Introduction 

Brian Cox was born in Dundee in 1946 and has been a star of stage and screen for decades. His stage roles include Titus Andronicus and King Lear, and his film and TV credits include Sharpe, Manhunter (in which he played the first on-screen Hannibal Lecter), Rob Roy, Braveheart, Troy, X2: X-Men United, Churchill, and Succession. At the time this interview was conducted over Zoom (21 August 2024), Brian was in Glasgow about to start work directing on a new project. He couldn’t tell me much about this, except that it was something he had wanted to do for a very long time.  

Although we were pressed for time and the discussion could have gone on for much longer and in many directions, we covered a lot of ground, including Brian’s views on religion, acting as a form of humanism, the conflict in Gaza, sectarianism in Glasgow, Johnny Depp, Ian McKellen, Irn Bru addiction, and Scottish independence. All of this and more appears in the edited transcript of (and selected audio excerpts from) our conversation below.  

Interview 

Daniel James Sharp: Earlier this year, you caused a bit of a stir by labelling the Bible ‘one of the worst books ever’ and full of ‘propaganda and lies.’ But you also acknowledged the need people have for comfort and consolation. For you, though, theatre is the ‘one true church…the church of humanity.’ Is acting a form of humanism, then? 

Brian Cox: Yes. I don’t believe in churches, but if you need a church, theatre is the church of humanity. Acting is absolutely humanism. It’s based on who people are, what their belief systems are, how they’re plagued by their belief systems, and how they have to reconcile themselves to these belief systems—and when you think about it, in my view, that means reconciling themselves to something which is completely fictitious.  

It’s understandable that people need to believe in something because we live in an age where we’re so confused. What nobody ever talks about is where we are in our own state of evolution, because we’re clearly not fully evolved beings. If we were, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing again and again. We wouldn’t have a Putin situation. We wouldn’t have a Netanyahu situation. I feel that we have to be evolved. We are evolving, but we are not there yet. We’re a long way off, and we are in danger of destroying ourselves because of our own stupidity. At the root of a lot of our problems is tribalism. Am I Islamic? Am I Jewish? Etcetera.  

The Jews were treated appallingly by Nazi Germany, and they then founded their own state. But now they have all sorts of problems there. There’s a great division among Jewry, including some great friends of mine, about what is happening in Gaza and elsewhere right now. Because of what happened on 7 October last year, a lot of them are very afraid, and we have to understand that. But the genocide that is being committed is inexcusable on any level, and you have to put it down to the extreme right-wing Jewish government—which is not wholly representative of the Jewish people. That’s very important to note. A lot of the Jewish people do not like what’s going on in Gaza. And anti-Semitism is not the answer, of course. Anti-Semitism is what gave rise to fascism and we have to be very careful about that.  

That is just one example of the danger of being beholden to belief systems. They trap us, they don’t liberate us. They may give us comfort, they may give us what they call faith, but at the end of the day, they are not helpful. They are not ultimately helpful to the human spirit, at all.

Just on the point about Israel and Palestine, I think it is also worth keeping in mind that it’s the same with the Palestinians as it is in Israel: Hamas is not necessarily representative of the Palestinians as a whole. 

Exactly, nor are the Yasser Arafats necessarily representative. It’s awful how they are using Gaza for their own ends. When it comes to these situations, I always feel for the children. They live in these conditions created by the mistakes of adults. I just cannot stand what’s happened to the children in Gaza. How many children have been killed? A disproportionate number of children have been killed because of these adults’ mistakes.  

I don’t in any way excuse Hamas at all. I do not excuse people who hide behind law-abiding citizens, innocents, because of their own disharmony with the system. Yes, I understand that Palestine has suffered a lot of persecution—psychological persecution as much as anything else—but I don’t excuse Hamas. I certainly don’t excuse what happened on 7 October, not at all. That was horrendous.  

But what has happened in Palestine as a result is also just appalling. This is where belief systems do not support you. They support your view over that view, but they’re not about harmony.  

I compare it with Glasgow, where I am right now. If you come to Glasgow, it’s quite ecumenical with its Islamic and Catholic populations. It’s quite free. Of course, it has its streaks of racism, and that is always going to be there—that fear that man has about his fellow that he can’t quite understand. But on the whole, Glasgow is doing well. 

I feel that we’re in such a state of setback at the moment. We are failing to understand how we’re evolving. We’re going through such horrific things at the moment, and the thing that stops us from evolving is being stuck in these belief systems.  

Could you explain a little more what you mean by these external belief systems being inimical to the human spirit? What is the human spirit? 

What is the notion of a freethinker? It means a person who thinks freely, without any trammelling of any kind. Their thinking is of a sense of liberation, the liberation of the human spirit (their actions might be a different matter, of course). I’m not a classified ‘freethinker’, but that’s what I would have thought a freethinker is. I rather admire and respect that.  

I’ve been thinking about why I’m talking to a freethinking magazine. I think because there is a problem at the moment with the cancel culture that we live under. There’s not a lot of free thinking going around. … Cancel culture is offensive and damaging to the human spirit. 

I believe in the human spirit. We don’t understand our own mystery. We try to codify it. ‘Say your prayers and it’ll all get better and then you’ll have something at the end of your life.’ But that’s a mystery, and nobody knows anything about that. All we know about is what we’ve got to deal with now, with our two legs, two arms, and two hands, and a head that can, perhaps, function. I feel quite passionate about that. We should give it the respect it deserves and not fall into these systems. 

My sister was a strong Catholic. She cleaned the church. But at the end of the day, when she was dying, I said to her, ‘Where do you think you’re going to end up?’ And she said, ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’ That was her conclusion after 90-odd years of life. And that’s the truth. It doesn’t really matter when it comes to those elements which are definable, but it does matter to something else that we don’t even know about. 

I did want to ask a little about your background. You’re from a working-class Scots-Irish Catholic family. And you’re in Glasgow right now, which, historically, was torn apart by sectarianism. 

Oh yes, Glasgow has always been sectarian, because of the Orange Order. The Glorious Twelfth. ‘Our father knew the Rome of old and evil is thy name…And on the Twelfth, I love to wear the sash my father wore.’ [Lines from Protestant anti-Catholic songs, the latter celebrating the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, the victory of the Protestant King William III over the deposed Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.] All in service of William of Orange, and what was he, except a good Proddie? 

The Catholics are good survivors because they’ve been hacked about ad infinitum. But there are also the acts that have been committed under the guise of Catholicism—the [Magdalene Laundries in Ireland], for example, and all those poor, misbegotten women who worked for them—so there is a lot of questioning there and nobody is exempt.  

And my sister, in the end, said that it doesn’t really matter. What does matter? We matter. Not our religion, not our faith, not our belief systems. We matter. Let’s try and understand who we are as a herd animal and as an individual animal. But we don’t even go there. Instead, we come up with all these stories that justify certain things.

And art is a way to understand ourselves. 

Yes. Art is the way I do that. Art is a way of looking at the world, and of looking at everybody in the world. From a dramatic point of view, we are looking at how human beings behave. What screws them up? What are their ambitions? What do they want? Why do they want it? Is it necessary? No, it’s not. Well then, why do they want it? Is it some kind of neurotic force at work or is it something else? That’s what actors do when we work on a role, we’re examining what’s going on. And that’s where all the belief systems can come into it. ‘Oh, I see, he’s Jewish, he’s got that kind of belief. Oh, but he doesn’t like being Jewish. Why does he not like that?’ Do you see what I mean? You’re creating an exploration of the human psyche, which to me is the great gift of acting.  

Who are your favourite actors? 

Spencer Tracy, for me, was the greatest screen actor ever, by far. He was extraordinary. He was very tormented, very Catholic, very guilt-ridden, but a great artist. The ease and the flawlessness and the way he negotiates stuff—tremendous. And he and [Katharine] Hepburn were extraordinary together. So, I think Hepburn is another of my favourite actors. 

Another is Cary Grant, who was a construct of a personality because of his horrific background, and he played all these wonderful, mysterious kinds of characters who just said, ‘I really don’t give a fuck.’ And of course, there’s [Marlon] Brando and Jimmy Dean, even though he didn’t live all that long. 

There are a few actors who grew better over time. Paul Newman got infinitely better as an actor as he got older. As a young man, he was a bit more confused.  

It’s a great craft, acting. And it is a craft. It’s a craft of human sensibility. Where are we coming from? Why are we doing it? What is it? What does it mean? What are we trying to achieve? And the truth is, we don’t know. We don’t know, because we’ve got all this other stuff that we have to deal with, that we’ve got to get through. 

That’s why I was interested in talking to somebody from a freethinking magazine. What is free thinking, and how free can thought really be these days? Or is there some impediment that makes it non-viable to think freely?  

I think it’s difficult to think freely at the best of times, but especially now. There’s so much pressure to conform to certain standards and ideologies.  

That’s right. And that’s why you’ve got to say, ‘Fuck it! I’m going to think freely.’ When the pressure is great, you don’t give up. It reinforces who you are. It looks as if you’re in doubt, but you’re dealing with a shit storm of meteors coming at you, and it’s very important to be able to think freely. I’m grateful because I think I’ve been able to do that for most of my life, and I didn’t even know I was doing it, and I did it because I didn’t have the usual constricts of family and parents and what have you. 

‘Fuck it, think freely!’ should be our new motto. You are well known for speaking your mind about politics, religion, and even fellow actors.  

I’ve got to shut up about fellow actors. I’m a bit naughty about that. It’s a hard game, and I sort of regret saying anything. And even if I did say something, it wasn’t meant as a damning criticism. It’s a question of taste. Not everybody likes everything other people do. I sort of regret calling Johnny Depp ‘so overblown, so overrated’ in my autobiography because he is fine in many ways. There are some things he isn’t fine at but, on the whole, he’s fine. He’s certainly very popular. It’s an imperious thing of me to do, to shoot on about somebody like that, because it’s a tough job.  

The best actors are children, and the greatest actors are the ones who can still be doing it at my age. I’m not saying I’m the greatest, just to be clear, but you know what I mean. I have great respect for people of my generation who are still doing it. 

In your autobiography, you talk about your and Ian McKellen’s different philosophies or styles of acting. I have a lot of admiration for both of you as actors.  

I love Ian, I really do, and I love him even more as he’s got older. He’s just a different style from me and naturally, I’m going to prefer my style, but that’s not about saying I’m any better. I’m not. I just prefer the way I work to the way he works.  

But he is a very special man in so many ways. He’s been a great champion, especially in the homosexual rights movement, standing up to Clause 28 and everything. He’s done phenomenal things in that way, so I have total respect for him. 

He’s a very sound man, in terms of his politics. I’ll still argue about the acting a wee bit. But as a man, I love him. We’ve known each other for a long time. We were neighbours recently. When I was doing the play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he was next door doing Falstaff, where he sadly fell off the stage. I think that was a big shock for him.  

I was impressed that he was back on stage so quickly after that fall.  

Well, they gave that out, but he didn’t go back to do the job because it was too dangerous. The production should have taken into account the danger of being that far out on the stage. The upside of the accident is that it woke something in Ian. A shock like that is bound to wake something in you. He’s considerable, he’s absolutely considerable. He’s continued on his path and you can’t help but respect him.  

That’s the nice thing about getting older. You’re not beating tambourines anymore. You’re actually looking at people and saying, ‘Oh, well, I disagree. But my God! I respect that person.’  

It’s also great for viewers and audiences to have these different styles of acting. 

Of course. 

What do you make of the critique that actors should refrain from intervening in politics and the like—that they should stay in their lane? 

I think that’s a nonsense. Actors more than anything have an acute sensitivity to politics. If you’ve been in the game, you know that you can’t depend on it. It’s very fleeting.  

It took me a long time to come around to speaking up about things like Scottish independence, which I’m very interested in. I have never liked the name ‘Scottish National Party’, but I love the notion of the independent nature of Scotland.  

