Elon Musk, in a recent conversation with Jordan Peterson, suggested that he was ‘probably a cultural Christian.’ Without being particularly religious, he claimed he was a ‘big believer in the principles of Christianity’, among which he named forgiveness. He also said that the Christian pronatalist presumption would probably ‘lead to a better society.’ Richard Dawkins, who is famous for being notoriously anti-religious, recently suggested that he does not wish for an end to Christian traditions in England because ‘I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’

In this article, I want to explain why I am a ‘cultural non-Christian.’ This does not necessarily mean that I am a non-Christian. It just means that, culturally, I am a non-Christian. Furthermore, though I can understand why somebody would see their embeddedness in a historic Christian culture as a fact, I understand much less why this cultural experience should be transformed into a political movement or an ideology.

The term ‘cultural Christian’ is shorthand for an attitude that rejects the supernatural claims of Christianity but still admits to being culturally determined by a historical context shaped by Christianity. Many people have embraced what Christian critics call ‘Christianity lite’, that is, Christian culture without miracles and divinity. Some people value moral ideas like humility or the sanctity of the individual, which they believe makes them ‘somewhat’ Christian in a cultural way. This leads to paradoxical labels. Slavoj Žižek has called his most recent book Christian Atheism, and French President Emmanuel Macron identifies himself as an ‘agnostic Catholic.’ Jordan Peterson adhered to a similar line when he said on television ‘I act as if God exists’ (emphasis added).

First, I wonder how deeply these people have actually examined their cultural contexts. In my own cultural environment, I find little that can really be identified as Christian. Instead, I notice that it is replete with almost anti-Christian elements. I might find a few secularized cultural components that were formerly Christian, but there is nothing powerful enough there to lead me to conclude that I am a cultural Christian. As a European or as a Westerner, I am culturally determined by secularism, the Enlightenment, the freedom to speak up against religion, and the overcoming of religion.

Cultural Christians tend to list qualities like respect for the individual, loyalty, or self-control as core Christian values that they still believe in. However, beyond the fact that such values can be found in practically any religion, these cultural principles have reached most of us in already highly secularized forms. Human rights and equality are secular ideas. Why should one insist on their Christian origins (a highly debatable proposition, anyway)? Many such principles could just as well be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and I could thus declare myself a cultural Greek. A kneejerk reaction might suggest that it is simply a difference in temporal distance that makes such an idea less feasible, but is the legacy of Greek philosophy really that much more distant than the Biblical origins of Christianity?

In my opinion, many non-practicing Christians are not as culturally influenced by Christianity as they think. They might imagine they are, and they may even want it to be true; but often, it is a highly secularized form of ‘Christian culture’ that they have experienced. The libidinal and subliminal reasons why these people attribute secular phenomena to Christianity might be interesting for their own sake, but they are irrelevant here.

We appreciate European culture, but to what extent is this culture actually Christian? Churches and their distinctive architecture can be used to illustrate a broader point here. When the Notre Dame of Paris burned in 2019, plenty of non-religious people were sincerely struck by this cultural loss and expressed a desire to have this monument quickly repaired. But this outpouring of emotion cannot simply be attributed to some kind of latent religiosity. It is more likely that the structure as a historical monument and a great example of Gothic architecture were what mattered to many, rather than its religious significance.

I appreciate much of the architecture that has been built by Christians, but I do not appreciate it as ‘Christian architecture.’ I appreciate it in the same secular way in which one might appreciate any architecture. The same goes for ideas and concepts that might once have been the preserve of Christian theologians but are no longer used in a Christian sense. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples is Christmas, which many celebrate without celebrating it as a Christian event. One could even go to Mass and enjoy it as a spectacle without it meaning that one is Christian in any way.

Theoretically, one could build a new Gothic cathedral and make it non-denominational, that is, build one that can be used by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike. Many who think of themselves as ‘cultural Christians’ might not be dissatisfied with such a monument in their city and might even view it as an example of foreign ideas being well integrated into their own culture. They are cultural Europeans rather than cultural Christians. In a similar vein, Dawkins mentioned that he enjoys listening to Christian hymns, and I believe that it is rather the music than the religious lyrics that he appreciates. He too is arguably a cultural European more so than a cultural Christian. How many people who enjoy Bach can actually relate to the lyrics of the St. Matthew Passion?

What we are really influenced by as Europeans and what really gives us an identity as Westerners is not religion but the liberty to act against obscurantism and religion. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a recent speech, suggested that Europeans should look to Christianity in order to reinstall meaning and purpose in a European society that has lost its moral compass. He does not seem to be aware that he suggests something that is deeply alien to a European culture that was born out of a revolution against religious authoritarianism. Unknowingly, by insisting on archaic Christian roots, Orbán, Peterson, and Musk push the West towards a worldview with which Christianity bears strong similarities: Islam.

Islamic societies continue to be much more strongly influenced by religion, and the idea of a ‘cultural Muslim’ is unnecessary because Islam is the only cultural reference point available: religion and culture almost entirely overlap, or are at least perceived to. Simultaneously and paradoxically, when the religious reference point is so strong that non-religious cultural aspects quasi-disappear, the idea of a ‘cultural Muslim’ becomes nonsensical and practically synonymous with the notion of a ‘cultural non-Muslim.’ A cultural Muslim is de facto a non-Muslim.

This is also the case for Christians, but for them, this paradox is less obvious. Westerners tend to have many more non-religious reference points, with the result that the concept of ‘cultural Christianity’ assumes a stronger connection to the religion than would exist if one identified more strongly with other cultural referents. Because one could choose another identity, the choice of Christianity holds more weight. Typically, when a Muslim says that they are only ‘culturally’ Muslim, the assumption is that they are in fact no longer Muslim. When a Christian says that they are ‘culturally’ Christian, the emphasis is that they are still somehow Christian. In Western societies, culture and religion can be more naturally perceived as two distinct things, and Musk et al plead not for a distinction but for a further confusion of cultural and religious aspects. It remains a strange choice. For example, Musk could simply talk about family policy boosting birth rates; why does he need Christianity to make his point?

I concede that the idea of being a ‘cultural Christian’, with which I personally cannot empathise, might be genuinely felt by some. However, there is no reason to turn this vague feeling into a movement or an ideology. This is precisely what Musk et al are doing. And when Dawkins values cultural Christianity as a ‘bulwark against Islam’ he is clearly missing the point. The only bulwark against Islam would be secularism.

I feel that you want to ask me now if I am a Christian or a non-Christian without the prefix ‘cultural.’ But this is not the topic of the article. Here I merely wanted to explain why, in cultural terms, I cannot be a Christian.

Related reading

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post Why I am a ‘cultural non-Christian’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

Readers may recall that during the Vietnam War, US soldiers were wont to justify their presence in that country by claiming they were there to ‘kill a Commie for Christ’. 

Before attempting to unpack this phrase, let me suggest that it encapsulates the very essence of the relationship between religion and war. I also suggest that it offers at least a sliver of hope that the historically deeply intertwined relationship between the two might one day be severed.

In October 2011, Dylan Ratigan wrote an article for the HuffPost entitled ‘How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?’ Written some eight years after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ratigan argued that ‘the only real consistency in policy-making is Washington’s commitment to war and oil, and increasingly often, war for oil.’ Suppose this is an accurate description of at least one of the US government’s major motivations for the Iraq War. In that case, it’s a far cry from the initial rationale for that war presented to the American people.

During an interview on CNN on September 8, 2002, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice infamously warned that Saddam Hussein could be close to producing a nuclear weapon. When asked just how close Saddam was to ‘developing a nuclear capacity’, Rice replied: ‘The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’

In contrast to Rice’s assertion, Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, reported the same day that there was no ‘smoking gun’ inasmuch as the Bush administration had failed to substantiate its case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Ritter’s conclusion was later substantiated prior to the war by onsite inspections conducted by both the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

Needless to say, the testimony of Scott Ritter and other reputable organisations did nothing to dissuade the Bush administration from invading Iraq on March 19, 2003. The result would be the violent deaths of between 268,000 and 295,000 people between March 2003 and October 2018. It also did nothing to dissuade many Christian clergy in the US from voicing their full support for the invasion. For example, Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta and a former Southern Baptist Convention president, stated in a sermon broadcast internationally on TV: ‘Throughout Scripture, there is evidence that God favors war for divine reasons and sometimes uses it to accomplish His will. He has also given governments and their citizens very specific responsibilities in regards to this matter.’ 

Further, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, noted that ‘Most evangelicals in America subscribe to the theological position called ‘Just War Theory,’ that it is morally justified to go to war under certain conditions.’ Similarly, Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson, a Baptist, argued in 2002 that the classical definition of Christian just war theory should be ‘stretched’ to accommodate a new age in which terrorism and warfare are intertwined. Colson alleged that ‘out of love of neighbor, then, Christians can and should support a preemptive strike’ on Iraq to prevent Iraqi-based or -funded attacks on the United States or its allies. Colson was one of the signatories to the Land letter, a letter sent by several evangelical Christian leaders to Bush giving their ‘just war’-based support to the invasion of Iraq.

As the above quotations indicate, one of the most frequent justifications for Christian support of war, shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, is the belief in ‘just wars’. Christian just war theory, first developed by Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and later by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), was designed to provide a reliable guide for determining if a specific war was in accord with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Laying aside what Jesus actually said about the use of violence for the moment, just war doctrine clearly empowered the Pope, as Vicar of Christ on earth, to determine which war, if any, the faithful should fight (and die) in.

