Creationists on the March

In recent times it has become clear that religion is on the March. Craig Ventnor who decoded the Human Genome in a lecture a few months ago spoke of his despair that in his own country of the United States, the most technologically advanced on the planet, there were still a large majority of people who thought the world was only 7,000 years old as the Boible says, that people walked the Planet alongside dinosaurs and so on. Even in Europe where it was thought that such ideas had died out decades ago with the succesful fights over "Lady Chatterley's Lover", "Gay News" and so on, and the general acceptance of the Theory of Evolution, there has been a growth of religious fundamentalism, and even of Creationism, despite the fact that in Britain only about 20% of people say they believe in God. It is a determined minority that is on the offensive, and it now they are getting backing ffrom fundamentlaists in the US who have big bucks and TV channels to back them up. Already on UK Cable TV we have a GOD Channel, as well as fundamentalist preachers occupying slots on other channels at the weekend.

In part, sections of the Left are to blame. They have accepted the Liberal nonsense of Multiculturalism rather than arguing that all existing cultures - all of which rest in large part on some set of reactioanry religious and moral beleifs - are oppressive, all are the cultures of the slaveowners, and Socialism will require a single, secular, working class culture if it is to be succesful. Sections of the Left in that vein have bowed down afraid to criticise in particular the cultures of ethnic Minorities in their midst - many of which unreformed as Judeo-Christian based cultures have been over the last 50 years or so, in particular, in order to survive in a largely secular, modernist world, are even more reactionary than that Western Culture - for fear a) of being criticised as in some way racist or b) for fear of losing potential recruits for their organisations within such communities or c) because having lost faith in the working class they have found themselves as foot soldiers of assorted religious zealots engaged in this or that "anti-imperialist" struggle. And as was bound to be the case one group of reactioanry religious fundamentalists feeds off the success of another. The Christians understandably say, "If you can't criticise or mock Mohammed, why should it be okay to criticise or mock Jesus?" The door is pushed open to a retun of all of that religious fundamentalism and censorship that most of us thought we had seen the end of in the 1960's.

But, the Left has to be careful not to respond with a censorship of its own. I agree people should be free to believe whatever nonsense they like. Galileo should have been free to argue his viewpoint after all when the majority of the planet thought he was a nutter. The problem, however, seems to me to be this. We are socialists, Marxists even, we have a view not just of how the world is, but how it should be. We do not wish just to have the right to hold those beliefs, but to convince others that they are correct. That means also then creating a world and society according to those values. In that world people might be free to hold whatever beliefs they continued to have, but the dominant view would prevail.

Someone who continued to believe that freedom could only be achieved through a free market for instance might be free to put that into practice in terms of employing themselves or maybe even a few other people, but many Marxists (I wouldn't be amongst them) would see it as the function of the state to prevent such people from say owning a large enterprise that exploited workers.

In short what I am saying is that if you have a world view the whole point is that if you hold it sincerely then you DO want it to be put into practice, and not want it to be something you just take out to read every so often. The problem secularists are now having with religion is that for a long time they have got used to religionists being hypocrites, people who hold their religious beliefs as a token, who even at the highest levels of the Church have effectively given in to Science, and compromised their beliefs. It is the shock of now confronting people who assert their beliefs, and their right to try to structure a world according to those beliefs as determinedly as socialists put forward their beliefs and try to create a world according to them.

Socialists would be appalled if anyone suggested that they should not try to implement their beliefs in practice, so why should socialists expect religionists to be any less appalled. This makes the answer difficult. No secularist wants to allow religionists to impose their views on society, but to deny the right to put those views into practice sets a dangerous precedent for socialists. Just as legitimately could a bourgeois society refuse to allow socialists to put its views into practice, could argue against the formation of Trade Unions, Co-operative organisations etc. or any other practical application of socialist ideas.

The answer must surely be not to look at measures which effectively amount to censorship and limitation of freedom, but to once and for all destroy the arguments upon which the religionists stand.