Perverted Religion and Hypocrisy

As once again we find the basic bourgeois freedom of free expression under threat from vile reactionaries, the response of some has once again been to try to provide excuses for the mediaevalist, murdering scum responsible. Some of that response, by those who have allied with political Islam, is of the noxious, opportunist type we have seen in the past, of blaming imperialism, for its intervention in the Middle East. It seems incapable of putting forward a positive socialist opposition to that imperialist intervention, without simultaneously putting itself on the same side as the even more reactionary forces of political Islam. It is the same kind of “Third Campism” that, as Trotsky predicted, was unable to put forward a positive socialist opposition to Stalinism, without simultaneously putting itself on the same side as imperialism. But, the response has also been the usual one of blaming these murderous acts on “fanatics”, people who act against the true peaceful nature of Islam, a nature it shares with all other religions. In doing so, it fails to tackle the root cause of such acts.

The root cause of those acts is not imperialist intervention, nor is it the conditions of poverty in which people live in parts of France, and elsewhere, nor is it a sense of alienation from the host society, a failure to integrate and so on. All of those things may contribute to providing the foot soldiers, the human material for carrying out such barbarism, but the root cause lies with religion itself. Not just with Islam as a religion, but with all religion. When assorted representatives of liberalism, whether they call themselves conservatives, liberals or even socialists, try to write these acts off as being a perverted form of religion, the acts of people who are acting contrary to the principles of the religion they claim to adhere to, therefore, they are simply apologising for their failure to tackle the root cause itself, and they are ensuring that these events will continue to occur. Religion is the swamp within which these ideas are allowed to be fermented, and out of which they crawl to infest the rest of society. If we want to stop these actions occurring in future, the time has come to drain the religious swamp.

That doesn't mean some kind of Stalinist, bureaucratic prohibition of religion. That would simply be to send it underground, and make it even more poisonous. It would also be to use the same kind of censorious approach of religion itself. But, for too long secularists, and secular society have been prepared to live in a state of peaceful co-existence with religion. In fact, as some have pointed out, where such a state of co-existence with Judaeo-Christian religion has existed for some time, not even that has existed with Islam, which has been granted a special role, apparently out of fear, compared to other faiths. For example, the mainstream media refused to publish the Danish cartoons, several years ago, and when the Jesus and Mo cartoons were replicated, the image of Mohammed was blurred out, but not that of Jesus.

The basis of the condition of peaceful co-existence, has been a tacit agreement, that secular society would leave the religionists to wallow in their own God delusions, provided the believers agreed to be thoroughly hypocritical in their faith, and did not try to pursue it consistently. In much of Europe, religion became not an article of faith, but simply a tradition. The only time people went to Church was to get married, baptised, or buried. When some of the priests, who thought that this was hypocritical, spoke out, and even began to refuse to marry people who had never been to Church, they were quickly slapped down by their own organisation, that was desperate to get customers on any basis.

What this liberal secular society is finding it hard to get to grips with is not that the religious fundamentalists are acting out some kind of perverted form of religion, but that, on the contrary, they refuse to be part of this hypocritical entente. The real problem liberal secular society has is that the fundamentalists, of whichever religion, are in fact carrying their religion to its rational conclusion, and acting consistently in its defence.

An example, of the hypocrisy is in relation to this repeated claim that those who act violently in the name of their religion are acting against the true nature of the religion. All religions, we are told, are innately moral, and peaceful in nature. But, this flowery presentation of “God Is Love”, is completely at odds with reality, and it is no wonder that anyone who has been schooled assiduously from childhood in any of the world's faiths, should conclude that there is only one true religion, and often only one true God, that must be defended against His enemies, gun in hand if necessary.

And, indeed that same liberal secular state has often relied on such belief as a foundation of its own defence. When British soldiers went into battle around the globe to establish its Empire, and cast millions into slavery, they did so having been told by the representatives of the Christian Church in Britain, that they belonged to God's chosen country, and that in slaughtering millions they were doing God's work. In just the same way that its said that the job of an accountant is to go in and count up the dead after the battle is over, and the job of an auditor is to bayonet the wounded, so after British soldiers had imposed its rule, the job of the Christian Missionaries was to follow behind them, and convert the heathens, at the point of a bayonet. When British soldiers went into battle in WWI and WWII, they were told the same thing, even though the German soldiers they were killing, had been told by their own Christian religious leaders that they too were fighting in the interest of that same Christian God!