Just war theory, at its most basic, declares that a war must be fought for a just cause, i.e., it must correct a grave, public evil. Further, only duly constituted public authorities may wage war exclusively for the reasons set forth as a just cause. Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in cases where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success. Finally, force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted and the force used must be proportional to the injury suffered. That is to say, the harm caused by the war must not be greater than the harm to be eradicated.

If one believes that the use of force is sometimes unavoidable, it is difficult to fault just war theory, at least at the theoretical level. But what of historical practice? In the long history of the Roman Catholic Church, has the Church, i.e., the Pope, ever formally declared that even one of the numerous wars occurring since the adoption of just war doctrine is ‘unjust’? The surprising answer is ‘no’. No Pope has ever issued a formal declaration using their full papal authority to categorically label a specific war as unjust. Not even in the Second World War did Pope Pius XII see fit to formally declare that Nazi Germany, with its sizable Catholic population, was fighting an unjust war. That said, it is true that numerous Popes have used their moral and spiritual authority to speak out strongly against certain wars. For example, Pope John Paul II was strongly opposed to the Iraq War. Nevertheless, he, too, failed to issue a formal declaration explicitly stating that that war was unjust.

What of the opposite case, i.e., have any Popes declared that certain wars have been ‘just’? Here the answer is an unambiguous ‘yes’. Successive Popes declared the multiple Crusades of the late 11^th to 13^th centuries to be just wars. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II framed the very First Crusade as a penitential act, a holy pilgrimage, and a just war to reclaim the Holy Land and protect Eastern Christians from Muslim rule. Urban further promised spiritual rewards, including indulgences (remissions of sins), to those who took up the sword and the cross.

Following in Urban’s footsteps, various Popes issued bulls (formal papal decrees) supporting and legitimising the Crusades. For example, Pope Eugenius III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores in 1145, calling for the Second Crusade, and Pope Innocent III issued Post miserabile in 1198, urging the launch of the Fourth Crusade. These papal bulls not only called for the Crusades but also outlined the spiritual benefits, protections, and financial support to be had by those who participated in them. They promoted the Crusades by emphasising themes of Christian duty, divine favour, and spiritual rewards, further reinforcing the just war narrative.

Today, thanks to a reconsideration of the historical relationship between Christians and Muslims set in motion by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Church has undergone a major change in its outlook. In 1976, Paul Johnson, an English Catholic historian, described the Crusades as follows:

The Crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military… A Crusade was in essence nothing more than a mob of armed and fanatical Christians. Once its numbers rose to over 10,000 it could no longer be controlled, only guided. It might be used to attack Moslems, or unleashed against Jews, or heretics… The fall of Jerusalem [in 1099] was followed by a prolonged and hideous massacre of Moslems and Jews, men, women and children… In general, the effect of the Crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture.

In short, over the centuries just war doctrine has been, at least in practice, little more than a moral fig leaf to disguise an age-old pattern, i.e., what we (the Church and its adherents) do is by definition ‘just’ (no matter how horrendous) and what others do is not. Just how far just war doctrine varies from, if not violates, Jesus’ teachings is clear when we turn to the New Testament. Jesus not only advocated non-violence but directed his followers to love one’s enemies. Key passages include the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and urges his followers to turn the other cheek if they are attacked. These teachings were foundational for early Christians, with substantial evidence suggesting that early Christian communities leaned heavily towards pacifism. Early Church fathers like Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220), for example, argued that Christians should not participate in military service, stating that ‘Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.’

Nevertheless, by the time of Constantine I in the 4th century, Christianity was becoming enmeshed with the militaristic Roman state. As a result, the Church’s stance on violence and military service began to change. It was this change that prompted figures like Augustine to a shift in thinking, accommodating the realities of Christians to the political power of the state. Note, too, that this shift not only led to Christianity’s acceptance by the Roman state, but it greatly enhanced the influence, prestige, and wealth of the prelates themselves.

As for Christianity and war specifically, one of the most momentous changes occurred when, in the aftermath of Constantine’s victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in October 312 (which he came to attribute to the support of the Christian God), he agreed to exempt Christian clergy (but not laity) from service in the Roman army, among other benefits. Constantine did this in exchange for the clergy’s commitment to pray for the victory of his soldiers. This marked the beginning of the military chaplaincy we have today and explains the origins of why in the UK and US, for example, chaplains remain unarmed even as they meet the ‘spiritual needs’ of soldiers on the battlefield.

The importance of the role of military chaplains is explained in the following article that appeared in the Associated Press in 2004 during the Iraq War:

As American troops cope with life—and death—on a faraway battlefield, military chaplains cope with them, offering prayers, comfort and spiritual advice to keep the American military machine running… Chaplains help grease the wheels of any soldier’s troubled conscience by arguing that killing combatants is justified.

Capt. Warren Haggray, a 48-year-old Baptist Army chaplain said: “I teach them from the scripture, and in the scripture I can see many times where men were told…to go out and defeat the enemy. This is real stuff. You’re out there and you gotta eliminate that guy, because if you don’t, he’s gonna eliminate you.” [Emphasis mine]

Note, too, that it is not just military chaplains who ‘grease the wheels’ of those who are engaged, directly or indirectly, in the killing business. That is to say, those who order soldiers into battle also benefit from Christianity’s alliance with the state. For example, at the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, following Spain’s defeat and America’s takeover of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, President McKinley invited a group of Methodist church leaders to the White House in 1899. He told them:

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came … that there was nothing left for the US to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.

The Spanish, albeit Roman Catholics, had used the same ‘Christianizing’ mission to justify their own colonisation of that country from 1565. Nevertheless, none of the US Protestant clergy present opposed the colonialist decision of a president who had ‘went down on [his] knees’ to ask for divine guidance. In the Philippine-American War that followed between 1899 and 1902, the total number of Filipino casualties is estimated to have been between 220,000 and 250,000—all in the name of being uplifted, civilized, and ‘Christianized’ (i.e., ‘Protestantized’) by the US. The unity of Christianity and the state that began under Constantine has for many centuries provided both spiritual and material blessings for Christian soldiers, their political rulers, and their clergy throughout the world, and not only in the US.

At this point, I would not be surprised if some readers may be thinking, ‘Why is the author of this article so relentless in his criticism of Christianity? Wasn’t he once a Christian missionary in Japan? Is it perhaps because, now that he’s a Buddhist priest, he thinks Buddhism is so different from Christianity, i.e., a true religion of peace?’

While the author did once labour under that misapprehension, it is no longer the case, for like all world religions, Buddhism, despite its undeserved reputation as a religion of peace, is not substantially different when viewed in its actual historical practice. One of the first times I realised this was when I read a quotation from D.T. Suzuki, famous for his introduction of the (Rinzai) Zen sect of Buddhism to the West.

At the time of Imperial Japan’s attempt to colonise Korea, leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, Suzuki wrote an English-language article entitled ‘A Buddhist View of War’. He concluded the article with the following appeal to Japan’s soldiers:

When our ideals clash, let there be no flinching, no backsliding, no undecidedness, but for ever and ever pressing onwards. In this kind of war there is nothing personal, egotistic, or individual. It is the holiest spiritual war… Let us then shuffle off this mortal coil whenever it becomes necessary, and not raise a grunting voice against the fates… Resting in this conviction, Buddhists carry the banner of Dharma over the dead and dying until they gain final victory.

Simply stated, Suzuki was exhorting Japanese soldiers to simply die without complaint in ‘the holiest spiritual war’ since their deaths would ensure that the Dharma (i.e., Buddhism) reigned supreme. Placed within historical context, Suzuki’s admonition is unsurprising inasmuch as Suzuki’s own Zen master, Shaku Sōen, a Buddhist military chaplain in the same conflict, said essentially the same thing. In explaining the motivation for his service, Sōen wrote:

I wished to have my faith tested by going through the greatest horrors of life, but I also wished to inspire, if I could, our valiant soldiers with the ennobling thoughts of the Buddha, so as to enable them to die on the battlefield with the confidence that the task in which they are engaged is great and noble.

In the preceding quotation, if one were to replace ‘the ennobling thoughts of Buddha’ with ‘the ennobling thoughts of Christ’, I suggest you would have, at least doctrinally speaking, a nearly identical stance.

Further, when Leo Tolstoi, the famous Russian author and pacifist, sent a letter to Sōen asking him to sign a joint statement denouncing the war between their two peoples, Sōen responded:  

Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things that are incompatible, killing and war are necessary.

In the following years, as Imperial Japan continued its colonisation of additional Asian countries, Buddhist support for this effort, on the part of all of Japan’s many Buddhist sects, became ever more strident. It reached the point that even the fundamental Buddhist precept proscribing the taking of life proved no impediment to those espousing support for Japan’s war effort. For example, in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, Sōtō Zen master Yasutani Haku’un wrote:

One should, fighting hard, kill everyone in the enemy army. The reason for this is that in order to carry [Buddhist] compassion and filial obedience through to perfection it is necessary to assist good and punish evil… Failing to kill an evil man who ought to be killed, or destroying an enemy army that ought to be destroyed, would be to betray compassion and filial obedience, to break the precept forbidding the taking of life.

