to understanding how an apparently likeable man was able to bring himself to commit mass murder in pursuit of his own destruction.

Beliefs are often held to be private, but I contend that as soon as someone's belief affects (worse, shortens) the lives of others, then beliefs become a matter of public concern. Unsupported, unevidenced tales about heaven and afterlives, endorsed by popular respect for religion, might well prove to be deadly ticking time-bombs.

The Elephant is still In The Room

It took a little longer than I expected, but the accommodationist fringe has stepped up to the plate with the usual trope. We brought the Paris Charlie Hebdo shootings upon ourselves, by mocking the deeply-held beliefs of those who are not in power.

The video below is unusual in that the presenter continually tries to bring rationality into the discussion, against a tidal wave of loony cultural relativism from both her guests, who succeed only in making themselves sound very silly indeed.

Click for video

Moreover, contemporary thought professor (and Self-styled wannabe thought policeman) Will Self observes that the notion of absolute freedom of speech is "exactly the same as a religious idea".

How dreadfully confused these people are. Religions such as Islam are totalitarian in nature. They seek to control every aspect of the lives of every one of us. They would dictate (i.e. severely limit) what we can read, what we can draw, what we can see, what we can say and how we can dress. To suggest by association that the ideal of freedom of speech is some kind of totalitarian imposition is ludicrous in the extreme. Freedom of speech does not need to be enforced, and it is not predicated upon the propitiation of any deity. Freedom of speech does not enlist the service of the gullible through the empty promise of impossible rewards in an imaginary, uncorroborable hereafter.

Professor Self might just as well argue that the universal right to oxygen is a religious idea. Supposing a crackpot religious sect imprisoned a few hostages and sealed them in an airtight room to suffocate. Amid the global outcry for the hostages to be freed before they run out of air, the lone voice of Professor Self pipes up: "Just remember - to claim that every person has the right to free oxygen is as much a religious idea as are the sincerely-held beliefs of these men." And some of those who had been clamouring for the hostages' freedom tiptoe quietly away to re-evaluate the matter.

In fact the issue is far less complicated than these high priests of obfuscation would have us believe. Some very nasty bullies, who happen to share a title (Muslim) and some of their beliefs with a very large group of people (most of whom have never questioned or examined the belief system they were born into), have sought to impose a set of restrictions upon all of us. We have rejected those restrictions, and so the bullies have resorted to murder. That is all. This was no desperate act by heroic, downtrodden underdogs with no recourse to debate or protest. The Paris shootings were not the result of western foreign policy. They were a cynical attempt by a gang of thugs to score brownie points with their imaginary totalitarian deity. Such a mindset ought to have no place in a civilised society, and represents a real, immediate danger to it.

As @MrOzAtheist has pointed out, not all Muslims resort to murder over cartoons, but all of those who murder because of cartoons are Muslims, following the teaching of their religion. Furthermore, the Paris gunmen were heard to shout that they had avenged the prophet Muhammad, and that god is great. We should have stopped ignoring the elephant in the room on 11 September, 2001. It is still here, generating a growing mountain of repellent ordures.