But I think that what we really require in these islands is federalism. We need each country to be self-standing on its own. These islands are a community. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, there’s Scotland, forget about the rest.’ 

Actors have a sense of that, of how they belong, and they also have a sense of not belonging. When you don’t belong in any one place, you get a broad view of what things are.  

Oh, you’re drinking Irn Bru!  

[Cue Irn Bru interlude. See audio excerpt.] 

I think that actors are very right to talk about stuff. We also have to talk about politics as it relates to our work. I think some of the practices that are happening to young actors now are despicable. Things like self-taping, where they’ve got to be their own technician and so on. They do these tapes and nobody even responds to them at the end of it. I find that appalling, so I will speak up about that, and I wish some of my fellow actors of my generation would also speak up about it. It’s our responsibility as the old regime of actors to say that what is happening to our young actors is not right. It’s not right that they lose the intimacy of a casting director.  

Some casting directors don’t work that way, of course. There’s a great casting director in Scotland, Orla O’Connor, who doesn’t do that. She believes in the relationship between people. But there’s a lot who do work like that. They used the excuse of Covid, and now they use the excuse of there being too many actors, and I say, that doesn’t matter. Common respect costs nothing.  

Do you think practices like self-taping will affect the quality of acting in future? 

I don’t think so. Actors are survivors, and you’ll get the talent no matter what. It’s just the battering that you get. It’s very wearing after a while, when you’re constantly not getting any response for what you’re doing. Young actors need some kind of response, even if they’re told they’re bad. And usually, they’re not bad, they just don’t fit into a particular project. But you’ve got to tell them, ‘Sorry, you’re not right for this project, and I’ll explain to you why you’re not right for it.’ 

Going back to politics, by advocating federalism, have you moved away from Scottish independence?  

No, not at all. I think federalism is the development of independence. We need to have a vision of how we live within these islands. We’re still a community, we’re still an island, like it or not. The border is a piece of land that’s flexible either way. At one point lots of people in the north of England were keen to be part of Scottish independence.  

I’m still pro-independence. I just think we’ve got to have a broader view of it, and federalism does that. We’re still very class-conscious in this country. I want to move away from that, to have a vision of what we want our country to be.  

We have to think about what an independent spirit means. To me, it means shaking off what we’ve suffered and endured for centuries. And we did it to ourselves, the Scots: we sold our Parliament out from under our feet in 1707 and became part of the United Kingdom. But that made us second-class in a way. For example, why did Prince William only go to see England at the Euros? That’s not very ‘United Kingdom’, is it? I think there’s still that attitude of, ‘Oh, the Scots are so tiresome.’  

When I was young, I couldn’t give a fuck about any of this. Now that I’m getting older, though, I think, ‘Hang on a second.’ In the project that I’m working on right now, my job is to honour the unity and the talent I see. People are delivering amazing work. And I want people to see that this is what Scotland can do. We can create stuff at a very high artistic level. But we don’t get that right now, we get reduced constantly. Our own culture is much older and more consistent than any other culture in these islands, because of the Celts that we all are.  

When I was younger, I was too ambitious. I didn’t care about any of this stuff. I just cared about me, but after a while, you get sick of that. And now, coming up to Scotland again, I see a kind of depression. It’s very difficult to describe but it’s there and it’s to do with permanently being defeated. We don’t need that. We can live through our defeat and learn from it. It shouldn’t make us depressed. It should do the opposite. It should free us more. It should make us think, ‘On, on.’ That’s how we’ve survived for centuries. We haven’t been browbeaten by it. It should make us think that maybe we could actually decide things for ourselves. That’s all I’m asking.  

Keir Starmer is absolutely against the breakup of the Union. It’ll never happen under a Labour government. He’s a stupid man—no, that’s not right, I’ll withdraw that. He’s very intelligent, but he’s very unspontaneous as a man. He’s limited in that sense. He doesn’t understand people’s feelings in Scotland and how necessary it is to nourish them, to make them blossom, to make them bloom.  

We’ve become so thwarted so much of the time, and that makes me sad because it is unnecessary. That’s why I believe in a United Federation, because I do think one of the things we are good at in Scotland is being very kind and considerate to others. All of those riots in England [in August], that would never happen in Scotland. We don’t do that. That’s not who we are. We are inclusive of our brothers and sisters who are Sikh and Islamic and so on. Of course, there will always be the headbangers. There will always be those who are afraid, who are intrinsically racist. You can’t avoid that. That’s something underdeveloped in the human spirit again. But on the whole, we’re really rather good at being inclusive in Scotland.  

For example, there was a meeting in Glasgow recently and what happened was quite stunning. About 30 right-wing people turned up. And against them you had the Indian, Irish Catholic, Scottish Presbyterian, and other communities all coming together. I think that is Scotland’s great gift. We’re good hosts. And that generosity of spirit is what I think could make us the nation that we should become.  

We’re out of time but thank you very much for talking to me. And good luck with your new project. 

My pleasure, it’s been nice to talk to you. Thank you very much. Take care. 

Related reading

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

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

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

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

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

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

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ, by Brian Victoria

The far right and ex-Muslims: ‘The enemy of my enemy is not my friend’, by Sara Al-Ruqaishi

Reflections on the far right riots: a predictable wave of violence, by Khadija Khan

Free speech and the ‘Farage riots’, by Noel Yaxley

The post ‘F*** it, think freely!’ Interview with Brian Cox 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.

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.

A previous article of mine mentioned a number of pitfalls into which many philosophers have fallen over the millennia. But what of those who have, more or less, overcome the philosopher’s curse(s)?  

The Modern Cosmopolitan

If pressed to name a philosopher who stands for sensible, resolutely non-mystical while deeply probing thinking, Karl Popper comes eminently to the fore. If, in addition, the search is for a thinker who confronts and makes advances in concrete issues, not just in philosophy but in society and in politics; and further, if someone is sought who made it a point to produce writing that is sturdily clear, Popper keeps, well, popping up.

He may well have been the most important philosopher of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first centuries. And yet he was the very model of the philosopher who doesn’t assert what he or she imagines to be the definitive position on anything. His basic attitude is no more than that of proposing something that he considers workable, rather than laying down the law—a welcome attitude in philosophy (and, it goes without saying, further afield too). Popper’s writing is peppered with phrases like ‘where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux’ and ‘most of our theories are false anyway.’

No, in the above statement on Popper’s importance, I did not overlook Wittgenstein, his old nemesis. Nobody made more significant contributions than Popper (and in more fields than Wittgenstein); the difference was that W. had charisma, which to P.—who didn’t—was a big irritant. In any case, their rivalry—which reached its high point in the famous episode with the poker—was a great pity, since they had so much in common. Not just that both were brilliant Viennese philosophers from wealthy, cultured Jewish families (although the Poppers were ‘merely’ rich, and the Wittgensteins were the Rockefellers, update that to the Bill Gateses, of Austria), but they were both enrolled in the same good cause, that of ridding philosophy of mumbo-jumbo and baseless dictums.

The above phrase ‘their rivalry’ perhaps requires some qualification: it was Popper who felt it was a rivalry, while Wittgenstein hardly considered him or anybody else to be his rival—virtually the only real intellectual respect he felt was for Bertrand Russell.

Popper’s texts are so clear that one may sometimes get the impression that one is reading a dumbed-down version of them, but that was just the way he wrote—and thought. One of his principal, and best-known, advances was to establish that what allows a statement to be considered scientific isn’t, as was commonly thought, that it be verified by experiment, but that it be possible, at least in principle, to try to disprove it experimentally (as opposed to metaphysical and mystical propositions, which can’t). Sometimes this ‘falsifiability’ principle has been likened to the earlier ‘fallibilism’ of Charles Sanders Peirce, although fallibilism seems closer not to this specific epistemological tool but to Popper’s overall position that our knowledge is fundamentally uncertain. In any event, Popper admitted that he wished he had known Peirce’s work earlier—and went so far as to write that Peirce was ‘I believe, one of the greatest philosophers of all time’.

He also had an answer to those who held that the falsifiability criterion was useless because any theory refuted by experiments could nevertheless be propped up by introducing additional hypotheses (‘It didn’t really fail, it’s just that there was an external factor that modified things’). He said: ‘As regards auxiliary hypotheses we propose to lay down the rule [notice the ‘propose’] that only those are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question, but, on the contrary, increases it.’ His theory of knowledge was, essentially, that it advances by making conjectures, based on any source at all, and then submitting them to criticism (and after stating this theory he characteristically added, ‘which I wish to submit for your criticism’.)

Always wary of unforeseen, unintended consequences, in practical politics Popper showed the virtues of piecemeal, careful improvements above all-at-one-stroke ‘utopian engineering’. He dug political theory out of a morass born of a demoralising realisation about democracy, namely that people are capable of democratically voting for a Hitler or for religious extremists. He did it by pointing out that the key to a democracy, even above formal conditions such as the separation of powers, is to have mechanisms that don’t allow rulers who turn out to be incompetent, larcenous, or dictatorial, to do too much damage. It isn’t elections that define a democracy, he taught, but containment afterwards.

Popper championed freedom—his major book on this subject being titled The Open Society and Its Enemies—yet cautioned against ‘unrestrained’, i.e. entirely free, capitalism. He wasn’t perfect (he had all along been saying that nothing is). He could be self-aggrandising, aggressive, and hurtfully dismissive. In inviting criticism professionally, he was Dr Jekyll; in responding to it in person, he was Mr Hyde. He could also contradict his own thinking: take the just-mentioned issue of capitalism. His stance was that it was the state’s duty to defend the weak and poor, and wrote that ‘we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state.’ And yet, out of his fervid anti-communism (based partly on errors he detected in Marx and very strongly on the dictatorial nature of the Soviet Union), he ended up not raising an almighty fuss when his teachings were misappropriated by Margaret Thatcher, the heartless and supreme political champion of untrammelled capitalism.

Then there was his fiercely critical attitude towards Israel. Popper never managed to get over the shock, as someone who grew up feeling entirely assimilated into mainstream Austrian society, of being pigeonholed as Jewish by the Nazis. It left him unwilling to even try to understand Israel’s dilemma, that of having to defend its very existence even as it was attempting to very hurriedly yet democratically work out its ultimate identity. This is a process that has normally taken nations scores or hundreds of years—he might have considered the case of his own country, Austria.

Popper must have known that Israel was born containing a welter of groups pushing wildly different interpretations of what it should be, including an intractable ultra-religious minority holding the balance of power. And yet over time, whilst permanently threatened by Arabs from outside, Israel actually increased, not decreased, the participation of its native Arabs in its institutions. Maybe it was Popper’s own past identity flux that led him to censure the Jews of Israel with startlingly disproportionate harshness. In any case, there is a time-hallowed, sadly applicable word that, among its meanings, includes that of finding far more fault with Jews than with others acting comparably or worse. That word is anti-Semitism.

The Ancient Savant

In a time long before and a country far away, there lived another thinker who deserves to be singled out for appreciation as a philosopher utterly determined to root out the bogus: Wang Chong (27 – c. 97 CE).

Not just clear-sighted, Wang Chong (alternative transliteration: Wang Ch’ung) was also courageous in a way that we today cannot—and thankfully need not—emulate (unless, of course, we happen to live under a fundamentalist religious regime and want to let it be known that we are deep-down sceptics who reject hocus-pocus and intend to subject received tenets to hard scrutiny).

In fact, for us, it’s easy not only as regards the politics (with the above reservation), but as regards the actual thinking. We can rely on all the demystifying work done by many notable philosophers and scientists in recent centuries. Wang, on the other hand, lived anciently—the precisely two-thousandth anniversary of his birth will take place three years from now—and in a China (in his case, under the Han dynasty, in its second or Eastern phase) that was steeped, as it almost always has been, in a culture of unquestioning obedience to power and obeisance to sacrosanct texts. His dubiousness had only a few thin precedents to go by. (By the way, the British new wave band Wang Chung, whose name gets prominent screen display in the recent film The Idea of You, was definitely not named after the savant.)