Not content with advocating the killing of the enemy army, Yasutani, like the Nazis, found yet another group to demonise—the Jews. Yasutani wrote:

We must be aware of the existence of the demonic teachings of the Jews… They are caught up in the delusion that they alone have been chosen by God and are [therefore] an exceptionally superior people… The result of all this is a treacherous design to usurp [control of] and dominate the entire world, thus provoking the great upheavals of today. It must be said that this is an extreme example of the evil resulting from superstitious belief and deep-rooted delusion.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about D.T. Suzuki, Yasutani Haku’un, and the many other wartime Japanese Zen Buddhist leaders is that even today large numbers of Western Zen Buddhists continue to revere them as the very embodiment of ‘enlightenment’. And lest there are readers who think that statements like the above are limited to either wartime Japanese Zen masters or Japanese Buddhist leaders in general, we need only look at the more recent statement of Thai monk Kitti Wuttho who, in 1976 in the aftermath of a massacre of leftist protesters, claimed: ‘Killing communists is not killing persons because whoever destroys the nation, the religion, or the monarchy, such bestial types are not complete persons. Thus we must intend not to kill people but to kill the Devil (Mara); this is the duty of all Thai.’ Based on this statement, one can assume Venerable Wuttho would have had no objection to the statement ‘Kill a Commie for Buddha’.

Were space available, I could give examples of similar statements made by the leaders of all the world’s major faiths. With regard to Islam, for example, on 23 April 2004, the well-known Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr encouraged his followers to rise up against the US occupation of Iraq. He said:

Tell America, tell all the world, tell the Governing Council, that I have God by my side and they have the devil by theirs, and to my followers, I say, do not think we are not powerful. We can fight and defeat anyone!

A few months later, he crowed:

The only reward for those who make war on Allah and on Muhammad, his messenger, and plunge into corruption, will be to be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet severed on alternate sides, or be expelled from the land.

Judaism, too, is no exception to religion-endorsed warfare, as revealed in the current mass murder of Palestinians being carried out by the Jewish state of Israel. While contemporary statements by Israeli leaders calling the Palestinians ‘human animals’ and the like are well known, it is important to recall that a denial of the shared humanity of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews has long been the staple of some Israeli Jewish rabbis.

In a 2001 sermon, the now deceased Ovadia Yosef, then the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and a founder of the ultra-orthodox Shas religious political party, exclaimed: ‘May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them… It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.’ Twenty-three years later, Rabbi Yosef’s words are being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Finally, readers will recall that I found a sliver of hope in the phrase ‘Kill a Commie for Christ’. By this, I meant that history suggests that when we see the ‘other’ as an extension of, or a reflection of, our self, we cannot easily kill them. Instead, we must first believe (or be led to believe) that the ‘other’, in this case, the ‘Commie’, is the very incarnation of evil while at the same time believing (or being led to believe) that we are the ‘good guys’ (and increasingly ‘good gals’) killing for a ‘righteous cause’, e.g., on behalf of Jesus, the ‘Prince of Peace’.   

But what happens when soldiers discover that the enemy is actually an extension of themselves? That they are fellow human beings with the same wants, desires, fears, and, indeed, weaknesses? In this connection, I recall my own personal experience as a civilian college instructor in the US Navy’s Program for Afloat College Education. In 1980 I was assigned to teach on board the USS Kirk, a destroyer escort homeported in Yokosuka, Japan. In addition to the Japanese language, I taught a course on modern Chinese history as the ship patrolled the Taiwan Strait on a ‘peace-keeping mission’.

At the beginning of the course, my sailor-students expressed interest in learning more about their putative enemy, the ‘ChiComs’ (derogatory GI slang for Chinese Communists). Knowing of their prejudice, I chose Edgar Snow’s famous work Red Star Over China as the course text due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Communist guerrilla movement led by Mao Tse-tung (aka Mao Zedong). Sailors were shocked to learn, for example, that in the late 1930s, Mao’s opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Chinese and a professed Christian, expressed his admiration for fascism and believed that it held potential for China’s future development. ‘So we’re here in the Taiwan Strait risking our lives to defend fascism?’ they asked incredulously.

Toward the end of the class one of the sailors, having long abandoned the term ‘ChiCom’, said:

‘You know, Professor, if I’d been in the position of impoverished, landless Chinese peasants, faced with the choice of supporting either Chiang and his landlord backers or Mao, I would have become a Communist guerrilla, too!’ Other students in the class nodded in agreement. Needless to say, the purpose of the class was not to create ‘Communist guerrillas’ but, rather, to understand what led impoverished Chinese youth to become revolutionaries.

For this reason, I was heartened to see that with the knowledge they had acquired the sailors came to recognize the humanity, and understand the motives, of those who heretofore had been presented to them as evil incarnate. However, following the voyage, I was fired from my teaching position at the direction of the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet in Japan. The headquarters wrote my employer, Chapman College, explaining that ‘Brian Victoria is considered a threat to military order and discipline and must never be allowed to teach on board a Seventh Fleet ship again.’ So it goes…

Readers of Part One will recall that I identified the ongoing ‘tribal mentality’ of Homo sapiens as the root cause of our willingness to kill the ‘other’ in ever more massive numbers and with ever more lethal means. While all of today’s major religions claim to espouse universal truth and promote peace, when push comes to shove, religious leaders, almost without exception, resort to a tribal mentality that endorses if not promotes the murderous actions of their tribe’s (aka nation’s) soldiers. In doing so, they provide both their political leaders and the soldiers under their direction with the belief that they are acting righteously, ethically, with worthy goals that justify the means, no matter how cruel and heartless they may be.

Religious leaders also typically assure soldiers’ next of kin that in the event their loved ones fall in battle, they will be rewarded with some form of an afterlife, e.g., eternal life in the heaven of Christianity or rebirth in Buddha Amitābha’s ‘Pure Land’ in the case of Buddhism. At the same time, religious leaders enjoy the respect and approbation of their tribe/nation, for even should ‘their side’ lose the war, religious leaders are there to offer moral support and comfort, eulogising the patriotic ‘selflessness’ of the fallen and assuring their loved ones that the fallen have gone to a ‘better place’ and are ‘at peace’. In short, whether the war is won or lost, religious leaders, who need not risk their own lives on the battlefield, typically end up as the ‘winners’.

Given this, is there any hope?

In light of the ongoing, and widespread, strength of the tribal mentality of Homo sapiens, there is only one solution. First, we need to educate both ourselves and others regarding the true nature of conflicts (almost always fought in the self-interest of the rich and powerful on both sides).  Thereafter, we need to educate as many as possible to see the same humanity in others as they see in themselves, regardless of differences in skin colour, ethnic or national identity, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), gender, gender orientation, etc. Should we fail to do this, we would be well to recall the words Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in his Christmas Sermon of Sunday, December 24, 1967:

[We] must either learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we are all going to perish together as fools.

Related reading

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed, by Charles Freeman

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The roots of political Buddhism in Burma, by Hein Htet Kyaw

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem? by Khadija Khan

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod

The post Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Like the typical visitor to Japan, I initially regarded Shinto as the quaint if not simplistic faith of the Japanese people. However, when placed in its historical context, I realised that Shinto was one of the last remaining major expressions of a much older faith, namely animism (typically described in Western countries as ‘paganism’).¹ Further study led me to the realisation that animism, with its panoply of mostly nature-affiliated deities like a sun or a rain god(dess), was in fact the oldest form of religion about which, today, we have any trace. That is to say, animism is now widely acknowledged among scholars as the oldest form of religion, practised universally by our ancestors for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years.

Inasmuch as survival plus reproduction is generally recognised as the fundamental purpose of all life forms, the creation of sun god(s), rain god(s), fire god(s), etc. is unsurprising. For just as the creation of stone tools enhanced the evolutionary fitness of hunter-gatherers, the presence of nature-affiliated deities offered the possibility of controlling (and benefitting from) natural phenomena that were beyond any other method of control. In short, what we today identify as religion resulted from the fundamental human need to survive, though it should be noted that religion at this stage was centred on the needs of the entire tribe—to ensure plentiful water and animals to hunt and so on—rather than the spiritual needs of the individual tribal member. Today, we now have examples of tribal religious practices involving nature-affiliated deities dating back as far as 70,000 years ago.   

Yet, if tribal-oriented, animistic religions can be traced back tens of thousands of years, if not longer, how does one account for the personal faiths we have today? For this, we are indebted to the insight of a German-Swiss philosopher by the name of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). Jaspers noticed the broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred throughout the entire world from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE, now known as the Axial Age. He noted that the present-day spiritual foundations of humanity were laid nearly simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece. Among the key thinkers of this period, he identified Confucius and Lao-Tse in China, the historical Buddha and Mahavira in India, Deutero-Isaiah in ancient Israel², and Socrates and Plato in Greece.

Though their teachings varied, all these thinkers shared three basic elements in common. First, ‘truth’ was universally valid, and its existence was no longer confined to one’s tribe. Second, morality/ethical conduct, too, was universal. While it had long been wrong, or taboo, to steal from or injure a fellow tribal member, the rule for members of other tribes was ‘anything goes’, especially when the latter posed a threat or possessed something coveted by one’s own tribe.  At least in principle, those outside one’s tribe were now recognised as fellow human beings. Finally, the myths that had explained natural events like the eclipse of the sun, or the creation of the world, were no longer accepted uncritically. Slowly, haltingly, the search for rational answers to natural phenomena and life’s questions took root, eventually leading to the birth of science.

One good example of this change in mentality is provided by the historical Buddha in regard to the doctrine of karma. In Sanskrit, the word ‘karma’ originally meant no more or less than an ‘action’ of some kind. Later, in the Vedas, which initially presented an Indian form of animism, ‘karma’ came to mean action associated with properly conducted ritual sacrifices to the gods. It was only later still, with the advent of the Buddha, that karma acquired an ethical connotation. The Buddha ethicised the meaning of karma by identifying it with intentional actions on the part of the actor. Thus, when actions were undertaken with wholesome intent, this was good and proper, reaping positive rewards. However, when actions were conducted with harmful intent, this was wrong, and those who did so would suffer the negative consequences of their actions.