And, the fact is that anyone who had been consistently indoctrinated in the Christian faith from childhood, would find nothing odd with such violent acts, whereby the notion of “Love Your Enemy” is nowhere to be seen. The Judaeo-Christian religion is based upon both the Old and the New Testament. Whenever I have read the Old Testament the last thing that I see is a God of Love. Rather it reads like an epic novel, not of War and Peace, but of perpetual total war, whose fundamental basis is the idea that “My God is more powerful and more vicious than your God, and will help me to smite all of his enemies”.

But, the idea that the Christian religion is any better on the basis of the New Testament is also totally false. The New Testament is the work of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who in the fourth century A.D. had selected manuscripts collated into it. That is why various accounts of the life of Jesus from his contemporaries, including Mary Magdalene, were excluded, and hidden away. It formed a religious basis for the extension of the Holy Roman Empire across the globe, an Empire that was also not renowned for its peace loving ways.

We have, for example, the Borgias. A Pope renowned for political intrigue, as a means of spreading the family power across Europe, by spreading the power of the Catholic Church, renowned for hosting orgies in the Vatican, for fathering a child with his daughter and so on. We have one of his children, Lucrezia a renowned political intriguer, and poisoner, and a son, Cesare, who was the employer of, and model for Niccolo Machiavelli. The name “Old Nick”, as a pseudonym for the devil, is derived from Niccolo Machiavelli, but in reality, his work “The Prince”, is considered by many scholars to be a satire on the life and methods of Cesare Borgia.

But, similarly, we have the example of The Spanish Inquisition. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, but would those who claim that Christianity is all about peace and love, and that those who act violently in its name, have us believe that the Spanish Inquisition were not officially sanctioned by the Church?

My father remembered that in his youth, less than a hundred years ago, Catholics and Protestants, in Stoke, were organised in rival gangs. The same thing persists today in Glasgow, and other parts of Scotland, as well as in Liverpool, and most notably in the North of Ireland. And that is just a schism between two branches of the same Christian faith, let alone violent antagonism between the supporters of opposing Gods!

In the 1960's, the Christian Church in Britain was still powerful enough to have people locked up for blasphemy; to censor books, films, and magazines for outraging its morals, and so on. Mary Whitehouse even found justification for complaining about Noddy, and not Noddy Holder either. A couple of weeks ago I was watching a documentary about the wonderful Dave Allen who did so much during the 1960's and 70's to satirise the hypocrisy and nonsense of religion. But, it was also set out on that programme that his actions not only got his programmes banned in Ireland, but he also received death threats himself from the adherents of that Catholic faith, including the Official and Provisional IRA.

Some years ago, when I was lecturing, I had to teach a group of young mechanics, about half a dozen of whom were members of the local Pentecostal Church. I'd come across older people before with such fundamentalist beliefs, but to come across such young people who had grown up at a time of TV, of science education, and so on was still something of a surprise. But, education is a clear example of this hypocrisy. On the one hand, we have kids being taught science, on the other we have compulsory religious instruction! In a discussion I had with some of my old school teachers, after I'd become a teacher myself, having expressed the idea that religion had no place in school, their response was, “What would we do for several weeks before Christmas?”

In the US, we have had Christian fundamentalists blowing up abortion clinics, and using high powered rifles to shoot doctors and nurses for having the temerity to legally carry out abortions. We have some of the same lunatics now picketing abortion clinics in Britain, and applying pressure on those going into the clinics.

The Ku Klux Klan has also been associated with Protestant Christianity. It was militant Christians who objected to Jerry Springer The Opera, and tried to get it banned, no doubt finding their own inspiration once more given the cowardly response of the British media to the outrage over the Danish cartoons. We have also seen the banning of the play Beshti, as a result of similar violent opposition by Sikhs. Instead of tackling this religious intolerance, the British government introduced its own censorship, to provide religion with special protection against criticism.

If the response to the shootings in Paris is to find justifications for such acts, or to present those responsible as in some way just mavericks, acting against the true nature of essentially peaceful religions, secularists will have failed, and society will be setting itself up for further such attacks, encouraging other religious bigots to demand similar special treatment, and exemption from criticism and satire. Rather than going on to the defensive, secularists and socialists should go on the offensive against all such obscurantism.