Our Wang was a Renaissance man avant la lettre, an encyclopaedic historian, astronomer, meteorologist, physicist, and so on, as shown in his compilation text Lunheng (variously rendered as ‘Measured Treatise’, ‘Disquisitions’, ‘Discussive Weighing’, ‘Balanced Discussions’, and other titles). But it was as a philosopher, one stubbornly unimpressed by authority, whether philosophical or political, that he most impresses us today.

Wang remained tied to a number of prevailing concepts, although he criticised and, when he saw the need, modified them—like destiny (ming) and vital energy (qi). But here’s the crucial thing: he demanded proofs for affirmations, spurned superstitions, belittled supernatural explanations, and dismissed the belief that things only happen because they are preordained. He held truth even above tradition (gasp!). The official worldview in his China was positively Panglossian (again, avant la lettre), the epitome of wishful thinking, in the sense that what was regarded as ideal was thought to be actually the case. For example, the worthy person will no doubt get ahead: it ain’t necessarily so, sang Wang. Good deeds are inevitably rewarded and bad ones punished: hardly, noted Wang. If the ruler is a good person and is happy, prosperity will necessarily smile on his subjects and even the climate will be benign: just not so, declared Wang.

And this is amazing: he got away with it. He wasn’t decapitated, or forced to drink hemlock (as Socrates had been 400 years earlier), or ordered murdered by his own son because his thinking was too free and offended religion (as happened to the great astronomer-mathematician Ulugh Beg of Samarkand 1,300 years after Wang’s time), or stabbed in the eye (as well as various other parts of the body, as happened to Salman Rushdie all too recently). While the year of his birth is generally accepted to have been 27 CE, so peaceful and unremarkable was his death that its date is only approximately known, set as c. 97.

Wang Chong. Here was a person who truly thought freely.

East, West

To complement the praise-fest, here are two thinkers (in a way, diametrically different from each other) whom I cherish specifically as historian-commentators of philosophy. People who don’t care to go into any one Western philosopher’s thinking in great detail but could use a very pithy one-volume overview of it all can be directed to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Alan Watts, even in a slim book like The Way of Zen (1957), elegantly renders a similar service as regards the East.   

Russell was, of course, himself a towering figure in philosophy as well as mathematics. In A History, he brings his big brain to bear on philosophy’s past—seeking to put it in its historical context—and he doesn’t just set forth the diverse thinkers’ positions. He gives his own assessments—and his commentaries can be acid. Kant, he says, ‘is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate…’ Of Hegel’s Philosophy of History he writes, ‘Like other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Marx and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications.’

And yet he is scrupulous in pointing out meritorious aspects even among theories he finds fault with. One complaint that can be made is that, with quite uncharacteristic modesty, he is comparatively, and disappointingly, brief about what he calls ‘the philosophical school of which I am a member’—logical analysis.

One way to describe the task pursued by logical analysis, and the overall current it forms part of, is (in loose terms—not Russell’s own), ‘Let’s sweep away the twaddle.’ Russell did a lot of sweeping himself. Alan Watts, on the other hand, is—how to put this?—in a different tradition. He is selling mysticism and ‘don’t think, float along’ elixir by the barrel. The reason to turn to him, as suggested above, is to obtain a compact outline of philosophical thinking, Eastern division. This he provides: in order to put the Zen in the mentioned book’s title in context, he gives a genial guided tour of Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism in general.

Watts writes with style and clarity—and affably works every gram of reasonableness he can into the narrative. His tone is quite the opposite of the sanctimoniousness his largely religious subject matter might tempt him into.

Zen is about gaining ‘Wow, I suddenly see it!’ moments. A personal takeaway: The Way of Zen not only describes such events, but actually generated one in me—with the small catch that what I suddenly saw wasn’t what Watts intended.

It concerned the issue of spontaneity. The Eastern philosophy that Zen distils sets enormous store by spontaneity; acting on reasoned decisions is for the unenlightened. In consequence, devotees strive strenuously to achieve that ideal attitude. Unfortunately for them, this is self-defeating—since striving for something is precisely the opposite of being spontaneous about it. But it turns out Zen has a wonderful solution up its sleeve. Can you help it, it asks the victims of this trap, if you can’t stop striving? No? Then your striving is itself spontaneous! So you have been spontaneous all along! Watts quotes a Zen master: ‘Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh.’

The cleverness of the table-turning bowled me over. Wow, I suddenly did see something: namely, that with gambits like that, one can let oneself off any mental hook.

One can get away with anything!

Some philosophy-related further reading

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

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain, by Michel Petheram

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’: interview with Alex Byrne, by Emma Park

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

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Anaxagoras, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Portrait bust of Epicurus, an early near-atheist, by Emma Park

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Lifting the veil: Shelley, atheism and the wonders of existence, by Tony Howe

The post Two cut-the-nonsense thinkers who overcame the philosopher’s curse(s) appeared first on The Freethinker.

Six months on from 7 October, the Israeli war on Gaza continues. The recent withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza should not be misunderstood. It is a tactical decision, made in response to the ongoing hostage negotiations taking place in Cairo, as well as growing international pressure on Israel to temper its bellicosity towards the civilian population.

Last month, Israel killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK). These deaths brought the number of aid workers killed in Gaza to over 196, but since then the number has risen to 203. Israel apologised for the strikes on the WCK convoy, declared them to have been a mistake resulting from significant errors and protocol violations, and removed two senior officers from their posts. However, there is reason to think the strikes were a deliberate targeting of the aid convoy as a means of undermining humanitarian efforts in Gaza. Firstly, the WCK convoy had agreed and coordinated its movements with the IDF beforehand. Secondly, the IDF launched three separate strikes on the WCK vehicles in turn. Finally, the convoy was marked with the WCK logo, and all the passengers were civilians. Another example, taking place earlier this year, illustrates why this incident cannot be considered in isolation.

In January 2024, Israel made unsubstantiated claims about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); Israel claimed that a dozen or so employees of the agency were members of Hamas. The US, alongside the UK and several other Western countries, decided to suspend their funding to UNRWA based on Israel’s word alone. Even if the accusation against UNRWA was true, the organisation employs 30,000 people across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The complicity of a negligible amount of people in atrocities would not justify the suspension of funds to an organisation responsible for the provision of humanitarian relief to millions of people.

The United States admitted its inability to verify Israel’s claims. Moreover, the EU’s humanitarian chief said in March that there was no evidence from Israel to back up its claims about UNRWA. A UN-led review likewise found no evidence to support Israel’s claims, but, as the title of Julian Borger’s Guardian articles ruefully notes, the ‘damage to [the] aid agency is done’. Most recently, the German government announced that it would resume the funding to UNRWA that it had suspended. This is especially telling, given the virtually unconditional support Germany has otherwise provided Israel.

We therefore find ourselves in a situation in which Israel is responsible for the destruction of the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza and makes unfounded claims about the only relief agency able to provide significant help, while simultaneously urging its allies to suspend funding to this very same agency. In doing so, Israel has denied itself the right to be trusted when it declares that attacks against aid convoys are mere accidents. The BBC reported on 5 April that:

‘The Erez Gate in northern Gaza will be reopened for the first time since the start of the war, and the Israeli container port of Ashdod—which is close to Gaza—will accept humanitarian supplies. More aid from Jordan will also be allowed to enter via the Kerem Shalom Crossing.’

If Israel could reopen the Erez crossing and begin to use the port of Ashdod before, and had chosen not to do so, despite the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians, the logical implication is that it has been intentionally withholding aid. A Palestinian physician, Dr Duha Shellah, commenting on the distribution of aid into Gaza, told me that the ‘Volunteer committees responsible for coordinating and delivering aid have been targeted by the Israeli military.’ Likewise, hearing from colleagues, family, and friends, she speaks of ‘people eating grass, animal food, anything to survive.’ Israel’s claims about UNRWA led to $450 million worth of funding being suspended; in light of the dire plight of many Palestinians, this shows the fatal consequences of false—or at the very least unfounded—claims.

Recent revelations about the Israeli military’s application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the war on Gaza by the IDF also provide a sinister window into how Israel has been conducting its war. The Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, writing for +972 Magazine, has reported that ‘The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. The system is called ‘Lavender’ and its existence and use in the current war was revealed by six Israeli intelligence officers. The obvious question arises—are these Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants being targeted? And, even if they are, would using AI to target them be justified?

Well, Abraham reports that the six Israeli officers say ‘the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity.’ The explanation for this was simple. One of the intelligence officers declared that ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

In The Guardian’s report, one Israeli officer said that, in using Lavender, ‘I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.’ In the field of AI the idea of the ‘human in the loop’ is a cornerstone of ethical and practical thinking. The idea is that human beings, informed (and constrained by) their reason and ethics, can be accountable for the actions of AI. The essential negation of the human in the loop in the use of Lavender shows the depths of callousness the IDF have reached in their war on the people of Gaza.

The figures for the dead in Gaza are unlikely to be exact. However, given the ID numbers provided to residents in the small enclave and the corroboration of figures from various sources, it seems probable that the figure of over 30,000 dead is accurate. As of April, Save the Children reported that over 13,800 children had been killed in Gaza. In the face of this catastrophe, what role have Western powers played?

It is without a doubt true to say that virtually unanimous and unconditional support has been provided to Israel, particularly from the United States. A recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documents that ‘The US has approved more than 100 weapons transfers to Israel since October 7, and exported 8,000 military rifles and 43,000 handguns in 2023’. The BBC, in an article documenting where Israel gets its arms from, reported that ‘The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.’

The exact percentage figure of Israeli imported arms coming from the US is 65.6%. Trailing in second place is Germany, responsible for 29.7%. Although the United Kingdom does not provide as much as the other two powers, it nonetheless sold £42 million worth of arms to Israel in 2022 and since 2015 has granted arms export licences to Israel worth £442 million. This includes helicopters, aircraft, missiles, grenades, armoured vehicles, and tanks. Whatever drop in the larger ocean this constitutes, the UK has armed Israel and continues to provide it with diplomatic and political support at the United Nations.

Apologists for Israel tend to recycle the well-worn phrase that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. Ahmed Benchemsi, the MENA spokesman for HRW, however, described the situation differently to me: ‘What is happening in Gaza now is more like a mediaeval siege, in which the whole population is punished in retaliation for crimes committed by a small minority of combatants.’ Collective punishment is illegal under international law, so all of Hamas’s crimes on 7 October notwithstanding, Israel’s actions against the population of Gaza are illegal. A recent HRW report covering the West Bank also noted that:

‘Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools under the cover of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza.’

This is corroborated by Dr Mahmoud Wohoush, a doctor working in the West Bank, who told me that ‘Settler violence in the West Bank tremendously increased after Oct 7th and…the Israeli forces protect them [the settlers] and provide any needed support as many of the settlers are their relatives and friends.’ He goes on to say that ‘This escalation has been fostered by the politicians, particularly the extremists in the current right wing government. They are following the instructions from their religious leaders to kill the Palestinians to uproot them from their land.’ We often hear of the fanaticism of Hamas, sometimes generalised to the Palestinians at large, yet how often do we hear on Western airwaves of the fanaticism of Israeli settlers in the West Bank who think, by divine right, that the land of ‘Judea and Samaria’ should be granted to them alone?

These accounts, by HRW and by Palestinians on the ground, are crucial to note for two reasons. Firstly, the Israelis are committing crimes in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, nor any seriously organised armed Palestinian resistance group fighting them. Secondly, the war in Gaza is giving cover to the dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank, something which has been ongoing for decades, long before 7 October.