Not only did the Axial period mark the beginning of religion for individuals, but it also prepared the way for the emergence of all the major, universal religions we have today, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. That is to say, while there are major doctrinal differences between these faiths, they all share the same three basic characteristics born during the Axial Age. Thus, if there is hope for mutual religious understanding, if not religious tolerance, it is to be found in the fundamental tenets underlying them all.

However, given the copious amounts of blood that have been shed in conflicts between post-Axial faiths, it is readily understandable that readers may think I have a Pollyannaish view of religion. However, such is not the case, for I have long realised that the Axial Age did not bring an end to a tribal religious mentality. Instead, the Axial Age functioned to add something like an additional universal layer on top of limited tribal religion, the latter concerned first and foremost with the wellbeing of one’s ‘in-group’, whether defined by a common religious faith, ethnic and racial grouping, or simply membership in the new tribal grouping we call ‘nations’.

The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza are classic examples of this religious ‘layer cake’. Prior to the war, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), while it enjoyed a degree of autonomy, was part of the Russian Orthodox Church. After the invasion in February 2022, the UOC declared its independence from Russia. (The Orthodox Church of Ukraine—a separate church—had already gained independence in 2018.) Since then, the independent UOC has attempted to cut all ties with Moscow, dismissing pro-Russian bishops and having its head, Metropolitan Onufriy, publicly condemn Russia. For its part, in April 2024, the Russian Orthodox Church proclaimed that Russia was engaged in a ‘holy war’ with Ukraine. Although they shared the same God, the same faith, the split between them clearly came about due to their allegiance to the contending warring tribal entities we today call ‘nations’.

As for the current war in Gaza, it is, if anything, an even clearer example of the conflict between universal and tribal religion. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not hesitate to invoke the Biblical image of the Jewish tribal battle against the Amalekites.³ Last year, he said that Israelis ‘are committed to completely eliminating this evil [Hamas] from the world… You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.’

Netanyahu’s reference was to the first Book of Samuel in which God commands King Saul to kill all the Amalekites. God, says the prophet Samuel, has told the Israelites to ‘go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ (1 Samuel 15:3).

Likewise, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that ‘We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.’ While Gallant may have initially been referring to Hamas fighters, he went on to call for the collective punishment of all Palestinians in Gaza, stating, ‘We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.’ The tribal nature of Netanyahu and Gallant’s comments, and their complete dismissal of the shared humanity of Israelis and Palestinians, could not be clearer.

That said, it is important to acknowledge that there are Jews, including in Israel, who do recognise their shared humanity with Palestinians. Organisations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow share post-Axial universal values of caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing justice, and treating others with compassion based on their shared humanity.  

If this analysis is correct, readers may be thinking that this tribal way of thinking is not unique to some adherents of Judaism, and they would be correct. One Christian example particularly relevant to the current situation in Israel/Palestine is the role played by ‘Manifest Destiny’ in American history. First coined in 1845, this term represented a collective mindset that viewed the expansion of the US as both necessary and ordained by God. As the US gained more territory, proponents of Manifest Destiny used it to justify the forced removal, enslavement, dehumanisation, and even elimination of Native American tribes, as well as the expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories.

Compare these actions with the words from Leviticus 19:33-34 that both Christians and Jews claim to believe in:

And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

These examples point to an unresolved split in all religions, i.e. between their tribal nature, based on tens of thousands of years of history, versus their post-Axial awakening occurring less than three thousand years ago. This awakening was of profound importance in that it led, at least in principle, to a recognition of the universal nature of their religious teachings based on their shared humanity. This in turn led, at least some of the time, to a feeling of mutual compassion in which people recognised others as extensions of themselves, extensions who had the same human needs and fears as they themselves had.

The struggle between a narrow tribal mentality versus a truly universal mentality accepting of others is one that transcends all ethnic, racial, national, and even religious boundaries. Nevertheless, in the US, for example, the slogan ‘America First’ is embraced by millions, demonstrating that for many the tribal mentality remains firmly in place.      

On the one hand, as brutal and destructive as religion-endorsed tribal warfare has been in the past, humanity as a whole was not endangered. Today, however, things are different. For the first time in the approximately 300,000-year history of Homo sapiens, we have the capacity to destroy each other not only in the tens of thousands, or even the millions, but totally, without exception. This is because of the very real possibility of ‘mutual assured destruction’ in the form of a nuclear-induced winter, not to mention the ever-increasing dangers resulting from phenomena like global warming. None of the deadly serious problems facing humankind as a whole can be solved by one or even a group of nations. They require the concerted efforts, and necessary sacrifices, of all the world’s nations and peoples.

Thus, adherents of all the world’s religions, and even those who identify with no faith, share a common challenge. Can we Homo sapiens collectively awake to, and transcend, the tribal religious mentality of our past or are we bound to continue to fool ourselves into oblivion, believing that we are pursuing universal truths even as we betray such truths in practice? In Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond, we live in a world characterised by the ongoing threat of thermonuclear warfare, global warming, and many other deadly challenges.

Can religion save the human race?

As an adherent of religion, I sincerely wish I could answer this question in the affirmative. However, in light of the above examples, and many others like them, I cannot. What I can say with confidence is that postaxial religion has the largely unrealised potential to prevent humanity from destroying itself. Yet, all too regrettably, this potential is far, far from being realised even though pockets of universal good will do exist.  A positive outcome for humanity, let alone all life forms, requires that we undertake concrete actions based on the realisation that the continued existence of our species is, in fact, dependent on the success of a truly universal struggle, by the religious and nonreligious alike, for human equality, dignity, and justice.

Will we be successful? Among many others, the answer lies with each reader of this article.

1. As a foundational aspect of various ancient and indigenous religions, animism is based on the belief that all things, animate and inanimate, possess a spiritual or animating force. ‘Paganism’ describes the same phenomena but the word as used to describe this belief system has pejorative overtones and is therefore no longer widely used. ︎
2. Deutero-Isaiah is the name given to the anonymous author of chapters 40–55 of the Book of Isaiah. He (it was most likely a ‘he’) is believed to have lived with the Jewish exiles during their Babylonian captivity (c. 597 BCE – c. 538). Because this prophet’s real name is unknown and his work has been preserved in the collection of writings that include the prophecies of the earlier, or first, Isaiah, he is usually designated as Deutero-Isaiah—the second Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah was a pure monotheist who rejected the idea of Yahweh as the exclusive god of the Jews. Instead, he proclaimed that Yahweh was the universal, true God of the entire universe. ︎
3. The Amalekites were a people of the Negev and adjoining desert who were regarded as a hereditary enemy of Israel from wilderness times to the early monarchy. Amalek, a son of Esau’s son Eliphaz, was presumably the eponymous ancestor of the Amalekites. ︎

Read Part Two here.

Related reading

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse, by Emma Park

The Highbrow Caveman: Why ‘high’ culture is atavistic, by Charles Foster

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Anaxagoras, by Emma Park

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: humanism with Sarah Bakewell, by Emma Park

Reading list against nuclear war, by Emma Park

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

Morality without religion: the story of humanism, by Madeleine Goodall

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

The post Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One appeared first on The Freethinker.

All this, to my mind, underscores the need for a much more robust secularism in the UK. Perhaps we ought to start with the Church of England? The CoE, after all, was the original—and, thus far, the single most successful—sectarian religious group dedicated to imposing on the rest of us. Without such privilege enshrined in our law and state, other groups will have a much weaker foundation for their own claims to special treatment. ~ Daniel James Sharp, Editor

In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Keir Starmer promised that his government will ‘unite our country’.

This must be a priority for our new PM. The 2024 election campaigning and its result keenly illustrated why.

Rishi Sunak’s call for a general election predictably sparked a flurry of wishlists for the next government from myriad groups. But this election’s lobbying frenzy was overcast by a worrying shadow of sectarianism.

A coalition of Hindu organisations released a ‘Hindu Manifesto’ which said linking Hinduism to issues of caste and misogyny in India could be considered ‘Hinduphobia’, and that Hinduphobia should be criminalised.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews published a ‘Jewish Manifesto’ calling for future MPs to allow religious freedom to trump other rights, by protecting the controversial practises of ritual circumcision on baby boys and ritual non-stun slaughter of animals.

And the ‘Sikh Manifesto’ 2020-2025 from the Sikh Network called for a ‘code of practice’ on the right of Sikhs to wear religious items such as swords and recognition of ‘anti-Sikh hate’ in a ‘similar fashion to Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’.

All three manifestos called for more support for state-funded, segregated faith schools for their respective communities, as did the Catholic Union. Interestingly, a newer Sikh Manifesto from the Sikh Network omitted this call—a step in the right direction.

All three manifestos also made some barbed references to sections of other religious communities. The Hindu Manifesto accused Islamist and Sikh extremists of ‘acts of violence’ against UK Hindus and suggested that the government is giving more support to Muslim and Jewish causes than Hindu ones. Conversely, the latest Sikh Manifesto says the government ‘needs to confront Hindu nationalist groups’ in the UK, while lamenting that Sikhs are under-represented in the Lords compared with Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. And the Jewish Manifesto expressed that ‘Islamist extremists’ are one of the ‘major threats to the immediate physical security of British Jews’.

These concerns are all valid. But their inclusion in each religious group’s ‘manifesto’ suggests that cracks between British religious communities are widening.

