Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

It seems there’s a belief among certain extremist factions in the UK’s Christian community that they are being discriminated against.

According to the people behind the new (and hilariously titled) ‘Not Ashamed’ campaign, their views and needs are being ignored in public life and elsewhere.

It is, of course, baseless paranoia. Actually, it’s probably not even that: it’s a cynical and mendacious attempt to portray Christians as an oppressed group. After all, such groups tend to garner sympathy and special treatment.

As if 2,000 years of power and special treatment weren’t enough.

In the UK, Christianity already enjoys privileges and benefits out of all proportion to its importance or worth to society. Just to give one example: we have unelected bishops able to wield votes in the House of Lords purely by dint of their pointy hats.

It may be that some of those behind this campaign – such as Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury – genuinely believe themselves to be marginalised. Clearly, they haven’t stopped to consider whether they should be marginalised.

Religion is a personal matter. No faith – whether it’s Christianity, Islam or Jedi-ism – should form the basis of any kind of public policy. Nor should people be given special privileges purely on the basis of their superstititions.

It’s not discrimination these people are experiencing – merely an end to their unwarranted privilege. They are not accustomed to being a marginal group. They are not used to being treated like everyone else.

After two millennia of grasping on to power – of being able to control and manipulate – they suddenly find themselves a dwindling minority, unable to make themselves heard because no-one is interested in the silly things they want to say. If they feel powerless it’s because there is no reason for them to have power.

This is not discrimination – it’s simply a genuine reflection of their irrelevance.

It’s time for these Christians to engage in some deep reflection and face up to a future in which their faith assumes its proper place in society – as a sometimes quaint, mostly weird and always irrelevant fringe activity.

Which planet is Pope Benedict XVI on? The Roman Rottweiler’s speeches during his tour of the UK show a weird disconnection from reality and a rabid fear of secularism. And this controversial visit demonstrates once again that the Pontiff and his cronies are not above lying.

Let’s have a look at a few of the things the Pope has said:

“Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.”

The Papists have already made clear their disgust for multiculturalism. Cardinal Walter Kasper, who is normally trotted out to excuse Vatican PR blunders, made one of his own when he compared the UK to a “third-world country”, a comment inspired by the country’s multiculturalism and increasing secularism. When these comments created justifiable outrage, Kasper was dropped from the Pope’s entourage. The excuse given was illness – a transparent lie.

But also note how the Pope wants respect for ‘traditional values’. This, clearly, is a reference to religious belief. As usual, a church leader is demanding special treatment for faith. Why should faith be granted automatic respect? Most religious beliefs are bizarre and have formed the basis of centuries of social and psychological repression. There is a false and insupportable assumption here that ‘traditional’ means ‘good’.

I’m glad that the Pope finds certain aspects of secularism ‘aggressive’. Of course, they’re nothing like as aggressive as Roman Catholicism, a faith so totalitarian in its outlook and implementation that it is still killing people today. But it’s right that the Pope should be afraid. His weird ideas simply can’t withstand the scrutiny of reason.

“Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms”

Here we go again – the age-old conflation of Christianity with morality and ethics. This is an outright lie. What underpins British freedoms is democracy, not the bronze-age myths enforced with mediaeval morality offered by the Christian church. No-one needs Christianity in order to be good. All it offers is narrow-mindedness and suspicion of new ideas. The UK can do perfectly well without that, thanks.

“Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.”

First, let’s not be shy about how many Jews have been persecuted and murdered by Christians. Shall we mention the Blood Libel? Who invented the idea of forcing Jews to sew yellow badges to their clothing? It certainly goes back as far as (Christian) King Edward I and his 1275 Statute of Jewry.

Of course, Pope Benedict is also reiterating the lie that the evils of Nazism were a result of atheism. Hitler was a Christian. He formed a new German church. The Nazi fear and hatred of Jews was inspired, fuelled and justified by Christian attitudes to Judaism. Hitler frequently cited divine inspiration and justification for his actions. And let’s not forget that the motto of the SS, inscribed in their belt buckles, was ‘Gott mit uns’.