The war in Gaza represents—and is—a war on the Palestinian people. The high civilian death toll, combined with the suspension of funding to UNRWA, the application of AI, and increasing settler violence in the West Bank, prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Further reading

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

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

An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain

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

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

The post Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people appeared first on The Freethinker.

In December 2023, Ed West wrote for The Spectator about a phenomenon I have been interested in for quite a while: the rise of a new counter-Enlightenment that defends religion, and Christianity in particular, based on its social value rather than because it is true. West termed such defenders of faith(s?) the ‘New Theists’, a term that I like very much and which I shall probably use quite often from now on.  

The New Theists, says West, argue ‘not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful.’ Whether West himself is a New Theist, I do not know, though his article seems very sympathetic to the New Theist argument. I am going to take issue with that argument soon enough, but first, who are the New Theists? 

I am tempted to date New Theism to the publication in 2019 of Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Holland’s argument is that almost all of Western culture is essentially Christian, even the parts seemingly antagonistic to Christianity. Holland wants to claim everything from gay rights to science to liberalism to the Enlightenment itself and even atheism as an outgrowth of Christianity.  

(Notice that, even as he tries to hide it behind a disinterested scholarly facade, Holland is a latter-day champion of Christianity—he is especially keen on claiming all the nice bits of Western civilisation for the faith. Christianity’s many historical crimes are explained away as not being really representative of its essence.) 

Dominion has been very influential since its publication, as perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s citation of it last November as a reason for her conversion to Christianity. But, as West rightly notes, this sort of argument has a long history. And in its current form, it precedes Tom Holland. As Adam Wakeling writes in the Freethinker: 

Perhaps no public figure has become more associated with this argument than Jordan Peterson. Peterson does not appear to believe in a literal supernatural being, but believes that the secular ethics of the modern west are based in Judeo-Christian values and it would be better if we acted as though the Christian God did exist.

So, since Peterson seems to have really started publicly obfuscating on religion in 2017, perhaps that is a better origin date for New Theism. Holland, Hirsi Ali, and Peterson are just a few of the more famous New Theists, though Hirsi Ali is unique in having formerly been a New Atheist. There are plenty of others. Some are actual believers, some are not, and many are just Petersonian wafflers. 

New Theism, of course, is named in opposition to New Atheism.¹ (I should say here that I pretty much consider myself an unreconstructed New Atheist.) West again: ‘Like New Atheism, [New Theism] largely involved unbelievers, and argued for the same western liberal tradition.’ I think New Theism is broader than West allows here—for example, Theo Hobson, another of its champions, is a theologian (and, incidentally, Hobson’s arguments for New Theism precede 2017). West’s third clause is also questionable, not least given Sam Harris’s interest in Eastern spirituality, but it is broadly true.  

Where West really misunderstands the relationship between New Theism and New Atheism is in New Theism’s much narrower focus: it is concerned only, or at least mainly, with religion as a social phenomenon. The New Atheists were concerned with both of the really big questions about religion: its truth and its utility. True, there were differences of emphasis. Richard Dawkins was much more interested in the God hypothesis, and Christopher Hitchens in the evils of religion. But they all dealt with both questions, while the New Theists are only really bothered about one of them. Hobson himself recently put it thus in a review of a book called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins²:  

This is the real flaw in New Atheism: it inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense. It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots. But most Christian apologists fail to focus on this and get bogged down in tedious arguments about first causes, and try to make a rational case for God, and even the historical likelihood of the resurrection. Most of these contributors take this approach, some citing the apologetics of William Lane Craig and Alister McGrath (who is this book’s co-editor). 

To my mind, this is deeply unhelpful. It sinks to Dawkins’ level. A wise apologetics is minimalist. It calmly exposes the moral muddles of rational humanists, their weak grasp of the history of ideas. But it doesn’t overstate the role of intellectual argument in belief.

And this is telling. The God argument has been lost; all that is left is the argument from utility. The near certainty of God’s non-existence has been apparent since long before New Atheism³, but it now seems that the argument has been given up entirely. New Theism, then, is a rear-guard action, a desperate attempt to salvage religion even when its core has been gutted and even as the number of its adherents dwindles by the day. It is also an insult to the truly devout, for whom the truth of religion is very, even supremely, important. I have recently had the misfortune to have to endure The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger, and the happily deceased pontiff often made that point very clear.  

Now, with the faith in tatters, the New Theists are often not even, or are barely, theists (and isn’t there something strangely postmodern about that?⁴). And they now spend most of their time proclaiming that Christianity is fundamental to Western civilisation. In so doing, everything institutional Christianity ever opposed until it was beaten into submission—liberalism, secularism, gay rights, free speech, to name a few—are claimed for Christianity! This argument takes some chutzpah, I allow, but it is essentially the theology of the consolation prize—and a sign of continued decline rather than rejuvenation. 

An important exception to the above is Justin Brierley, a believing Christian apologist who tries to convince his readers of Christianity’s truth while also championing it in the fashion of Holland and the other New Theists.⁵ His latest book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again, is an explicitly New Theist text, and I am surprised West did not reference it.⁶ Of course, the popularity of any idea is no guarantee of whether it is correct or not, but I think Hobson and Brierley are simply the latest in a long line of people wrongly claiming that New Atheism is pretty much dead (see footnote 1 for a note on Jerry Coyne’s rebuttals of this oft-parroted critique, among other ones). The secularisation of the world, even in America, continues unabated, however much the New Theists wish otherwise. I do not think that New Theism will reverse this trend or have the public impact that New Atheism had in its heyday, but it is well capable of causing serious confusion (and perhaps worse⁷) nonetheless.⁸

There is little point in me going into great detail on the very many flaws of Hollandaise Christianity⁹, since many others have done so already—and, I think, have done so decisively. I will just recommend pieces by Nick Cohen, Peter Thonemann, and Gerard DeGroot in addition to the Wakeling piece mentioned above (and also Wakeling’s recent book Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world). The books of Charles Freeman—particularly The Closing of the Western Mind and The Awakening—are also fatal to Holland (I discussed this, among other things, in an interview with Freeman for the Freethinker). I also recommend looking through Richard Carrier’s website, for, even when not discussing Holland directly, he does refute many of Holland’s claims (e.g. on the supposed invention by Christianity of charity and the concept of dignity). I will allow myself one lengthy quote from Thonemann, though: 

Mr. Holland’s argument about the continuing legacy of Christian sensibilities involves selecting one particular winding strand of Christianity—the one that happens to terminate in our present-day value system—as the “real” one. Mr. Holland postulates a golden thread of Nice Christianity, directly linking Jesus’ teachings with the civil-rights movement, the end of apartheid, #MeToo and so forth. When large numbers of actual Christians between Paul and Pope Francis turn out to have subscribed to Nasty Christianity (butchering Albigensians, incinerating sodomites and suchlike), Mr. Holland blithely comments that “the Christian revolution still had a long way to run.” This argument—that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path—seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic. 

Perhaps Wakeling puts it most concisely: ‘According to Genesis, God created man in his image – yet the morality of the Bible is not humanist.’ (My emphasis.) Indeed—and it is very often anti-humanist, with its injunctions to slavery, rape, and genocide and its threats of eternal torture for nonbelievers.¹⁰

Secular liberalism has spent centuries defanging Christianity (one of civilisation’s most noble achievements, though the task is still incomplete). Christianity did not inspire secular humanism—and least of all did institutional Christianity, which, as Freeman notes, became an imperial and authoritarian structure in the fourth century. Once it became dominant in that period, it did not challenge slavery or wealth inequality or militarism, nor did it do any of the other nice things that it should have done if its essence was as Holland says. On Holland’s thesis, the millennium and more of Christian supremacy should have produced a paradise of liberalism and democracy long before the Enlightenment arose. The emergence of secular modernity has other roots, many of which predate Christianity by a long time and most of which were almost pulled up by Christianity before they had produced even the tiniest of shoots. 

To return to West’s apparently pro-New Theism article, a couple of small points of disagreement before we get on to the meatier stuff. West says that ‘Framed as opposition to religion in public affairs, [New Atheism] gathered much of its energy from fear of Islam following 9/11, although it was impolite to make that explicit.’  

Who said it was impolite? Given that the New Atheists frequently criticised Islam in their books, speeches, and debates, and that Hitchens deliberately inverted the Takbir in the title of God Is Not Great, and that some of New Atheism’s fiercest (and most unfair) critics were those who saw anti-Muslim bigotry in the work of the New Atheists, any implication that the New Atheists shied away from Islam is bogus (it is unclear whether West intends any such implication).¹¹ 

Second, West writes that ‘[r]ather than ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, the collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.’ Again, it is slightly unclear what West means in the full context. Does he mean that the New Atheists believed that destroying religion would ‘usher in a golden age of enlightenment’? If so, he is plain wrong. Hitchens, for example, wrote in God Is Not Great that “[r]eligious faith is…ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.’ No New Atheist claimed that the world would become an enlightened paradise after the demise of religion (which was unlikely or even impossible, anyway), or that religion was responsible for all the world’s ills.  

The point about the impossibility of fully throwing off religion is quite an important one, so I shall let Matt Johnson discuss it further. From his Quillette piece critiquing Konstantin Kisin’s argument against the New Atheists: 

The title of Kisin’s article is “The Atheism Delusion.” He now regards religion as “useful and inevitable.” The argument that religion is inevitable is one the New Atheists have always taken seriously: Hitchens described religion as “ineradicable”; [Daniel] Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell examined the ways in which religion evolves and survives over time; a central part of Harris’s career is channelling the religious impulse into secular forms of introspection and mindfulness; and Dawkins acknowledges that religion may reflect a deep psychological need among many people. Where the New Atheists part company with Kisin is over his argument that religion is useful—particularly in the third decade of the 21st Century.

With that out of the way, on to the meat. West writes that ‘The atomising effect of secularism has become extreme. While America’s poor filled their God-shaped hole with drugs and alcohol, its rich did so with politics.’ By the final clause, I think West means to refer to Critical Social Justice ideology, or ‘wokeism’, as his following reference to progressive intolerance implies. But these are just unevidenced assertions. There are plenty of other explanations for atomisation, drug and alcohol abuse, and the rise of wokeism, and why should one prefer secularisation over all others without any evidence?  

Indeed, poverty, genetics, mental health problems, and the social environment are among the many more convincing explanations for drug and alcohol abuse than some nebulous ‘secularism’. They are certainly more concrete. The causes of the US opioid epidemic, which West perhaps has in mind here, also lie largely in the many structural problems of the American healthcare system itself. Social atomisation and alienation also have many alternative explanations, though I grant that the shared community offered by churches has been and is very important for many people. But there are other sources of community that do not require belief in mumbo-jumbo or come with the negative effects of religion (which, to my mind, outweigh those ‘shared community’ positives)—although we must do better at providing them.  

Most fatal to West’s argument here is the fact that the social woes he lists are positively correlated with religiosity, while the opposite holds true for secularism, as the sociologist Phil Zuckerman has copiously shown. Or, as I have put it previously: 

Though we can’t re-run the tape to produce a definitive answer to the question of whether religion has overall been good or bad for humanity, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from the state of our existing societies. Put very broadly, and with the caveat that the causation/correlation relationships are complex, the data shows that more religious societies are poorer, less safe, and less happy while more secular societies are richer, happier, and more just. If religion is good for us, why should this be so? 

I would also argue more directly that nobody with even a shred of dignity or decency would wish to live in an extremely religious society. We have seen, and can see even now, what such societies look like, and it is not pretty. One need only look at the Muslim world or pre-Enlightenment Europe to see that where religion rules, tyranny and poverty are the norms. If you think religion is good for you, I invite you to consider living in a society where it reigns supreme; I think you will be rushing back to the decadent, post-Enlightenment, secular West very quickly. 