Meanwhile, a group of Muslim organisations launched ‘The Muslim Vote’, whose ‘high level pledges’ include adopting the contentious All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ ‘Islamophobia’ definition and ensuring school rules have exemptions to accommodate pupils wearing ‘religious symbols’ and attending Friday prayers.

A similar ‘Muslim Vote’ campaign has been launched in Australia, ahead of the next federal election. The country’s prime minister Anthony Albanese has spoken out against it, saying: ‘I don’t think, and don’t want, Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties because what that will do is undermine social cohesion.’

He’s right. But in the UK, too many candidates have instead rushed to embrace faith-based politics. Some have publicly endorsed the various faith manifestos and posted pictures of themselves clutching them on social media.

And sectarian politics had significant success in this election. Despite its overall victory, Labour lost four seats to independent candidates backed by The Muslim Vote in Leicester, Blackburn, Birmingham Perry Barr, and Dewsbury and Batley. Other Labour MPs only just held on to their seats, including the new health secretary Wes Streeting, who retained his seat with just 528 more votes than the candidate backed by The Muslim Vote, Leanne Mohamad.

Sectarianism, particularly in connection to the Israel-Gaza conflict, also underpinned appalling campaigns of abuse and threats against candidates. Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and Rushanara Ali were smeared as genocide supporters, Naz Shah was followed around and heckled by a man who called her a ‘dirty, dirty Zionist’, and Jess Phillips was heckled during her victory speech with cries of ‘free Palestine’. Phillips called it the ‘worst election’ she’d ever stood in, and that one Labour activist had her tyres slashed.

Starmer’s Labour government has inherited a country where most people have no religion, Christians are a minority for the first time in history, and other religions are growing in number and variety. But most of us don’t let religion divide us. During his campaign, Sunak called the UK ‘the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy’. It is true that, in general, we rub along pretty well with each other, but the lack of separation between religion and state creates unequal citizenship and so undermines this claim.

The election has revealed powerful forces which threaten to split our communities apart and pit them against each other. And many of our representatives seem all too happy to help them, for the sake of votes.

This approach will not heal divisions. It will instead entrench the notion that religious communities should compete with each other, rather than work for the mutual benefit of all UK citizens of all religions and beliefs.

How will Starmer face this challenge? So far, not all signs have been encouraging. Despite his personal atheistic beliefs, Starmer is in danger of falling into the same trap by appealing to faith-based interests. He told Premier Christianity magazine that his government will work ‘in partnership with churches and faith communities’, using a ‘network of parliamentary faith champions’.

Starmer needs to ensure that this ‘partnership’ doesn’t lead to a balkanization of public services or become a vehicle for proselytising and religious privilege.

Before the election, Starmer said his government would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the Conservatives. An early test for Labour will be whether they resist Catholic bishops’ demands to continue with the Tories’ dreadful plan to abolish the 50% cap on faith-based admissions at free schools, paving the way for a new wave of religiously, ethnically, and socio-economically segregated faith schools.

If Starmer wants to make sure his vision for a changed United Kingdom doesn’t turn it into a divided one, he and his party must consider carefully their approach to religion. Rather than giving more and more privileges to religious elites at the expense of equality, cohesion, and fairness, the government should work to ensure our society is a level playing field based on shared values, where individuals of all religions and beliefs have the opportunity to flourish.

Let’s hope the change Labour promised is in the right direction.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about, by Alejandro Sanchez

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

Cannibal Speaks Out, by Modus Tollens

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

Secularisation and Protestantism in the 2021 Northern Ireland Census, by Charlie Lynch

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

The post Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together appeared first on The Freethinker.

Of all the items in my library, one of those I prize most is a bound volume of the first twenty issues of Richard Carlile’s The Republican, a radical journal which appeared weekly from 27 August 1819. It thrills me that I can peruse the original leaves of a journal edited and largely written by one of the bravest and most steadfast freethought heroes in British history. At a time of ferocious oppression in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, Richard Carlile dared to challenge the authorities and their arbitrary power in the most outspoken terms—all while he was being tried for blasphemous libel for publishing Thomas Paine’s works, including Rights of Man and The Age of Reason (the subjects of the first two articles in this series).

Richard Carlile was born the son of a shoemaker on 8 December 1790 in Ashburton, Devon. From the age of twelve, he served an apprenticeship as a tinsmith. By 1813, Carlile was in Gosport and probably worked in the nearby Portsmouth Dockyard. On 8 December of that year, he married Jane Cousins. At this time, he was attending David Bogue’s academy and was in training to be a missionary (Bogue was a Congregationalist and from his academy sprang the London Missionary Society). Of course, Carlile was to change his mind about the virtues of Christianity, but his theological training was to stand him in good stead.

Soon after their marriage, the Carliles moved to London and, after struggling to make a living as a tinsmith, Carlile began to sell pamphlets on the streets, including those of Thomas Paine. By 1817 he was reprinting cheap editions of Paine’s works, including The Age of Reason, which had not been sold legally in Britain since 1797.

Peterloo

On 16 August 1819, the then-biggest-ever meeting of working-class people was held in Manchester. Carlile travelled with the main speaker, Henry Hunt, to St Peter’s Field and was on the platform when the yeomanry charged, killing eighteen and wounding many others. Carlile avoided arrest and returned to London to publish one of the first accounts of what he termed the ‘Manchester Massacre’ in the journal he edited, Sherwin’s Political Register. The following week the journal’s title was changed to The Republican, thus upping the stakes. Carlile did not mince his words: in the first issue of the retitled journal, in an article entitled ‘The Crisis – No. 1’ (clearly, he was mimicking his hero Thomas Paine), he wrote:

‘The massacre of the unoffending inhabitants of Manchester, on the 16^th August, by the Yeomanry Cavalry, and Police, at the instigation of the Magistrates, should be the daily theme of the press, until the MURDERERS are brought to justice by the Law Officers of the Crown, under the instruction of the executive, or in default thereof, until the People have obtained their proper rank and station in the legislature…’

To Dorchester Gaol

This was all too much for the authorities, and Carlile was soon on trial for blasphemous libel, as well as for publishing two classic deist texts: Paine’s The Age of Reason and Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature (1801). He referred to this as a ‘mock trial’ because he refused to accept that the law could suppress free discussion and because the judge refused to allow him to call the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Rabbi as witnesses. He did, however, grasp the opportunity of reading the whole of The Age of Reason to the court so that it was published as part of the record.   

Carlile was convicted in October 1819, sentenced to a total of three years in prison, and fined £1,500 but, as he refused to pay the fine, he was not released until November 1825.  He was sent to Dorchester Gaol, well away from his radical colleagues and sympathisers in London, and placed in solitary confinement for fear he would contaminate other inmates. He was supposed to be taken from his cell for half an hour each day for exercise, but he objected because this would have meant his being paraded before the other inmates. As a result, he didn’t leave his cell for three years.

On the other hand, his cell was light and airy and he had his own sofa, sink, water closet, and bath. There was also a writing desk from which he continued to contribute to and edit The Republican, now published by his wife Jane. This writing desk is currently in the Conway Hall Library. In those days, prisoners could pay for better food and accommodation and Carlile had some well-heeled supporters, including Julian Hibbert, a wealthy Caribbean sugar plantation owner. One thing that the authorities seem to have missed was that the Dorchester to London stagecoach passed both Dorchester Gaol and the Carliles’ premises at 55 Fleet Street, thus providing a convenient service which Carlile used to deliver copy to London. The Republican sold well due to the notoriety of its editor and he produced twelve volumes while in prison. It was during this period that he pronounced himself an atheist (rather than a deist), the first person in England to do so during his own lifetime.

In 1820 it was Jane’s turn to be tried. She stood in the dock with her baby, Thomas Paine Carlile, in her arms. She was sentenced to two years and shared her husband’s cell. When in prison, Jane gave birth to a daughter whom she named Hypatia, after the pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces and burnt by a Christian mob in the fifth century CE. Jane’s place in Fleet Street was taken by Richard’s sister, Mary, who in turn received a sentence of six months and joined Richard and Jane in the same cell in Dorchester. Meanwhile, more than 150 men and women, Carlile’s ‘shopmen’, were sent to Newgate Prison for selling The Republican.

Despite all this, Carlile’s freethought books continued to sell. To make the authorities’ task more difficult, they were sold from behind a screen. On the customer’s side was a clock face bearing the names of the items on offer with a hand that could be pointed at the relevant title, whereupon a hidden shop assistant pushed the book through a hole in the screen, thus avoiding identification. Carlile called it ‘selling books by clockwork’.

By 1825 it had dawned on the authorities that their actions were merely promoting the Carliles’ publications. Carlile was suddenly and unconditionally released. He returned to London, took out a lease on larger premises at 62 Fleet Street, and expanded his business.  These premises are still standing today—although fast food, rather than books, is now sold from them.

Every Woman’s Book

In 1826 Carlile wrote and published Every Woman’s Book, the first book to advocate birth control, provide contraceptive advice, and advocate free love in Britain (it had been preceded by an article in The Republican entitled ‘What is Love?’). For Carlile, contraception served two purposes: it helped prevent conception and facilitated…pleasure!

‘See, what a mass of evil arises from bastard children, from child-murder, from deserted children, from diseased children, and even where the parents are most industrious and most virtuous, from a half-starved, naked, and badly housed family, from families crowded into one room, for whose health a house and garden is essential. All these matters are a tax upon love, a perpetual tax upon human pleasure, upon health, a tax that turns beauty into shrivelled ugliness, defaces the noble attitude of mankind, and makes its condition worse than that of the cattle of the field.’

