Peter Tait, a candidate in the upcoming Scottish Elections, has suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by gay marriage. When called out on his assertion, he cited God.
Yesterday, Good Friday, 2 April, 2021, Professor Alice Roberts tweeted, accurately and appositely, that dead people do not come back to life. There followed a stream of predictably sanctimonious replies, with the common theme that she should leave well alone and let innocent believers be happy in their harmless persuasion. Moreover, she should refrain from posting tweets that might offend people. Many of the ‘please don’t offend’ tweets were in this wise: “I personally don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, but I understand that some people really need to believe that, so you should not try to stop them doing so.” Can these people not see the patronising condescension that drips from their every word? “I am far too clever to believe in God but I pity lesser brethren for whom belief is an indispensable crutch. Prevented by their limited intellectual capacity from defending themselves, they need me, a paid-up member of the ‘I’m an Atheist-But’ club, to ride in like the cavalry on their behalf.”
As I’ve said numerous times in my own blog, there is no automatic right to believe what you want. That is because beliefs affect actions, and actions affect people. Peter Tait’s statement that the COVID-19 pandemic is God’s judgment on gay marriage is truly offensive on just about every level. Like some of the self-righteous respondents to Professor Roberts, Peter Tait hides behind God to justify his claim. I know several people, all of them honest, reliable and trustworthy, who are in gay relationships including marriages. Peter Tait has blamed those innocents for, at the time of writing, almost three million deaths. His vile words are deeply offensive to them, and to me.
Theists, please don’t respond that I’ve missed the point and I don’t understand the beautiful subtleties of your religion. There are no such subtleties. There is merely a set of contentions with nothing - absolutely nothing - to support them, other than a single book accompanied by blind faith in its inerrant truth.
Unsupported assertions deserve to be questioned. When those assertions affect people’s lives, the questioning should be especially robust. You will not be allowed to play the offence card. If you make a claim, either back it up with evidence, or stop making it.
And before you start asking me where religiously inspired great art, or music, or architecture came from, think on this. The world is, thankfully, well supplied with all of the above, pertaining to and arising from religions that are long dead, with no living adherents. As examples, I cite the breathtaking temples of Abu Simbel; the Parthenon which housed the lost statue of the goddess Athena, numerous prehistoric circles including Stonehenge and Avebury, the Temple of Mithras in London, and numerous Roman relics, such as the Temple of Diana in Turkey. There are others. None of them is evidence of the existence of the deity or deities in whose honour they were erected. As I’m sure you would agree, those beings existed only in the minds of their loyal followers, who were nevertheless driven by their piety to invest vast wealth and labour in those enduring monuments. Your cathedrals and churches are the same, with the trivial difference that you, a believer in Yahweh, are still alive. Please don’t forget that the ancient Egyptian and Roman gods and goddesses held sway for far longer than Yahweh, before their fandom faded away and they became a mere historical curiosity. There are other religions, causing us more daily grief than yours does, that have been around for even less time, and still bask in the bright, youthful flare of their adolescence. I am sure they will all go the same way as did Olympian Zeus, the sun god Ra, and the Norse pantheon of Thor and Odin.
You protest that Professor Roberts ought to remain silent. Yet, your cathedrals and churches, with their attendant rituals and pageantry, are a stark daily reminder of your own baseless claims.
The best way to protect your declared right to your private belief is to keep it private. If you wish to make it public, be prepared to have it questioned, and to defend it, with real, verifiable evidence.