West, naturally, differs with all this, and might object that he goes into more detail in the very article I am criticising:  

[T]his period has also coincided with a proliferation of social science studies pointing to the benefits of religion – both belief and practice – on child welfare, social capital, individual happiness and most of all the suppression of anxiety, the cause of that modern-day “mental health epidemic”.

Fair enough, one might say: delusion does have its benefits. I can only repeat what I have already said: the negatives outweigh the positives, and these positives can all be gotten without the negatives. Religion might help with the problems West lists, but much better, I think, to provide adequate healthcare, housing, income, and the like.

The studies to which West points are also rather undermined by the data referenced above, which, among other things, suggest that as societies become more prosperous and more just, the need for religion, particularly to salve our social ills, evaporates. Perhaps religion has some benefits for the individual or the social group, but not so much as West seems to think. And is it not curious that religion is most popular among the destitute, the crisis-ridden, and the weary? It is almost as if the God delusion preys on desperation. 

In my previous article above, I also addressed the wokeism point: 

I know that the temptation to champion traditionalism and religion against the tide of Critical Social Justice (or, colloquially, and although it’s a term I’ve come to dislike, ‘wokeism’) is very strong. But consider: is championing another vile dogma really the solution? Of course it isn’t.¹² (Besides, wokeism is hardly the greatest threat in the world today; jihadist Islam and the grotesque alliance of Trumpism with Christian nationalism in the U.S., are, I would argue, much graver ones.) The solution is to keep fighting for free, secular societies based upon reason and universalism and human rights. This fight, and the societies produced by it, count among humanity’s greatest achievements.¹³ Much better to go forward in this enterprise, rather than embracing religion (or wokeism).

Matt Johnson, in the piece referenced earlier, has much more to say on the wokeism argument, including the following: 

The notion that we abandoned our old faiths and replaced them with the new alternatives is too tidy and simplistic. For one thing, the process of secularization has been gaining momentum for decades, long before the “Great Awokening.” For another, unlike the Pew researchers who ask respondents how their religious views have evolved over time, the critics of progressive dogma don’t provide much evidence for their claims about the ways in which religion is supposed to have been supplanted by this new faith. Isn’t it possible that many religious people identify with elements of progressivism? Black Americans are disproportionately religious and far more likely than their fellow citizens to support the Black Lives Matter movement (81 percent versus a national average of 51 percent). However, they’re less progressive when it comes to issues such as gay rights—black Protestants are considerably less likely than their white counterparts to support gay marriage. Young even admits that wokeness has “made converts within the established Churches, particularly the Church of England.” 

… 

No matter how exhaustively the word “religion” is redefined, there’s plenty of evidence that secularization has taken place across the Western world. But there’s far less evidence for the opportunistic claim that this shift is responsible for the emergence of another socio-political movement. Those who say otherwise may have a “god-shaped hole” in their own lives, but they shouldn’t assume that everyone else suffers from the same affliction. More and more commentators are attempting to resuscitate religion under the guise of anti-woke politics, but they’re just exchanging one dogma for another.

On the argument that the West (though I would prefer to say ‘liberal democracy’) needs Christianity to combat the various threats it faces, much could and has been said. Michael Shermer has expertly done so already, along the way demolishing the other tenets of New Theism, so I shall simply recommend his piece and quote the central point: ‘Atheism isn’t the alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Enlightenment Humanism is.’ 

Towards the end of his article, West says some quite astonishing things. First, he argues that ‘At the very least, the act of being involved in the community and ingesting a message of forgiveness would act as social Valium.’ I think I have said enough to make this at least a questionable assumption. When I shared West’s article with Matt Johnson, he responded to me with an understatedly tart observation: ‘Yes, because the essential message of forgiveness has always made Christians more tolerant throughout the ages.’  

A ‘social Valium’, though! The land of Europe is barely dry after centuries of Christian bloodlust. And remember the horror inflicted upon millions of people around the world when Christianity had real power in the West. Even today, Christianity remains one of the most dangerous forces in the world. Indeed, the fields of Europe even now are soaked through with the blood spilled by Christians in the name of faith. In the context of American fundamentalism’s support for the disgusting Ugandan ‘kill the gays’ bill, I wrote last year: 

We all know what American Christianity has done to America itself of late—helped to elect and shore up support for the most vulgar and dangerous man to ever hold the office of president, Donald Trump.¹⁴ Christian nationalists were heavily involved in the January 6 coup attempt. And don’t forget that a slew of anti-LGBTQ bills are being introduced across the US as I write these very words (at least American Christian fundamentalists practise what they preach to others). Looking a little further back, Christianity was the core of the creationist/Intelligent Design movement, which tried its very best to inculcate American children with superstitious rubbish. Going even deeper into history, we find pietist Protestants banning alcohol, sharia-style, and the Bible acting as the bulwark of the case for slavery. And so on and so forth. 

… 

In short, those of us who value secularism and humanism ought not to be complacent about Christianity. In its senescence, or senility if you prefer, it is as dangerous as ever. And American fundamentalists are among the most dangerous of all the followers of Christ. The disgusting bill that has just passed in Uganda is a chilling reminder of these facts. It should also harden the resolve of freethinkers worldwide, American ones in particular, to recognize—and relentlessly combat—the barbarism that Christianity is still very well capable of unleashing upon the world.

For the Freethinker, and with reference to the dangers posed by other religions, I recently wrote: 

[F]rom Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy [indeed, in March this year, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Putin’s assault a ‘holy war’]—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that “religion poisons everything”.

Finally, I can’t help but note again how lame New Theism is. From world domination and supreme authority over billions of human beings and their eternal souls to a Valium faith. What a mighty fall for mighty Christendom!  

West’s true sympathies are, I think, revealed by his conclusion: ‘But Christianity is not some meditation method or get-happy-quick guide. It is a deeply strange idea. Which makes its triumph over the West all the more unlikely – dare one say, miraculous.’ 

One might as well say the same about any hugely influential religion that has ever existed (here one might instance the ‘miraculously’ rapid spread of Islam¹⁵) but that would be to ignore the very worldly—and often very grubby—ways in which they gained power. As Charles Freeman notes in my Freethinker interview with him: 

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state.  … 

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

There is not much miraculous about cosying up to state authority to expand your influence, as I think West would agree.  

I have gone on long enough, certainly much longer than I anticipated at the outset (and I apologise for all the long quotes, but they were necessary). This is a subject I am likely to return to in future, and it is an important one. Critical as I have been, West’s piece is very good. It is certainly stimulating, and it provides a useful framing of the argument. It crystallised some things I have been thinking about a lot, albeit from a rather different perspective. So I am grateful that he wrote the piece, and even more grateful that he coined what I think is a very useful term for the very un-miraculous and probably over-hyped resurgence of Christianity.  

To finish off on a more positive note, a couple more quotes, including another of my own. In arguments about religion there is always latent the question of meaning. What meaning can there be in a godless universe? From my Freethinker interview with the New Atheist ‘horseman’ Daniel Dennett, where I asked him that very question: 

Well, life is flippin’ wonderful! Here we are talking to each other, you in England [Scotland, actually, but it didn’t seem the moment to quibble!] and me in the United States, and we are having a meaningful, constructive conversation about the deepest issues there are. And you are made of trillions—trillions!—of moving parts, and so am I, and we are getting to understand how those trillions of parts work. Poor Descartes could never have imagined a machine with a trillion moving parts. But we can, in some detail now, thanks to computers, thanks to microscopes, thanks to science, thanks to neuroscience and cognitive science and psychophysics and all the rest. We are understanding more and more every year about how all this wonderfulness works and about how it evolved and why it evolved. To me, that is awe-inspiring.¹⁶

And from my own piece on religion, quoted earlier: 

One last thing remains. There is the question of meaning. Without religion, without the supernatural, how can humans even bear to get up in the morning? I think I have obliquely answered this already: secular societies are happier. But I’d like to add that this, to me, is an impoverished view of humanity. Without delusion, it essentially says, what’s the point? 

Well, there is art, and literature, and science, and philosophy; there are friends and family; there is sex, and parties, and music, and love. What more meaning can you possibly need? If you need the supernatural to find the transcendent, I pity you. 

In the end, I can make weaker and stronger versions of my argument. At its strongest, I can say that religion is not just harmless but harmful. At its weakest, I can say that religion is irrelevant. Either way, religion is not positively good for us. We have no need of it. Humanity is weak and foolish, yes, but it also contains what Saul Bellow in his great novel The Adventures of Augie March so beautifully called the “universal eligibility to be noble”. 

I submit, finally, then, that the highest, noblest path that humanity can pursue is one without religion. We must face the uncaring universe with our chins up. Abandoning religion is not a guarantee of utopia (indeed, utopia is unattainable anyway), but it is a good start. We are mere apes, yes—but apes capable of art and science and love. Supernaturalism, which is the core of religion, is a distraction from, even a negation of, this most important and inspiring of truths. 

So let’s reject the false, dangerous delusions of religion, and be worthy of humanity—that is, of ourselves.

In short: Christianity (and religion in general) is neither true nor particularly useful, and the New Theism is but a sputtering and desperate response to that fact. 

Update 9 February 2024: Charles Freeman writes to me to mention the splenetic David Bentley Hart as a forerunner of the New Theism and a critic of the New Atheism. Indeed he is both those things, though I did not have space to mention everyone who falls under those headings. I append this update only because Hart is a particularly obnoxious man, and his work is oft-trumpeted as a fatal knockdown of New Atheism. The ever-reliable Jerry Coyne once more makes nonsense of such claims.

Let me also add that, in his work, Freeman makes the very good points that Christianity’s Pauline disdain for philosophy and its extreme salvific exclusivism prevented it from being a vehicle for science and human rights almost from the very beginning.

This is as good a place as any for a further update. After I had written the bulk of this piece, I rediscovered a good passage from Bertrand Russell’s classic Why I am not a Christian that puts the point much better than I ever could:

You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

1. I am more or less sidestepping the question of whether there is even such a thing as New Atheism. Many so-called New Atheists disavow the term altogether and see nothing particularly new in it (Jerry Coyne is a good exemplar here) or don’t regard it as a coherent movement in any meaningful way. I have some sympathy with these objections, but I think that it is a useful term nonetheless. Similar objections could be lodged against the use of ‘New Theism’, of course. But both terms describe real phenomena, regardless of whether there is anything new about them and however formal or informal they are as ‘movements’. 
   
   Incidentally, if you search ‘atheism’ or ‘New Atheism’ on Coyne’s website, he has done a remarkably thorough job over the years of defending New Atheism from its many critics, who never tire of pronouncing it dead or leading to ‘wokeism’ or being bigoted or whatever else. Critics dismantled by Coyne are as various as (but are far from limited to) John Gray, Freddie DeBoer, Rupert Sheldrake, Sebastian Milbank, Massimo Pigliucci, Tim Stanley, and Julian Baggini.  ︎
2. By the way, this book’s trumpeting of former Dawkinsian atheists finding faith should be seen in the context of how many people lost (and never recovered) their faith thanks to Dawkins. I think if you tallied these numbers up, it would not even be close. ︎
3. I have no space for that argument here, but many of the people I reference in this essay deal with it. I would also recommend Victor J. Stenger’s book The New Atheism (Stenger, incidentally, embraced the ‘New Atheist’ label and in his book on the subject enumerated what he saw as its key propositions). I shall just say here that ancient atheists in Greece and India came to this conclusion long before Christianity even existed and that there is not much to add to David Hume and Bertrand Russell and the rest. I think Richard Dawkins’ Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit (elaborated in The God Delusion and elsewhere) is unassailable unless you engage in theological hand-waving. Richard Carrier has made a similar ‘argument from specified complexity against supernaturalism’.
   