Carlile was appalled by the practices of abortion and infanticide, both common at the time. He suggested that no married couple need have more children than desired and maintained that no unhealthy woman need endanger her life through childbirth. He believed that there need be no illegitimate children and that sexual intercourse could be independent of the dread of conception.

Carlile’s feminist views were rooted in his experience at Peterloo, where many peaceful women were present, and in witnessing the sacrifices made by his female shop workers, particularly Jane and Mary. Now he went a step further, arguing that Christian sexual morality was a constraint on female emancipation and reduced women to subservience. He accused Christian marriage of causing men to treat their wives ‘with as much vulgarity as he treats any other chamber utensil’ and for placing women under a form of ‘legalised slavery’.

To hammer his point home, Carlile included a frontispiece illustration to his book showing Adam and Eve without the usual fig leaves. He was making the point that, in his opinion, aspects of the Bible were obscene—far more obscene than his endeavours to improve people’s lives.

For Carlile, lovemaking was physically and mentally healthy, and he challenged still more taboos by claiming that women found sex as pleasurable and satisfying as men. His favoured contraceptive method was the sponge, although he also mentions ‘the glove’ (or condom) and withdrawal.

Carlile must have been disappointed by the reaction to his book. Many of his female followers turned against him and William Cobbett branded him ‘the grand pornographer and pimp’who planned to lure into prostitution the maidenhood of England. Nevertheless, the book sold steadily.

Lecture tours

When Carlile was released from gaol he went on four lecture tours, two in 1827 (totalling eight months), one in 1828 (six months), and another in 1829 (also six months). Although these had mixed success, they did help to establish a national network of reformers. He was always particularly well-received in Portsmouth and Manchester, although he had substantial support in many other industrial towns. He was not a particularly forceful speaker, and his most successful tour was the 1829 one, when he teamed up with Robert Taylor, the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’, and launched an ‘infidel…missionary tour’.¹ Taylor was a Cambridge-educated former Anglican Minister who had served a prison sentence for blasphemy. His oratorical skill greatly exceeded Carlile’s.

Eliza Sharples

Sadly, Richard and Jane were now falling out of love, and Richard took up with Eliza Sharples in 1832. Sharples became, in his words, his ‘moral wife’. She was a formidable character and campaigner in her own right, an effective platform speaker who edited her own feminist journal, The Isis. Years later, after Carlile’s death, a young Charles Bradlaugh was to briefly find a home with Sharples when his relationship with his father broke down.

The Rotunda

In 1830, Carlile opened the Blackfriars Rotunda on the banks of the Thames, near Blackfriars Bridge. This was a substantial building with two lecture theatres, one of which could accommodate up to 1,500. The Rotunda became infamous as the centre of reformers’ activities at a time of mounting discontent.

In 1831, Carlile was incarcerated again, this time in London, for defending the ‘Swing Riots’, uprisings by agricultural workers demanding better working conditions. Now it was Sharples who visited him in prison. During one of her visits, they conceived a child, the first of four.  While he was imprisoned, Sharples took over management of the Rotunda. 

Final years

After this second imprisonment, Carlile’s career declined. Financially bereft thanks to government fines, he had also lost a lot of support due to his abandonment of Jane, though he had granted her an annuity of £50 per year. He also made himself unpopular with many former supporters by adopting the title Reverend. His atheism was unwavering, but he thought Christianity provided a sound moral code.

Carlile’s end was probably hastened by his belief (shared by others) that swallowing a small amount of mercury each day improved health. He died on 10 February 1843 and his body was taken to St Thomas’s Hospital where, in accordance with his wishes, his brain was dissected for research. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

The Republican provided a foundation on which Richard Carlile built his reputation and following. His punchy, colourful, sometimes outrageous writing reflects his audacious and extraordinarily courageous war against arbitrary authority in the cause of liberal, democratic, and Enlightenment ideals. Can you blame me for gently handling my bound volume with awe—and a misty look in my eye?

Main sources

Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain.  The Life of Richard Carlile.  Greenwood Press, 1983.

Michael L. Bush, The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile.  A Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Twopenny Press, 2016.

Michael L. Bush, What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex. Verso, 1998.

1. Editor: I can’t resist adding a little more about Taylor’s nickname. One of Carlile and Taylor’s stops on the infidel tour was Cambridge, where a young Charles Darwin witnessed the controversy stirred up by the two infidels. Perhaps this was what made him fearful, years later, of stirring up controversy by publishing his theory of evolution by natural selection. He certainly remembered Taylor’s nickname, writing in 1856 ‘What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of Nature!’. In 2003, a latter-day missionary of Moloch, Richard Dawkins, was inspired by Darwin to entitle an essay collection A Devil’s Chaplain (albeit erroneously crediting Darwin with coining the term—which, in fact, goes as far back as Chaucer). ~ Daniel James Sharp ︎

Related reading

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

From the archive: ‘A House Divided’, by Nigel Sinnott

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

Freethought and birth control: the untold story of a Victorian book depot, by Bob Forder

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer, by Bob Forder

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

What should schools teach young people about sex? by Peter Tatchell

The post Books from Bob’s Library #3: Richard Carlile’s ‘The Republican’ and ‘Every Woman’s Book’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Books sometimes have a way of turning up at opportune times. In mid-2022 a collection of essays on the themes of blasphemy and violence in Europe, Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today, went off to the printers. According to the publisher, De Gruyter, the book ‘offers a much-needed analysis of a subject that historians have largely ignored, yet that has considerable relevance for today’s world: the powerful connection that exists between offences against the sacred and different forms of violence.’

‘Considerable relevance’ would shortly prove a massive understatement. On 12 August 2022, a month before the book’s publication, author Sir Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked as he was preparing to deliver a lecture in New York. Repeatedly stabbed, Rushie only narrowly survived, although he has lost sight in one eye. A New Jersey man of Lebanese background, Hadi Matar, is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder. All the facts will come out then, but from what we know, it is safe to say the attack was a violent response to blasphemy.

Rushdie has been living with the threat of such an attack since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the ailing Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed that his novel The Satanic Verses was ‘a text written, edited, and published against Islam’ and its author deserved death. This fatwa still stood in 2022, although amidst the tumult of COVID-19, the 2020 United States presidential election, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine it was hardly front of mind for most people. The attack on Rushdie reminded us that, whatever else is happening in the world, the threat of zealous violence against those who fail to treat the sacred with the level of reverence the zealots consider to be its due has not gone away. The fatwa still stands today.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic work, or a collection of academic works, exploring the connection between blasphemy and violence in Europe over the last two and a half centuries. Each chapter has a theme, usually a particular time and place. For example, one essay by Julio de la Cueva looks at blasphemy and violence in the Spanish Civil War. David Nash, one of the book’s editors (the other is Eveline G. Bouwers), contributes a chapter on blasphemy in English law, in which early editions of the Freethinker make an appearance. The final chapter, by Manfred Sing, covers the Rushdie affair.

A Conceptual Chameleon

‘Words are not violence’ is a long-running catchcry of the defenders of free speech. There are those, like Khomeini, who disagree, and Demystifying the Sacred can give some insight into their thinking. To them, blasphemy itself is violence, and blasphemers are themselves the instigators. The book does not just deal with violence against people, but violence against property. It starts, in fact, with the vandalism of an artwork.

It’s easy to assume that a book on blasphemy and violence will tell the story of the struggle against book-burning fanatics by the advocates of tolerance, reason, and Enlightenment. But the themes of Demystifying the Sacred are much broader. According to the book’s editors, blasphemy is a ‘conceptual chameleon’, related to but distinct from heresy, apostasy, and sacrilege. It has been criminalised in both religious and secular law, albeit often for different reasons, and at times it has even been treated as the symptom of a mental illness.

Each chapter can be read on its own, and I will not go into them all in detail. But a few themes run across them. One is the long-running connection between blasphemy and politics, where authorities have prosecuted blasphemy in the name of upholding public order and protecting the nation from its internal or external enemies.

More Politics than Religion

In his chapter on blasphemy in English law, Nash cites the 1911 blasphemy case of a man named T. W. Stewart. Stewart had taken to giving public lectures criticising the morality of the Bible, concluding in delightfully Edwardian fashion that ‘God is not fit company for a respectable man like me’. The Leeds Chief Constable concluded that these addresses were ‘most offensive and distressing to respectable persons passing by’ and had him hauled before Justice Thomas Gardner Horridge.

Justice Horridge did not criticise Stewart for the substance of what he said. Rather, maintained the Judge, ‘there was a difference between the drawing room and the street’, and while it might be acceptable to ridicule Christianity in private among friends, making the same claims before a crowd was a threat to public order. Stewart was convicted, which, as critics of the case pointed out, seemed to make a lapse of good taste a criminal offence.

Manfred Sing’s chapter on the Rushie Affair looks at the topic of blasphemy and politics from a different angle. Reading the chapter, I was surprised by the lack of clarity around many of the key facts of the episode. It was unclear what, if anything, was actually blasphemous about The Satanic Verses. It was unclear what, if any, actual legal effect Khomeini’s decree had in either Islamic or Iranian law (as Sing explains, it was not formally a fatwa, although the Western media ran with the term). And while commentators in the West saw the fatwa as a broadside against Western secular values, Khomeini’s attention might have been much closer to home. In 1989, Iran was in the midst of a political and constitutional crisis in the wake of the bloody war against Iraq, the regime’s domestic critics were becoming more vocal than the Ayatollahs were comfortable with, and its elderly and frail leader was well aware his time was coming to an end and that thoughts both inside and outside the country were turning to succession. According to Sing, it is likely that Khomeini issued the fatwa, or decree,to buttress his authority as both Iran’s temporal and spiritual head.