“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.”

Oh dear, such a twisted view. It’s another cheap and tawdry attempt to conflate atheism with extremist ideologies. What he’s getting at, of course, is Stalinism and Nazism. But none of the evils of the 20th Century’s savage regimes were motivated by or rooted in atheism. They couldn’t be. Atheism offers no basis for ideological action (unlike religion, which so often impels adherents to acts of murder and oppression).

And far from a ‘truncated’ or ‘reductive’ vision, atheism allows one to shed the blinkers of religion, to free oneself from the absurd, narrow and banal confines of faith and open one’s mind to the real wonders of our existence. When you encounter the astonishing complexity and beauty of the universe, what could be more reductive or truncated than the miserable, unimaginative explanation that ‘God did it’? I can’t think of anything more pathetic and feeble.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) had a suitably indignant response to this arrogant and mendacious Pope:

“The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that it somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.

“The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal.”

Surreal indeed.

Before The Times goes pay-per-view, check out this story:

Vienna Boys’ Choir caught up in sex abuse scandals

It’s not so much the story itself that caught my eye – it seems pretty much par for the course with church institutions these days.

No, it’s the byline. The article is by the The Times‘ Berlin correspondent – Roger Boyes.

If I were him, I’d change my name.

Pope John Paul II - not a well man

According to a new book, Pope John Paul II regularly whipped himself. At other times, and in spite of illness, he slept on a bare floor. This, apparently, makes him eligible for sainthood.

To the faithful, the self-flagellation and hardship, in emulation of Christ’s suffering, are heroic. But outside the warped logic of faith, is there any other context in which this kind of behaviour wouldn’t be regarded as unbalanced?

The details of the late Pope’s masochism come in a new book, Why He Is a Saint: the Real John Paul II. It’s by Vatican official Monsignor Slawomir Oder who will be in charge of the process that will probably end in John Paul II’s canonisation (so it’s probably not a very balanced view of the erstwhile Pontiff).

There could be no clearer illustration of how religious and real-world perspectives do not align.

To the faithful Roman Catholic, John Paul II’s actions demonstrate devotion and courage.

To the ordinary human being, such behaviour seems suspiciously deviant. Indulging in such masochism suggests mental disorder, perhaps with sexual overtones. Masochism, after all, frequently has sexual implications, and in a sect that imposes lifelong celibacy (in theory) on its priests, one might expect many different manifestations of aberrant psychosexual pathology.

Even without such dark overtones, this behaviour still seems odd. To deliberately hurt oneself in emulation of a character in a fictional story is hardly normal, is it? What would we make, for example, of a teenager who chose to live in a wardrobe to honour the story of Narnia? That’s right – we’d get them help. And that’s without them self-harming – a sure sign of psychological issues.

This wouldn’t be the first time that behaviour which would seem odd or unacceptable to society at large is excused by religious adherence. There is a broad spectrum ranging from violent jihad to the Church of England’s recent fight to protect its ‘right’ to discriminate against homosexuals. Right now, in Kansas, a man is claiming that his religious beliefs left him no choice but to murder a doctor.

It’s also worth remembering that, when he wasn’t enjoying a sound self-whipping, Pope John Paul II lived in an environment of fantastic wealth and privilege.

Still, the Roman Catholic church has elevated people to sainthood on any number of feeble premises. It’s a form of marketing. By making people saints, you’re saying, ‘See how our church contains so many good and righteous people’. It helps counter the bad press the church gets for its paedophile priests and its effective genocide-by-AIDS in Africa.

Most organised religions are fundamentally bizarre. They involve a wholesale acceptance of strange and improbable ideas. Most of the time, we let this slide, because many of these ideas have become entrenched as part of the whole patchwork that is our mythological and historical landscape.

But occasionally, something crops up that makes you step back and think, “wow, now that’s weird”. This is one of those occasions, and it’s the clearest sign you could ask for of the gulf between faith and the real world.

I readily admit that I’m not an expert on Christian theology. It’s a tricky subject. There’s so much that is vague, bizarre and self-contradictory in the Bible that making sense of it – if sense is the right word – takes a certain kind of mind and a lot of training.