   This might be the moment to mention that I am familiar with a lot of what Jerry Coyne, in a deliciously condescending manner, terms ‘sophisticated theology’. It is, unsurprisingly, unimpressive stuff, full of hokum and special pleading and mere assertion (and Coyne mercilessly rips a great deal of it apart in his Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible). ︎
4. And perhaps this is what really marks New Theism out as ‘new’. In that sense, it is perhaps more appropriately labelled than New Atheism. ︎
5. Richard Carrier has laid waste at some length to Brierley’s apologetics, as propounded in Brierley’s 2017 book Unbelievable. ︎
6. Note added 23 April 2024: I have just come across a good review of Brierley’s book in the New Humanist which has led me to reframe things slightly. Brierley and other genuine believers seem to be riding the wave of the barely-theistic New Theism, hoping that the popularity of obscurantist gurus like Peterson will give them an opening to win souls. This is unlikely ever to happen, as the New Humanist reviewer explains. As I say in note 8 below, I can see the religion debate becoming prominent again, partly because of the New Theists but also because of the resurgence of religious fanaticism—the continuing depredations of the Islamists, the Christian and Hindu nationalists, Tucker Carlson’s resurrection of creationism, etc. A moment for a new New Atheism, perhaps? ︎
7. Vide the unfortunately named National Conservatism movement.
   ︎
8. On the other hand, I can envision a return to prominence of the religion question in public debate. It is certainly an important question given that religious fanaticism is undergoing a resurgence across the world. Perhaps we’re in for another New Atheist-type moment in the discourse. I still doubt it will be as prominent now as it was then, though, and I certainly don’t think that it will have much effect on secularisation. ︎
9. Would using le Christianisme hollandaise be too pretentious? And yes, I know ‘hollandaise’ means ‘Dutch’ (or ‘Hollandic’) in French. I just like the sound of it, though given that the word ‘Hollandaise’ was applied by the French to the sauce during the Franco-Dutch war of 1672-78—that is, between Catholic absolutist France and a relatively (and I mean relatively) tolerant Dutch Republic, perhaps I could conjure some more substantial meaning into my little joke. In any case, only a teeny bit of fun at Tom Holland’s expense is intended. ︎
10. I would also recommend Mister Deity’s less scholarly but funny and scathing video series debunking Dominion. In the last part, he makes a good point: if Holland’s work ends up winning more converts for secular humanist ideals, perhaps that’s no bad thing. Also, there have been several more recent pieces in the Freethinker tackling New Theism, including one by Jack Stacey, which also deals with Richard Dawkins and the ‘cultural Christian’ hysteria (on which more below). You can look forward to another anti-New Theism article by Matt Johnson soon. ︎
11. And that provokes a thought: New Theism is largely about Christianity, not religion in general—another big difference with New Atheism. Both West and I, you will have noticed, switch between ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity’, when it is mostly Christianity under discussion. I, at least, also have religion tout court in mind, while West, I think, does not.
    
    New Theism is, to a large extent, a merely political movement (a conservative one, of course). It is also largely an exercise in apologetics containing assertions of Christian supremacy. All this makes it much less intellectually sophisticated than New Atheism (and, yes, I say that with a deliberate and disdainful nod to the critics of New Atheism who think it crude and philosophically naïve).
    
    I wonder if, in a few centuries when Islam has been tamed, we shall see similar arguments from its votaries and champions? Indeed, some Muslim apologists already claim that much of modern science is contained in the Qu’ran. Fatuously claiming pre-eminence in achievements that religion had little to do with is nothing new for its defenders.
    
    Incidentally, Richard Dawkins has recently spoken of his preference for Christianity over Islam. This is nothing new; he has called himself a ‘cultural Christian’ many times before (and his cultural affinity with Christianity is apparent in The God Delusion). But I do worry that in championing Christianity in this way, he misses the many ways in which the followers of Jesus Christ still pose a terrible threat to liberty and democracy around the world today. In fairness, I should say that he was specifically talking about the contemporary and very woolly British variant of Christianity. Nevertheless, it is worth restating that the solution to religious tyranny is the Enlightenment; it is not to be found in preferring an apparently softer religion over a more openly tyrannical one. That way only disappointment lies, and the noose will find its way back to your neck regardless. I think Dawkins would agree with all this, but I wish he would make it clearer. Still, and especially when he flirts with being a ‘Political Christian’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali-style, I do shake my head. I also agree with Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, who wrote in this magazine that Dawkins’s recent comments verge, if not quite on the chauvinistic, then on the anti-secular.
    
    Indeed, it did not take very long for the New Theists to pounce on Dawkins’s recent pronouncements. It should be said, though, that they have misunderstood him: he did not say that the West’s liberal values owe anything to Christianity; he merely said that he preferred Christianity today to Islam today and that he has an affinity for Christian, particularly Anglican, culture (music, cathedrals, and the like). He explicitly denied the New Theists’ central claim last year in his open letter to Hirsi Ali. ︎
12. Here there was a footnote in the original piece: ‘On April 29 of this year [2022], Angel Eduardo wrote a very good piece for the Center for Inquiry blog on this very topic: ‘No, We Don’t Need to Go Back to Church’. In it, he puts the point very well: “Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.”’ ︎
13. I might now emphasise here that Christianity had little to do with the formation of these concepts or the success of the Western world, which is better explained by other factors, as discussed in more depth by many of the articles referenced in this piece. ︎
14. And they remain faithful to Trump, who is now more or less openly declaring that he will seek to destroy American democracy and rule as a dictator if he regains power in November. ︎
15. Christian apologists used to argue that Christianity arose at just the right time to become absorbed and spread by the Roman Empire. Some of them probably still do.
    
    But one could make the same argument about Islam today: if the claims that it is the fastest-growing religion are even remotely true, perhaps Allah ensured that people from Muslim countries would be among the greatest beneficiaries of the age of mass migration. Perhaps he even made sure that there was such an age to begin with! All so Islam could spread across the world, even into decadent secular lands.
    
    Yes, that really is about the level at which religious apologetics operates. ︎
16. Incidentally, Dennett accepts the point about the ‘shared community’ value of religion even more strongly than I do, as you can read in that interview. ︎

The post Against the ‘New Theism’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

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

Christian nationalism in the US

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

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

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

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

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

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

The post Faith Watch, February 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

What role does religion play in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Two contrasting views have recently appeared in the pages of the Freethinker. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that ‘[a]t the heart of the ongoing conflict…is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory’. Meanwhile, the liberal imam Taj Hargey took the opposite view in an interview with Freethinker editor Emma Park: ‘[T]he root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight.’

The land where so much blood is currently being needlessly spilled is the Holy Land, sacred to the faithful of all three major Abrahamic religions, who exalt it within their respective spiritual and theological practices and traditions. Moreover, religious fundamentalists on both sides—whether in the hard right Israeli government and the fanatical religious Zionist settler movement or the Islamist outfits of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—continually invoke their sacred texts to justify their exclusive rights to the Holy Land. There is also a great deal of sensitivity when it comes to the use of religious sites like the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa. Given all this, it would be naïve to disregard the important part religion plays in this conflict—and it is easy to see why, in the face of such zealotry, one might see it as nothing more than a religious dispute.

Fundamentally, however, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a holy war. Its roots lie not in supposed ancient hatreds or Quranic enmities but in modern and secular conditions. In essence, I would argue that the conflict is not, as Shahid claims, about different religious groups fighting for exclusive control of the same territory. Rather, it is a quarrel between two nations of roughly equal size—one Hebrew-speaking and predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish, and one Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, but with a significant and influential Christian minority—over who should be the undisputed master of the whole land.

In the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the words ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘homeland’ and ‘nationalism’ form a consistent motif. It does not refer much to religion, except in vague and ecumenical terms – in contrast, Hamas’ 1988 charter is replete with religious references. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent Palestinian nationalist outfit after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was the ostensibly Marxist-Leninist (though ‘Stalinist’ would be a more apt description) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Founded by George Habash, who came from a Christian background, many of the PFLP’s members were very secular-minded; many were even avowed atheists. It is mostly forgotten now, but when Hamas first arose in the 1980s, they would frequently clash with PFLP members, who they condemned as ‘apostates’. At that time, Israel, playing at the old imperial game of divide and rule, also implicitly backed Hamas, seeing it as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian groups.

The goal of leftist Palestinian nationalism is one secular democratic socialist state. This has been criticised as a Trojan horse for Arab ethnonationalist domination, but even if this was true, it would be an ethnonational, not religious, domination. It was only in 2003, under Arafat’s autocratic rule, that the constitution of the Palestinian Authority was amended to proclaim that Islam was to be the sole official religion of Palestine and sharia was to be ‘a principal source of legislation’.

On the other side, the founders of the Zionist movement, from Moses Hess to Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion, were, likewise, extremely secular, even anti-religious. ‘We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples’, Herzl wrote in his infamous cri de coeur, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. Zionism originated in 19^th-century romantic nationalism. It understood the Jewish predicament in a very particular sense. Jews were a nation in the abnormal condition of being the ‘stranger par excellence’, as the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker put it in 1882: ‘They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home … [T]hey are everywhere aliens … [and] everywhere endangered’. Therefore the answer to the so-called Jewish question was to create a Jewish national home that would morph into a Jewish state in what they saw as the organic homeland of the Jews: Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whether it advocated for a Jewish nation-state or a Jewish socialist commonwealth, early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people.

Zionists heartily invoked traditional Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language, but these were subordinated to their project of national renewal. Among the first and most ardent opponents of Zionism were religious Jews who railed against the Zionist prescription of a Jewish state as a blasphemy against the Torah; in their eyes, only the Messiah (who was, as yet, still tarrying) could establish a true Jewish state. As the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has put it, ‘[S]ome of the main Zionist thinkers saw Zionism as a Jewish revolt against Judaism.’

Many Palestinians and Arabs find the notion of Jewish nationhood hard to swallow. To them, Judaism is just a religion; it does not denote a nation or a people. This position is also expressed in the PLO charter: ‘Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…’ To acknowledge the secular fact of Jewish peoplehood and the depth of the historic and cultural attachment to Eretz Israel would be, to them, tantamount to legitimising Zionism, and, thus, the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and onwards. The Israeli state’s own lack of clarity as to whether it sees Jewishness in either ethnic or religious terms exacerbates this confusion.

Zionism is not particularly unique in using religion as the external badge of nationhood. One can find a parallel (as Shahid astutely notes) in the Pakistani nationalist movement. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founding father, was firmly irreligious, and he argued that the Muslim population of South Asia was a particular nation that could not live as a minority under an India where the Hindu ‘nation’ was the majority. Therefore, Muslims required their own state.

Understanding the national foundation of the conflict means having a more nuanced understanding of the enmity towards Israel. Shahid claims that Islamic anti-Semitism is the ‘predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel’. No doubt there is an element of truth to this. Religiously-motivated anti-Semitism has proliferated across many Muslim countries, as Hina Husain, for instance, has described in an article on her Pakistani upbringing. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposition to Israel really is about ‘Muslim imperialism’, as Shahid puts it. They do not care about Palestinian nationhood; for them, Palestine is nothing more than a province in a lost empire that they wish to resurrect.

But it would be wrong to see all Arab opposition to Israel as a result of eternal anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab enmity towards Israel, in particular, is rooted in the concrete reality of what Zionism in practice has meant for them: the takeover of their land by newcomers, guarded by an external imperial power, to create a new political order that they would be excluded from, thus necessitating their extirpation. In other words, settler colonialism.

‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (& indeed after 1967 as well)’, observed the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. This antagonism would have been present whatever the identity of their dispossessors—because it is a rational and materially-based antagonism, rather than a result of hideous prejudice. This is not to say that genuine prejudice has not emerged among Palestinian Arabs, just that not all of their opposition to Israel can be dismissed as such.