Of course, radical Muslims in Western countries had a simpler view. Sing quotes British Muslim intellectual Shabbir Akhtar, who argued at the time of the Rushie Affair that without ‘an internal temper of militant, but constructive wrath’ Islam would, like Christianity, fade away in an increasingly secular world. In this worldview, violence in response to blasphemy becomes almost a type of collective self-defence.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic book which will be of more interest to those researching its subject than general readers. But it brings together a huge amount of scholarship about its subject in an accessible volume, and the electronic version is available for free download, making it a great resource for writers to reference. The subject, sadly, is unlikely to become unimportant any time soon.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a collection of Freethinker articles compiled by Emma Park

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Blasphemy and violence: review of ‘Demystifying the Sacred’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

In Pakistan, the formation of a truly democratic government is increasingly hindered by the limited participation of religious minorities. Many Ahmadis, members of a religious group facing severe persecution—and I am one—abstained from voting in the 2024 general election in February for fear of attacks and the discriminatory and dangerous practice of separate voter lists. This exclusion from the democratic process reflects the broader challenges faced by religious minorities in the country.

Amir Mehmood, a community spokesperson, told me that religiously motivated extremists consider it their duty to kill Ahmadi individuals; it is therefore practically impossible for Ahmadis to vote so long as there is a voters list that openly identifies them as Ahmadi.

Pakistan is home to a population where less than 4% of the citizens are religious minorities, including Ahmadis, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, and others. These groups were registered on separate voter lists from the 1985 general election onwards, but in 2002, President Pervez Musharraf abandoned this practice—except for the Ahmadis.

According to Pakistan’s most recent census, in 2017, 3.53% of the population consists of religious minority groups. The total population of these minority groups is 7,331,246. Interestingly, the Ahmadi population has seen a decline, decreasing from 291,000 in the 1998 census (the last one before 2017) to 207,688 in 2017. However, since many Ahmadis boycotted the censuses, the true figure is thought to be considerably higher—between two and five million.

Nasir Qureshi, an Ahmadi, is a resident of Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan. He has been living and running a business there since 1979. However, he has never voted due to the discriminatory voter list practice. When I spoke to Qureshi, he said that the situation for Ahmadis in Pakistan is the worst it has ever been. Each day, the number of attacks and incidents of hatred against the community is increasing. ‘Like other parts of Pakistan, Karachi is also insecure for the community,’ he told me.

Qureshi stated that discrimination has become widespread and that it is impossible for Ahmadis to vote for fear of being targeted with violence. ‘Until the separate voter list is abolished, I cannot vote and will not vote in the future because it makes us easily identifiable and vulnerable to attacks,’ he lamented.

Still, he was defiant. Although the ‘Ahmadiyya community is being compelled to boycott the general elections and is denied a role in the formation of a democratic government… [It] is our fundamental right to participate in polls because Pakistan is our home country.’

The Ahmadis believe that they are Muslims, but the Constitution and law of Pakistan criminalise this belief. The Constitution of Pakistan was promulgated in 1973 and passed unanimously by the parliament. General Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who ruled Pakistan under martial law from 1977-88, passed Ordinance XX of 1984, introducing sections 298-B and 298-C to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), which made it a criminal offence for Ahmadis to, among other things, refer to themselves as Muslims, call their places of worship mosques, and give the call to prayer (the Azan).

The National Commission for Human Rights, a statutory body established in 2012, recently released a situation report titled Monitoring the Plight of the Ahmadiyya Community which provides detailed statistics of the persecution against the Ahmadiyya community from 1984 to 2023. According to the report, Ahmadis in Pakistan have faced ‘an astonishing number of legal charges – 765 cases for displaying the Kalima [Islamic prayers containing the fundamentals of the religion], 47 cases for calling the Azan, 861 cases for preaching, and various others.’

Shedding further light on the persecution faced by Pakistani Ahmadis, the Human Rights Section of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Foreign Mission released a report in February 2024. According to that report, 277 Ahmadis were murdered between 1984 and 2023 because of their faith, and 478 attempted murders took place for the same reason. Additionally, 4,280 Ahmadis were arrested and 202 Ahmadi mosques were desecrated. In 2023, one Ahmadi person was murdered, 133 were arrested, and 39 Ahmadi mosques and 100 Ahmadi graves were desecrated. The report states that in the first couple of months of this year, several mosques were desecrated or attacked, 88 graves were desecrated, one Ahmadi was arrested under the anti-Ahmadi law PPC-298-C, one Ahmadi survived a murder attempt, and six Ahmadi teachers were transferred due to their faith. These statistics show just some of the ways—there are, sadly, many more—in which the Ahmadi community is persecuted and disenfranchised in Pakistan.

Amir Mehmood had this to say about the plight of the Ahmadis:

‘Sadly, we have been marginalized and excluded from the fabric of the state. As Ahmadis, we are also concerned about the future of our country, Pakistan. The actions of the state have cornered the Ahmadis, which is actually against the statement made by Quaid-e-Azam [‘Great Leader’, Muhammad Ali Jinnah], the founder of Pakistan, shortly after the creation of Pakistan [in 1947]. Quaid-e-Azam declared that every person, regardless of their religion or sect, would be free to practice their beliefs and worship in temples, mosques, gurdwaras, and so on.

This is a miserable situation for our community. Everyone, including rights activists, fails to understand why this is happening or why there is a desire to commit genocide against us, even though the loyalty of the community lies with Pakistan. Unfortunately, state institutions remain silent on this critical issue, which has not only damaged the image of Islam but also our country. However, I firmly believe that Pakistan is our country, and we are determined to serve it at any cost.’

Qureshi mentioned that discrimination is prevalent everywhere, including in universities, schools, and other institutions. Youths are also deprived of job opportunities, and their life chances are being adversely affected in Pakistan. Despite lodging several complaints with the relevant authorities regarding these issues, our pleas have been futile.

Excluding the Ahmadis, a majority of voters from other religious minorities in Pakistan also refrained from voting for their favoured candidates due to fear instigated by candidates representing the majority religion, Islam. Approximately 70% of Hindu, Sikh, and Christian voters decided to abstain from participating in the 2024 general election according to Behwish Kumar, a rights activist for religious minorities. He told me that minorities refrain from using their vote out of fear. He added that there is no mechanism to protect minorities from the consequences which would be meted out by opposing candidates.

Mehmood stated that activists have repeatedly approached the relevant authorities to abandon the separate voter list for Ahmadis, but, unfortunately, their requests have been disregarded every time. ‘We do not hold positions in parliament or other high-ranking posts, so we can’t decide to remove this. We are left with no choice,’ he said.

To participate in Pakistani democracy, Ahmadis would have to risk their lives. As the well-known human rights lawyer Yasir Latif Hamdani put it to me: ‘How can they participate openly in the electoral process and cast their votes with a separate electoral list?’ He continued:

‘As a Pakistani citizen, I firmly assert [my] right to participate in the electoral process on equal footing with every fellow citizen of Pakistan whatever their religion. This demand is firmly grounded in the Constitution, which explicitly grants this right to every individual in Pakistan. Hence, it is truly bewildering why Ahmadis are unjustly deprived of this fundamental right, despite the Constitution’s clear provisions. Such discrimination goes against the universal principles of human rights that guarantee equal rights and opportunities for all individuals.’

He added that the current situation militates against Jinnah’s vision of an inclusive Pakistan, where everyone would be an equal citizen regardless of their religion and creed.

Mehmood emphasised that Ahmadis are not seeking to overthrow the Constitution, but are simply demanding their rights under it:

‘As Ahmadis, we do not seek special legislation for protection, as the Constitution of Pakistan already guarantees the right to life for every citizen. However, we strongly advocate for the repeal of the specific articles introduced through Ordinance XX on April 26, 1984. These articles not only contradict the principles of human dignity and equality but also go against the very essence of the Constitution of Pakistan.

We are currently enduring a distressing existence, with no safe haven to be found. Our children and women face constant insecurity and are denied access to educational institutions. Shockingly, there are public declarations advocating for the legality of murdering Ahmadis, while hatred continues to propagate unchecked. It is of utmost importance that these circumstances be abandoned and addressed immediately.’

In 1947, Pakistan’s founder said:

‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State…’

As an Ahmadi myself, I look forward to the day when Jinnah’s secular vision is realised.

Related reading

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

Artificial intelligence and algorithmic bias on Islam, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan appeared first on The Freethinker.

The UK that goes to the polls on 4 July will be the most religiously diverse in election history. Less than half the population of England and Wales describe themselves as ‘Christian’. Most people in Scotland are now non-religious. And there are now more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland, but even here we are seeing more and more people turning away from religion.

This sustained shift in demographics demands a radical response from the state. Entrenched Christian privilege and a laissez-faire approach to social cohesion are ill-suited to a religiously diverse, pluralistic population. That’s why the National Secular Society is calling on the next Government to seriously rethink the role of religion in public and political life.

Here’s what we want to see from the incoming Government.

Secular, inclusive education

Schools play a key role in shaping future generations and fostering a culture of tolerance and understanding. But faith schools build division into the system.

A third of all schools are faith schools. This isn’t sustainable. Already, the prevalence of religious schools means many nonreligious families have no choice other than a faith-based education for their children. This needs to be addressed.

Dividing children by religion leads to ethnic segregation, too. The next Government should commit to phasing out faith-based education to better encourage integration and ensure that every child can receive a secular education.

