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When challenged on Christianity’s dark and savage history of repression, torture and abuse, the more intellectually challenged sometimes retort with the long-discredited assertion that worse atrocities were committed by two infamous ‘atheists’ - Stalin and Hitler. It’s a tired and feeble argument, deployed only by those too ignorant to know better. So why go over this ground again? Well, it does have a habit of coming back…
The Inquisition is not over. Faith continues to kill and torment. In Africa, for instance, witch hunts are causing mothers to turn against their children. Even babies are being brutalised and murdered. But this is not driven by some Dark Continent cult: this is fundamentalist Christianity at work.
Professor Richard Dawkins’ appearance on the BBC’s Have Your Say programme prompted Father Jonathan Morris, Fox News’ religious attack poodle, to dredge up the old and insupportable myth that Stalin and Hitler killed millions in the name of atheism. (Catholic priests and Fox News presenters are, of course, both accustomed to spouting insupportable myths.)
This is a standard and intellectually dishonest knee-jerk response to an inescapable truth: that throughout its history, Christianity has been responsible for widespread death and misery. The Inquisition comes immediately to mind. That said, today we most frequently associate religiously inspired murder and violence with Islam. Aside from Islamic-inspired terrorism, brutal, so-called ‘honour’ killings are shamefully frequent in places like Pakistan and even among Islamic communities in more enlightened countries, such as the UK. A recent report in The Guardian highlighted the murders and burnings of women in Iraq, now that Islam can use the chaos of that benighted country to reassert its atavistic influence.
But Christianity has not finished killing.
I remember clearly the moment I became an atheist. I was 10 years old when I suddenly realised that there was no good reason to believe in god or Jesus. That realisation has been a strength to me ever since.
It was all because of an argument. One sunny day, a friend and I were walking home from primary school. For some reason, now lost in time, we were arguing about whether Jesus was ‘real’. I was stoutly defending the historical truth of the Christ story while he was saying that it was all ‘made up’.
Not that I was what you would call ‘religious’. My family were not believers. My mother survived the allied bombing of Hamburg, and you don’t come out of that both sane and religious. I had, though, absorbed the unconscious, unthinking social conventions of believing that god was up there somewhere, that Jesus was real and that Christmas was great.
London’s Metropolitan Police may soon be operating from large, fortress-style bases to which the public will have no access.
While community support officers may be based in local shop-type premises, where the rest of us will be allowed to enter, the bulk for the Met’s forces will be housed in centralised ‘warehouses’, firmly closed to the public but possibly including jail cells.
This is a dangerous move. Police forces, and the Met in particular, are vulnerable to a kind of elitist, isolationist mindset that can become a sort of siege mentality at times.
Within the force, those officers engaged in community work are often seen as ’soft’, or not doing ‘real’ policing. The Met is riddled with an atavistic, macho self-image that sees real policing involving hard men doing tough things. And this leads to the other form of isolationism - the habit of police officers to see the world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.
The ordeal of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was jailed for blasphemy in Sudan, ended quickly. We can be grateful for that. But the religiously oriented regime in which she was convicted remains unchanged. Who will be its next victim?
It was an act of pure malice. The school secretary, who had been fired, reported Gibbons as a way of getting revenge on the school. Such grudges, such petty behaviour, are a fact of life everywhere. What is significant here is that Sudan’s laws, shaped and enforced by religious observance, provided a mechanism by which an otherwise trivial act - the naming of a teddy bear - could be exploited to extract a savage retaliation.
We all know Facebook won’t let you quit: you can deactivate an account, but not erase it. Many of us, who value our privacy, think this is disgraceful and arrogant. Facebook seems to think it owns us. But why worry? Just make sure all the information they have about you is false.
When I first heard about, and joined, Facebook it seemed like an amusing idea - for about a week. That’s about as long as it took to hook up with a bunch of old friends with whom I’d lost contact. Then the annoyances really set it - people badgering me to install applications to do things whose triviality and pointlessness make Big Brother seem positively constructive. Then there’s the advertising. And above all, the dawning realisation that I was doing all the work to make Mark Zuckerberg rich - by providing lots of intimate details about myself that he could sell.
Facebook is a waste of bandwidth. So why not leave? The answer is, they won’t let you. Your data is just too valuable to them. They can’t let you go.
If you ever want an example of just how convoluted, crazy and illogical religious thinking has become, you can usually depend on the Catholics. Take the comments by the Pope’s astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, who has just accused creationists of being pagans.
The BBC’s Have Your Say programme will be interviewing Dr Richard Dawkins. You have the opportunity to post messages to the good doctor - go here to post your question or make your statement.
Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee might just be the perfect candidate. With a preference for myth over truth and a willingness to publicly parade his ignorance, he’ll fit right in at the White House.
Standing before a crowd in the small town of Newton, Iowa, Huckabee summed up his election hopes with a familiar quip. “It’s scientifically impossible for the bumblebee to fly,” he said. “But the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, flies anyway.”
It was the perfect statement for Huckabee, an evangelical christian who is not shy about his dismissal of evolution and his desire to see creationism (in the dishonest disguise of ‘intelligent design’) taught in schools.
It was perfect because it so ably demonstrates Huckabee’s own qualities. For a start, it’s a lie.
Fingerprint System Nightmare - Funny home videos are a click away
No security system is ever foolproof. The more we rely on technology for our sense of security, the more vulnerable we become.