In this sense, Taj Hargey is right to make his parallel with settler colonialism. But this point, rather en vogue at the moment, needs more nuance. Zionism is a peculiar form of settler colonialism, because it was also a national movement of an immensely persecuted people, who were not regarded as ‘of’ European civilisation. The means of settler colonisation were used to attain the end of an independent ethnonationalist state, and the Palestinians paid the price for that.

It is also true that in recent decades, the conflict has acquired a more overtly religious character. On the one hand, we have seen the rise of religious Zionism, culminating in the ascension to power of the increasingly sectarian Benjamin Netanyahu, and, on the other, the ‘degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ (as Christopher Hitchens put it in 2008). But even this does not negate the national basis of the conflict. It complements it. Nationalism, like religion, can be extremely irrational; it too can create ahistorical ‘sacred’ mythologies and inspire all sorts of horrors.

In essence, the Israel-Palestine question is partially an issue of settler colonialism and partially an unresolved national question. Religion is an exacerbating, toxifying factor. With the parties of God holding a veto—and exercising it liberally—over any peaceful settlement, religion has made the conflict even more intractable. One has to understand all of these dimensions as part of a whole to truly grasp the nature of the conflict.

It has become a truism to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as ‘complex’, defying simplistic narratives. Certain things, though, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas/PIJ commandos on 7 October, or the obscene bombardment Israel has inflicted on Gaza since that date, or the tyrannical Israeli occupation of the West Bank, are, however, very simple to understand and easy to take a clear position on. Still, this conflict demands a subtle yet principled approach that forthrightly opposes all racist chauvinism and religious demagoguery, whatever form it might take. Standing Together is a great civil society initiative within Israel, organised by Jews and Palestinian Arabs, seeking to promote Arab-Jewish solidarity and opposing both the occupation and extremism on all sides. This is a movement that any humanist could and should support.

Edward Said’s remark that the Palestinians are the ‘victims of the victims’ encapsulates much of the emotional intricacy underlying the conflict. In the 2015 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which concerns itself with another protracted and deadly war, there is a passage that also sums up for me the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.’ The scars of the Israel-Palestine calamity are very deep. They will not be healed any time soon. But the fact remains: Jews and Arabs are tied to a common future in the Holy Land—a land which both belong to. The task of creating a common civic society, in which both can live as free people on a free land, may be arduous. But that does not make it any less necessary.

The post Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? appeared first on The Freethinker.

The blood-soaked holy land

The Israel-Palestine conflict today involves a tangled and tragic web of disputes, but it is ultimately rooted in competing religious ideologies. So long as fanatical Jews, Muslims, and Christians see Palestine as their personal holy land, it is hard to see how the conflict will ever be resolved.

In such a politically complex dispute, with so many historic grievances and so much suffering on both sides, it is hard to understand what is really happening on the ground, let alone get any sense of how the conflict could or should be ended. Some form of the old two-state solution, moribund as it seems now, is probably still the only viable path to peace. So long as bigotry and fanaticism reign on all sides, however, that outcome is unlikely to be realised.

Even if a compromise is reached, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argues in his essay on Hamas and Islamist-leftist extremism, ‘the solution is still set to be as arbitrarily imposed as the problem was.’ We hope to offer further reflections on the conflict from different perspectives in the coming weeks.

A heroine honoured

In other, somewhat brighter, news, the Iranian feminist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 6 October. Unfortunately, Mohammadi is currently languishing in a Tehran prison for her anti-regime activism, particularly her opposition to the hijab. The Iranian mullahs are the paymasters of Hamas and are almost certainly responsible for the attack in Israel – which was, coincidentally, launched the day after the Nobel was announced. But Mohammadi represents something very troubling for the mullahs: the growth in Iran of a mass movement for secular democracy and equality between the sexes. Let us hope this movement succeeds sooner rather than later.

An Islamic party pooped

An application to form a Party of Islam in the UK was rejected by the Electoral Commission last month. The application, sent just days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, seems to have been put together rather shoddily. As EU Today reported:

‘In its official application, the Party of Islam states “We are a party who has been created to help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice.”

The Party of Islam has also stated its intention to “help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice,” further stating: “We will make sure that all problems which lingure (sic) in the great country of Great Britain is defeated.”’

Everyone should be free to set up political organisations of whatever stripe they want, of course, but one does wonder what exactly the Party of Islam would stand for.

Would a PoI prime minister disestablish the Church of England? Would there be a Mosque of England in its place? Would blasphemy laws be reenacted? What stance would the party take on, say, the Batley Grammar School teacher who is still in hiding after displaying an image of Muhammad in his classroom in 2021? What would their social policies look like?

Given that another, now defunct, Islamic political party wanted to bring back the death penalty for homosexuality, is it too far-fetched to wonder whether such parties are really just Islamist outfits exploiting the language of inclusivity to further their theocratic agenda? Surely not! But who knows? Perhaps, just in case, it is time for Britain to adopt something like the First Amendment and become a properly secular country…

Christians against…sponges?

On 4 November, Freethinker contributor and National Secular Society historian Bob Forder gave a lecture at Conway Hall entitled ‘Condoms, Sponges and Syringes: The 19th century pioneers of family planning’. Curiously for a lecture unrelated to abortion, it drew the ire of an evangelical ‘pro-life’ group, who turned up to protest, parading some gruesome images.

A strange turn of events, to be sure, but the anti-spongers are entitled to their freedom of speech, and they caused no serious disruption. As Bob Forder told The Freethinker, ‘there were no interruptions apart from some raucous hymn singing when they left.’

Yet another gay orgy scandal for the Catholic Church

Finally, it is always amusing to have new additions to the ancient canon of stories about debauched and perfidious priests. Grzegorz Kaszak’s resignation from his post as bishop of the diocese of Sosnowiec, Poland, was accepted by Pope Francis late in October. No reason was given for the good bishop’s resignation, but it is curious to note that, under his reign, Sosnowiec has seen more gay sex scandals than the sweetly innocent might expect from a diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 2010, the acting rector of a Sosnowiec seminary got into a fight in a gay club. This August, one of Kaszak’s priests was arrested for trying to prevent paramedics from entering his apartment after a man, having overdosed on erectile dysfunction pills during a gay orgy, collapsed. The priest later said, ‘I perceive this as an obvious attack on the church, including the clergy and the faithful, in order to humiliate its position, tasks and mission.’ Well, of course!

Sexual scandal is hardly new for the Catholic Church. Gay orgy scandals, in particular, seem to be as popular among priests as poppers are at…well, gay orgies. Or take another example, just for fun. In 2017, Luigi Capozzi, private secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, was arrested by the Vatican police for snorting cocaine during another such orgy in the cardinal’s apartment (the cardinal, it should be noted, was not present).

The church continues to claim divine authority to pronounce on morality and condemn gay people while running an organised system of child sexual abuse—another thing that would be funny if it were not true.

As for the hypocrisy of its priests, who uphold anti-gay doctrine while bedding half the men in their dioceses—well, let them have their fun. They could, after all, be doing much worse things—like preaching. Though if you need a supply of erectile dysfunction pills for your orgy, you probably have no future in the business.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

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

Islamist ideology and anti-Semitism

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

Iranian resistance to theocracy

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

Batley Grammar School case

Blasphemy in the classroom, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? – Freethinker

Abuse in the Catholic Church

The Pope’s Apology, by Ray Argyle

The post Faith Watch, November 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

In July, President Joe Biden is likely to visit Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the two countries draw closer towards formalising the ties that have previously remained unofficial. The normalisation process that began with the Abraham Accords in 2020, when UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco recognised the state of Israel, will be extended, through Saudi, to the broader Sunni Muslim world. And Riyadh has been laying the groundwork to formalisation.

In Turkey, despite its seven-decade old relations with Israel and recent collaborations, Recep Erdogan is still capable of using Islamist rhetoric to muster hyperbolic outrage. Saudi Arabia, however, is financially incentivising Turkey to keep this rhetoric in check. It is also offering financial support to the unflinchingly Judaeophobic Pakistan; this should extend the normalisation process from the Middle East to South Asia.

While financial and geopolitical gains were a critical factor in the 2020 Arab-Israeli normalisation, they had to be complemented by a religious rationale for the Accords – hence the nod to Abraham in their title. Saudi Arabia, for long the self-appointed leader of the Sunni half of the Arab world and custodian of Islamic sites, knows that it needs a religious narrative to sell to the Muslim world, since the latter has long been taught Jewish hatred through Islamic scriptures, which display every kind of Judaeophobia, from asking the believers ‘not to take Jews as friends’ to ordering their genocide.

Post-postcolonialism

Since World War II, three generations of global leftist intelligentsia have endowed the Arab-Israeli conflict with immutable postcolonial narratives. The Western powers, which were primarily responsible for enforcing the new world order and the injustices that came with it, created Israel as a haven for the Jews whom it had actively persecuted, or as a colonial base to continue subjugating the locals in the Middle East. At least, this is how, for the past seven decades, the ‘progressive’ argument has gone.

The idea that any land should be allocated to a religious community owing to the claims of its canonical scripture would be preposterous for anyone not believing in that scripture. However, this happened with the new state of Israel, in a part of the world which was surrounded by states ethnically cleansing the very religious community from which it was formed. The same Muslim-majority states actively persecuted other minorities using Islamic scriptures. In a world brimming with religious injustices, only one succeeded in capturing the attention of many of those on the progressive Left, who have then spent decades dismissing suggestions that religion has anything to do with it.

For proponents of this view, Israel is touted as an ‘artificial’, ‘imposed’ nation-state. Yet this is in a region where the very idea of a nation state has been artificially imposed, and where regional borders are delineated according to spheres of control exercised by competing powers. Neither Jordon, Lebanon, Syria or Iraq existed as unified states prior to the interference by the West, which had also seen the African continent sliced up like a cake. Similarly, the parallels between Pakistan and Israel are innumerable: the creation of Pakistan resulted in the largest mass migration in human history, leaving significantly more people displaced than were by the creation of Israel. The fabrication of borders to create these states is as much a consequence of Western colonialism as their Muslim-majority identity is a result of Islamic imperialism.

But just as postcolonial ideologues have artificially expunged religion out of any examination of the Middle East’s difficulties, their narrative has also sought to sanitise Islam and diminish its imperialistic tendencies. For instance, Edward Said, the prophet of Middle Eastern postcolonial studies, in his staunch defence of Islam, castigated Western media for depicting Islam negatively – at the same time as many Muslim-majority states were carrying out gory, antediluvian punishments, such as flogging for extramarital sex and stoning individuals to death for exercising freethought about Islam, in accordance with Islamic law (sharia). Said’s ‘Orientalism’ has evolved into today’s cultural-relativist ‘Islamophobia’ narrative, in which the unflinching protection of 1,400-year-old ideas, which themselves codify violence in large parts of the Muslim world, is deemed the hallmark of intellectual progressiveness.

That many on the progressive Left have chosen to view certain issues through the narrow, selectively opaque lens of postcolonialism seems to have blinded them to the fact that others can be passionately attached to the same cause, but as a result of a completely different set of ideas – ideas which also invoke an ideology that actively seeks the destruction of much of what the progressives otherwise stand for. This has created a bizarre and perilous pact between the Islamists and the Left, who together try to minimise Islam’s role in any conflict in the region, including for the maintenance of the Arab-Israeli conflict and for the refusal to create a Palestinian state.

Religious roots

In addition to Islam, it is important to stress how the two other Abrahamic religions have contributed to the conflict in the Middle East. Just as Islam, from its onset, has explicitly condemned Christian and Jews, and rejected the fundamental beliefs of its predecessors – for instance by calling Jesus a prophet and not the son of God – Christianity too was keen from an early stage to distance itself from its Judaic roots. 