Creationists On the March

I have been watching the More4 series of programmes by Richard Dawkins taking on the ideas of organised religion. Over recent years the Left has had a problem with religion. For a long time, after the defeat of the religious Right in Britain in the 1960's over their attempts to retain censorship, and maintain medieval laws on blasphemy, fought out in the Courts over Lady Chatterley, and Gay News, we thought that one of the basic elements of bourgeois democracy, the right to Free Speech had been well entrenched. Moreover, as even the basic elements of Education provided by the Capitalist Education system, and the context of a modern industrialised society, in which the basic tenets of science were absorbed by the mass of population were enough to lead the vast majority of people to recognise that the words contained in a Book written by a number of different authors more than 2000 years ago, were not an adequate explanation of how the Earth had been created, or how Man and other animals had developed. In fact, for many it gave rise to the necessary question - if that bit of the Bible was not true, why believe any of the rest of it?

As if to emphasise that fact, even the religious leaders, and the teachers of religion in school, found themselves in a quandary of how to respond to such questions, when the body of evidence for science was so great, and their own beliefs so unsupportable. They shifted ground to argue that the Bible had to be read as allegory rather than literal truth. Even the "Gospel Truth", was apparently now only relative.

But, it is a good lesson that nothing ever progresses in a straight line, and even ground won that seems solidly defended, can come under attack, unless it is regularly maintained, reinforced, and seen as a bastion from which to move forward. I remember when I first left school coming up against a lay preacher in the Town Hall where I was working, and he was a fundamentalist. At first, I found confronting his ideas a bit of a novelty, but ultimately they are a bit like the trolls, who frequent the Internet. In order to have a rational discussion there have to be certain rules for debate. The troll, and the fundamentalist are different. The troll has no fixed views, or if they do they do not form the basis of their trolling activity, which is merely to engage in argument for the sake of argument, and to prolong such debates for as long as possible, by whatever means possible. The fundamentalist does have fixed views. But what they share is a closed mind. The former is not interested in an exchange of views only arguing, the latter is not interested in an exchange of views either, but only conveying theirs. Both will defend their position by similar means, essentially just denying any truth put to them, whilst asserting their truth without any credible evidence.

A few years later, when I was teaching I had a worse experience, as a number of apprentices I had in a class were Pentecostalists, and as a teacher I could not just walk away from a class discussion with them, simply on the basis that there was no rational basis for discussion with people who will reject any evidence no matter how strong, and simply assert in its place there own prejudices. In the US, as Dawkins programmes demonstrates this is a problem, in a way that it is not here - yet. The scientist Craig Ventner, whose company decoded the human genome, said in a lecture a year or so ago that it was ironic that the US is the most technologically advanced country on the planet by far, and yet around 40% of its population still believe that Man walked with dinosaurs, and that the planet is less than 10,000 years old, a belief they hold to as a result of holding the Bible to be absolute truth. In parts of the US, teachers are physically hounded out if they teach Evolution and real science in schools.

In Britain, despite the State encouraging the development of Faith Schools, financed by rich religious zealots, such views are still a small minority. But, minorities can become majorities. The Lefts problems have been further enhanced as a result of its own bankrupt politics. Having failed to build a revolutionary Party based in the working class, and having cut itself off from the existing Workers Party, the left in its search for new recruits dedicated itself not to the struggle for Socialism, but a struggle against Capitalism, and what was seen to be its Evil Twin, Imperialism. As a consequence sections of the left such as but not only the SWP accommodated themselves to some of the most reactionary political forces on the Planet, in the form of various clerical-fascist governments, and movements, solely on the basis of a spurious "anti-imperialism". These forces may not have been worse than the Christian clerical-fascists in the US, who adopted their own forms of terrorism against those they opposed such as the doctors performing abortions, or the homosexuals. But, having given the forces of Political-Islam such Left cover, the advance of those forces, the challenge to Free Speech that they brought forward, acted to also provide cover for the other religious zealots to put their heads above the parapet too. If blasphemy against Mohammed was not to be allowed, then why should it be allowed against Jesus?

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.

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.