The calling of the election means that the outgoing Government’s plans to abolish the 50% admissions cap in faith-based academies hit the buffers. The Conservative manifesto revives plans to lift the cap and allow faith schools to apply 100% religious selection, paving the way for yet more discriminatory faith schools.

Worryingly, Labour didn’t oppose plans to scrap the cap and will come under pressure from regressive religious groups to reinstate this policy. They should resist.

Religious selection means faith schools are not only less religiously and ethnically diverse; they admit fewer children from poorer backgrounds, children in care, and children with special educational needs and disabilities. Any government interested in tackling unfairness and discrimination in education can’t afford to ignore the pernicious effects of faith-based admissions. That’s why it is alarming that Keir Starmer has said a Labour Government would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the current Government.

In all state-funded schools, even the two-thirds without a religious character, daily acts of ‘broadly Christian’ collective worship are required by law. This law, dating back to 1944, has no moral or educational basis. Teachers don’t support it and many schools flout it. Imposing worship in schools undermines children’s freedom of religion or belief and opens the door to evangelism in schools. We will encourage the next Government to support its repeal as soon as possible.

England’s outdated model of religious education dates back to a similar era. Labour’s plans to modernise the school curriculum must not shy away from reforms to liberate this subject area from the inappropriate control of religious interest groups. All children and young people should have an equal entitlement to an objective and critical education about worldviews, citizenship, and ethics.

We will also push for new legislation to boost Ofsted’s powers to crack down on unregistered religious schools operating illegally. The creation of a register of children not in school is a key part of this. During their time in office, the Conservatives made plenty of encouraging noises but ultimately failed to tackle the problem. The required legislation for a register was in the Schools Bill which was ditched by the Sunak Government in 2022. The Tory manifesto promises to revive the register plans.

Labour’s manifesto makes no such commitment, but the Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, has previously signalled her support for a home-school register to deliver better oversight of home education, which in too many cases leads to children being indoctrinated with fundamentalist dogma in unsafe and illegal schools. She also says she wants ‘every child to receive a world-class education’. To achieve this, the next Government will need to stand up to religious lobbyists who impede attempts to protect the educational rights of children in independent and unregistered religious schools by spuriously claiming that such attempts violate religious freedom.

Free speech

For all its faults, the Conservative Government has shown willingness to protect the right to free expression. It was slow to do so when Islamic fundamentalists descended on a school in Batley in 2021. But after a parent was left pleading for mercy after her son was involved in the scuffing of a Quran in Kettlethorpe last year, the Home Secretary robustly asserted: ‘We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country.’

A recent recommendation for the creation of guidance to better protect schools and teachers facing blasphemy accusations should be adopted and implemented—as should the recommendation from Sara Khan, the Government’s Independent Advisor on Social Cohesion and Resilience, to create a special unit tasked with responding to ‘flashpoint incidents’ such as blasphemy protests.

The next Government needs to find ways to address anti-Muslim prejudice in ways that don’t impede the freedom to scrutinise and criticise Islamic beliefs, ideas, and practices. It needs to be clear that there is no right not to be offended—and no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion.

In opposition, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, and the Greens have all shown a worrying disregard for free speech by uncritically adopting a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ proposed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)  for British Muslims. The concept of Islamophobia unhelpfully conflates hatred and discrimination against Muslims with criticism of Islam. This blurring is intentional. The silencing of scrutiny, criticism, mockery, and anything deemed ‘offensive’ has been a long-term aim of Islamist groups, some of which have been too close to Labour for comfort. Labour has promised to reverse the Conservatives’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate incidents that fall short of criminality. There are also fears that a Labour Government will seek to incorporate the APPG definition into law.

Hindu groups have jumped on the bandwagon, calling on the next Government to criminalise ‘Hinduphobia’. Any attempt to do so will be met with fierce opposition from secularists and free speech campaigners. Resisting the politics of competitive grievances and sectarianism is something the next Government needs to do if Britain is to avoid becoming increasingly fraught with ethnic and religious tensions.

Towards a secular democracy

It makes no sense for one of the most diverse and secularised nations in the world to retain an established religion.

One manifestation of the Church of England’s established status is the twenty-six unelected Anglican clerics sitting as of right as legislators in the House of Lords. In 2022, Keir Starmer called the Lords ‘undemocratic’ and ‘indefensible’. He launched plans drawn up by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to replace the upper chamber with an elected Assembly of the Nations and Regions. The plans would bring a welcome end to reserved seats for bishops.

Despite originally suggesting the plans be implemented within the first five years of a Labour Government, the party is now promising a much more incremental approach. Replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber remains the goal, but the manifesto commits only to ‘immediate modernisation’ of the Lords by introducing an upper age limit of 80 and scrapping hereditary peers. Secularists will be arguing that any immediate modernisation must also include the removal of the archaic, unfair, and undemocratic bishops’ bench.

But we need to go further. A state religion is incompatible with a democracy in which all citizens of every religion and belief are equal. The announcement of the election unfortunately spelt the end of a bill backed by the National Secular Society to disestablish the Church of England.  But we’ll urge the next Government to engage with this long overdue democratic reform to transform the UK into a fully secular democracy, free from religious privilege.

A new administration will bring fresh hope for other necessary reforms, such as assisted dying, making wedding law fairer for all, outlawing caste discrimination, removing the advancement of religion as a charitable purpose, and effectively protecting children from abuse in religious settings.

Ultimately, Britain needs a new political framework to foster unity and keep religious fundamentalism in check by balancing religious freedom with other fundamental human rights. Secularism offers such a framework.

That’s why we’ll be urging the next Government to adopt secularist principles and policies which move us towards a freer and fairer society, where people can live by the creed they choose but where no particular religion or belief is privileged or imposed.

Related reading

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg

The case for secularism (or, the church’s new clothes), by Neil Barber

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

Bad Religious Education, by Siniša Prijić

Silence of the teachers, by Nath Jnan

The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023, interview with Paul Scriven by Emma Park

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Eschatology, from the Christian perspective, is a systematic study of the end of time or the events of the end of the current age and the inauguration of a new and quite distinct one.

At the heart of this doctrine is the assumption that there was a time when the world began and that there will also be a time when the world shall end. The exact timing of the world’s end is known only to God the Father (Matt. 24.36), but Christians will know that the end is approaching by understanding the signs of the coming apocalyptic events as prophesied by their shamans.

We are here faced with the problem of different worldviews: the cyclical and linear interpretations of history. Some religions, including Christianity, endorse the linear view of time: there was a beginning and we are moving towards the end. But even on this view, it is not clear that something must also end just because it begins. Nor is historical (material) progress necessarily measured on a straight line.

The question of when (and if) the world began remains (and perhaps will always remain) a mystery. For now, every attempt at an answer—religious or scientific—must be treated as essentially guesswork. Besides, creation days, if there were ever any, must not be confused with the world’s beginning. God may not have started structuring or furnishing the world at the same time as he created it. Just as clocks need batteries to function before they can begin telling us the time, the world may not have looked as it is now for a long time after its initial creation.

If we are uncertain when the world began and how old it is, we are equally not certain when it shall end—even if the Christian view is taken as our starting point. It is therefore madness to go around making noise and disturbing others about the end of the world. But where does the eschatological myth come from in the first place?

The lost Golden Age is a universal myth found in almost all the cultures of all the peoples of the world. This age was a perfect age. There was no evil, no pain, no suffering, no death, no war, no poverty, no starvation, no hunger, no injustice of any kind. There was a cosmic peace and the wolves lay down with the lambs. It was an age when the gods dwelled among and walked with men on this earth.

This age came to a sudden end when men decided to free themselves from the bondage of the gods and be independent. This was seen by the gods as disobedience, and they regretted the creation of man and withdrew their blessings, cursing the world and making life difficult for man. Thus, we have the religious explanation for the existence of evil and suffering in the world.

In Christianity, this single act of alleged disobedience cost both man and God their lives. Men became mortal and prone to illness, and God had to have himself tortured and sacrificed to save man from his own folly. The redemption of man symbolises the destruction of the old world and the creation of a new one. But the new creation will not be revealed until the Parousia, or Second Coming.

This new creation is clearly meant to be a restored Golden Age. In Revelation 21.1-8, you get an exact picture of the so-called Golden Age: there will be no more suffering or death (for the believers, that is). It is obvious that the desire for the end of the world in favour of a new, perfect one is a nostalgic desire, born out of regret for losing the ideal world. It is a future-facing nostalgia, a hope that the past will be restored anew. Eschatology is culture shock: a longing for your hometown after you left it for another country.  

Humans have come of age. We abandoned the gods. But adulthood is not without a price. It means responsibility. It means facing challenges head-on. It means accepting conflict and imperfection. Ours is a competitive world, full of evil and suffering that is almost unbearable to witness. To live in this world is to suffer and die, and it is this experience that man is not ready for. Instead, too many of us want to escape it by imagining a lost Golden Age that might somehow be regained at the coming of some mythical messiah.

This is nothing but an attempt to escape (from) the challenges and responsibilities of the world. Man is by nature a lazy, pleasure-seeking being who does not want to work and suffer but desires to lose himself in food and drink and money and sex. This is more or less what all ideas of Heaven or Nirvana appeal to: our desire for luxury and ease. Heaven is a world without work, without pain, without suffering, without death; it is, as Revelation 21.1-8 demonstrates, the perfect world for lazy shits.

But there is no escape from this life. We must face our challenges and learn to take responsibility. This is the brutal and unavoidable reality. Utopias exist only in the minds of dreamers, and rely upon wish thinking and fantasy for their power. Eschatology is a form of homesickness, except that there was never any perfect home to be sick over.

Further reading

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

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