Biblical Judeophobia, which holds the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, oversaw the persecution and even pogroms of Jewish populations from western Europe to Russia. Pogroms were also carried out under the Ottoman Empire. There were cheerleaders aplenty in both Christian-majority and Muslim-majority countries when the Axis powers were preparing the grounds for the Holocaust. The latter was itself spearheaded by an ethno-supremacist Nazi ideology, the genocidal antisemitism of which was complemented by religionist Judaeophobia.

Yet Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel which emerged amid the escalating Jewish persecution in the 19th century, has found many of its proponents aspiring to recreate ‘land of Canaan’ that would encompass the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The Biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’, today called the West Bank, was captured by Israeli forces after the 1967 war. The West Bank forms a large chunk of the Palestinian territory that was earmarked by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Yet over the past 55 years, it has been inhabited by nearly half a million Jewish settlers, a vast majority of them Orthodox Jews looking to fulfil the canonical prophecies.

Jerusalem symbolises the common roots, and shared animosity, between the three Abrahamic religions and the expansionist empires that have conquered the city, from the Romans in the first century AD to the Arabs in seventh century. Each conqueror in turn aspired to assert its dominance atop the remnants of the vanquished religions. The Temple Mount is a symbol of intra-Abrahamic antagonism and the tangible religious root of the centuries-old conflict between them.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, built atop the Temple Mount, signifies the third holiest site in Islam. According to Islamic tradition, it was the first qibla (direction of prayer) sanctioned by Muhammad and the site of the fable that narrates his flight to Jannah (heaven). It is the Jewish occupation of this holy land that has outraged the vast majority of the Muslim world, and constitutes its main grievance against Israel – more so than Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The animosity for Jews in Islamic scriptures adds Judaeophobic fuel to the Islamist fire.

Islamic anti-Semitism

While Jewish and Christian progressives largely denounce their scriptures’ contribution to the conflict, Muslim progressives have historically toed the leftist position on Israel: even those otherwise critical of Islamist doctrines have actively disassociated Islamic anti-Semitism from the broader Muslim denunciation of the Jewish state. Many have argued that the anti-Jewish bigotry in Muslim-majority states, which sometimes spirals into conspiratorial hysteria, is in fact rooted in the creation of Israel. This is a convenient, or deliberate, rewriting of the Muslim world’s history. Horrific massacres of Jews were being carried out centuries before modern-day Israel was born – from Hebron, Safed, and Petah Tikva in modern day Israel-Palestine to Damascus, Algiers, and Basra.

As far back as 628 AD, the Battle of Khaybar saw the conquest of Muhammad’s army over Jewish tribes; according to Islamic tradition, this involved the massacre and expulsion of the Jews. The Qatar-produced Ramadan television series ‘Khaybar’ alluded to the battle using the popular Arabic chant ‘Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud’ (Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning’). This chant is frequently heard in anti-Israeli rallies from the Middle East to Western Europe. There are many hadiths (sayings of Muhammad) that encourage killing of Jews. For instance, a quotation often cited by jihadists and radical Islamists asks Muslims to fight the Jews until the time when trees and stones tell the believers, ‘O Muslim! There’s a Jew behind me, so kill him.’ The charter of Hamas uses many verses from the Islamic scriptures to call for the extermination of Jews.

Over the past century, episodes of ethnic cleansing of Jews have been carried out across the Muslim world from the Middle East to South and East Asia. These have run in parallel with expressions of fear over Israel’s attempted elimination of Muslims in Palestine. The lack of a global Muslim push to establish a Palestinian state in West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when the territories were under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, also suggests that creation of another Arab-Muslim state was not as high a priority as elimination of the Jewish one.

At the end of the 1970s and in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the siege of Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a schism between Sunnis and Shias, led by Riyadh and Tehran respectively, exploded. A newfound oil hegemony became the economic basis for a proxy jihad between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This led to the radicalisation of Muslim movements from Palestine to Kashmir; even the formerly secular nationalist strains of the movements were purged in favour of a monolithic Islamist narrative. Meanwhile, as Saudi Arabia peddled violent anti-Semitism through mosques and school curricula, it was simultaneously Israel’s ally in the US alliance that pushed anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. Simultaneously, Iran, the hub of Shia proxy warfare, has actively allied itself with the Sunni jihadist Hamas to maintain its leverage in the Arab world. In turn, the jihadist takeover of the broader Muslim world in recent decades has meant that instead of rallying together over humanitarian grounds, even the officially secular Indonesia and Turkey have condemned Israel in an anti-Semitic way.

An Islamic rationale for Israel

New geopolitical realities, spearheaded by shared animosity for Iran, however, have pushed the Sunni Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into publicly befriending the Jewish state which they have long threatened with destruction. As a result, the radically Islamised curriculum in Saudi Arabia has been revised to remove anti-Semitic texts. The highest Saudi clerics, who long called for the ‘annihilation’ of Jews, dubbing them ‘descendants of apes and pigs’, have now been increasingly asking Muslims to exhibit kindness to Jews. From TV shows based on Islamic history, to deliberations in academic conferences, there has been a swift turnaround in the Arab narrative on Jews and Israel, eventually culminating in the 2020 agreements. And since the promises of Israel’s demolition were rooted in Islam, so is the rationale for this remarkable volte-face. 

In his 2020 visit to Auschwitz, Mohammed al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, passionately vowed ‘this must never happen again.’ He insisted that fighting hatred against Jews is a ‘religious obligation’, and maintained that the Muslim World League would keep challenging anti-Semitism till it ceased to exist. ‘Political outlooks change over time but our values, our morals should never change,’ al-Issa said. And yet that is precisely what has been happening, thanks in large part to religion.

Apologists of the anti-Semitism in Islamic scriptures have long sought to contextualise, or dismiss, explicit calls for Jewish blood in the canonical texts that Muslims around the world are taught. In its condemnation of January’s jihadist attack on a Texas synagogue, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) rejected anti-Semitism. However, it will be unlikely to address its own Judaeophobia and support for antisemitic jihadists like Aafia Siddiqui, who inspired the attack. In the aftermath of jihadist anti-Semitic manoeuvres, Muslim groups like the CAIR point to Islamic passages that urge tolerance and brotherhood, all the while refusing to address the passages that explicitly urge violence.

For instance, Jews are among the Ahl-al-Kitaab(‘People of the Book’) that the Quran refers to 31 times. According to Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, the ‘People of the Book’ were entitled to religious recognition under Islamic sharia, through being given the inferior status of dhimmi (‘protected persons’), which required them to pay jizya (tax) in return for protection. Islamic sharia also allows Muslim men to marry Christian and Jewish women, although not the other way round.

Today, a blend of theological guarantees for the Ahl-al-Kitaab and emphasis on the holiness of Al-Aqsa Mosque are the basis of the Islamic rationale used to justify the Muslim world’s normalisation of relations with Israel. Many even quote parts of the Quran to argue that Islamic scriptures in fact affirm that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews. The ostensible Islamic justification for Israel has been pushed by Saudi Arabia as it draws closer to normalising relations with it. A Saudi-led Arab influence over Al-Aqsa would further bolster Islamic tourism – which has also been spearheaded by Riyadh, as it increasingly looks to find substitutes for its revenue from the oil that is eventually going to run out.

This Saudi push for reformist interpretations of Islam, in other words, is not an offshoot of collective Muslim reflection, but a powerplay designed to reinvent Islam as the geo-economic foundation of an Arab world that is still just as invested in maintaining its totalitarian hegemony over its peoples. The Muslim world’s monolithic attitudes towards Islam, and the geopolitical conflicts where Islam has been imposed, could have evolved organically through permitting freedom of conscience and religion once again, after their centuries of suppression. Instead, however, the new interpretations of Islam are being forged autocratically by leaders, and while maintaining inflexible restraints on free thought among the wider Muslim populations. 

Suppressing free thought

The suppression of critical thinking means that Muslims around the world would have to arbitrarily accept Israel through Islamic legitimisation, just as they were previously pushed to support the Israel’s genocidal destruction through a different interpretation of the same canonical texts. What this also means is that much needed interfaith coexistence, regional peace, and Muslim intellectual progress will continue to be held hostage by the interpretation of Islam that best suits the geopolitical ambitions of the Arab monarchs at any given point. That is why, regardless of how reformist an interpretation of Islam the Arab states might be upholding today, they will not accept any allowance for challenging Islam itself. For instance, while the Hindutva regime in India has been actively targeting Muslims, and while its military has occupied the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Arab countries only  criticised New Delhi over the perceived blasphemy by Nupur Sharma, the BJP spokesperson, against Muhammad, when she alluded to the marriage of Islam’s prophet to six-year-old Aisha as narrated in Islamic scriptures.

Whether in South Asia or the Middle East, regional stability and human progress have long been stymied by the interference of religion in policymaking. The millennia-old faultlines between Israel and Palestine, or their respective cultures, have long needed reconciliatory solutions that are based on pragmatism rather than religion. But the progressives who should be spearheading such movements have created an ideology that reflects the monolithism and dogmatism of organised religion.

Historically, the hard Left has cherished the Marxist aspiration of destroying Israel as a way of removing Western capitalism from the region. The ‘anti-capitalist’ movement calling for ‘illegitimate’ Israel’s eradication grew in parallel with Arab monarchies, whose own legitimacy was rooted in the historic triumph of their founders in tribal warfare, and whose fast-accumulating oil wealth gave them disproportionate influence on the global stage. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Left broadly acquiesced to a two-state solution, but its fixation with Israel, often in parallel to the abandonment of human rights abuses elsewhere such as Kurdistan, Balochistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, or Xinjiang, has persisted. While the Marxist-Leninist goal of eliminating of Israel during the Soviet era described the Jewish state itself as artificial and colonial, the heirs of those ideologies use the same labels for Israel, but have moved the focus of their campaign to the territories captured after 1967 depending on the audience.

The hard Left’s doublespeak in its position on Israel – shifting between condemning the occupied territories or the state itself as illegal – is similar to the way in which Israeli leaders and expansionist Zionists allude to the ‘state of Israel’, whose borders vary from the pre-1967 state to ‘between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea’, depending on the setting of the discussion. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire political career fighting against the creation of a Palestinian state, before becoming the first leader of the Israeli right to concede the possibility of one in 2009, and then going on to spend the next decade or so in power persisting with his expansionist definition of Israel and rejecting any notion of a Palestinian state.

No one faction has a monopoly on duplicity: some Western media have suppressed free speech about Israel’s war crimes by depicting criticism of Israel as synonymous with anti-Semitism. Compare, for example, their contrasting coverage of Palestine and Ukraine.

Even so, my primary focus in this article has been on Islamists and Leftist opponents of Israel. This is not only because these two factions have bound Palestinians to their respective ideologies, all the while claiming to be their well-wishers, but also because criticism of Western media can be easily found in Western media itself, and denunciation of Israeli crimes in Israeli newspapers. In contrast, the Muslim Left has mirrored the Muslim Right by silencing any dissentient views on Israel, while globally, the ideological Left has suppressed divergent opinions, to the point of facilitating anti-Semitism within their own ranks.

Today, the prohibition on dissent among hardliners on the Left, and their enactment of their own blasphemy codes, can arguably be seen in the ‘woke’ cancel culture that religiously silences any challenge to the ideological status quo. Today, liberal women who express concern over hard-earned sex-based rights are being apostatised out of many progressive circles, and their refusal to conform to fast-evolving gender narratives is equated with bigotry against entire groups.

Unfortunately, this jettisoning of free speech, instead of allowing the open debate of ideas that are deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘offensive’ – the raison d’être of the right to free speech – has restricted their discussion. For the Palestinians, the historical silencing of viewpoints by their friends and foes alike has pushed the region today closer towards having a ‘solution’ arbitrarily imposed upon it. And it is the ‘progressive’ ideologues who have been willing to leave the Palestinians helpless in the face of autocratic religious leaders, and who have glorified the suffering of a minority as a way of legitimising their own puritanic views.

The post Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared first on The Freethinker.