Take, for instance, Jesus and the manner of his conception.

Mary was ‘visited’ by the Holy Spirit. That’s a polite term for it, as in ‘I gave her a damn good visiting’. The result was that Mary became pregnant without any of that sordid rolling in the hay malarky.

Catholics would have you believe she remained a virgin (let’s leave aside the small matter of Jesus’ brother, James, and other siblings). Not just that, Mary herself had to be free of sin, including original sin, so Catholics had to invent all that silliness about Mary’s immaculate conception. Nor could she die, but instead had to be assumed up to heaven.

It’s all man-made nonsense, of course, but it’s not the particular piece of nonsense I want to deal with here.

Fun-loving trio

No, my problem is with that Holy Spirit fella. He’s one part of that fun-loving trio, the Holy Trinity. The other members, of course, are God and Jesus. Oh, wait…

Presumably, before the Holy Spirit had his night of passion with Mary, the Holy Trinity was merely the Dynamic Duo. There’s not much I can find in the Bible or on Wikipedia about that, but in any case there’s a more pressing problem.

You see, Christianity has long anguished over this Trinity business. I mean, it markets itself as one of the leading monotheistic faiths (of which there are three key brands, but let’s not get into that coincidence). In fact, God is very emphatic about the mono bit – ‘Thou shalt have no other gods but me’ and all that.

And so theologians have had to come up with some very convoluted, clever, indeed downright devious ways of getting around the problem of there being three versions of the one God. Yes, they say, there are three entities or manifestations, but they are simply different facets of the same thing – God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost.

In the Credo (or Nicene Creed, if you prefer), this is made explicit. In the original version of the creed, formulated in Nicea in 325CE, believers simply state that they believe in the Holy Ghost. But in the Constantinople version of 381CE, the creed was expanded to avoid any unpleasant misunderstanding. The Holy Ghost, it says, “proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified”. In both versions, Jesus is, “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father”.

One substance. Hmm.

And so it seems that, in effect, Mary spent the night with God. And given that Jesus is part of God … well that raises some difficult questions, doesn’t it? One assumes that the Holy Ghost is nothing but a convenient invention of members of the early Christian church to get around the problem of Jesus begetting himself, and having sex with his mother into the bargain.

Anyone who has written a novel or screenplay will recognise the huge plot problems in the Christian story. And most will have little time for how poorly these have been resolved by later contortions and rewrites. We humans have made up this story but can’t seem to make it work at any logical level. Of course, that doesn’t always worry believers: most just throw up their hands and declare it a mystery and not for us to know.

Some Christian sects have avoided the problem by simplifying the story of Christ and what interpretations they make from it. For example, many do not insist on Mary’s virginity. In any case, this was only ever the product of a mistranslation of the alleged prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, where the Hebrew word almah, which carries no connotation of virginity, became the Greek word parthenos, which means ‘maiden’ and might imply purity.

But some powerful sects, most notably Roman Catholicism, take a hardline, one might say fundamentalist, view. In the process, their excuses and explanations take on ever more bizarre forms.

I think Uta Ranke-Heinemann expressed it best. She is a theologian who holds the chair of History of Religion at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She was, for a while, Professor of Catholic Theology at Essen, until fired by Pope John Paul II for daring to insist on a theological, rather than biological, interpretation of the Virgin Birth. Still a Christian, she departed from mainstream faith, insisting that the Bible and the Trinity are the products of mankind, not God, that Jesus was human, that hell, the devil and original sin are all fabrications and that the crucifixion was, in effect, a form of pagan human sacrifice. She said:

Catholic moral theology has lost much of its prestige … It is a folly that poses as religion and invokes the name of God, but has distorted the consciences of countless people. It has burdened them with hair-splitting nonsense and has tried to train them to be moral acrobats, instead of making them more human and kinder to their fellow men and women … Its theology is no theology and its morality is no morality. It has come to grief on its own stupidity.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s book, Eunuchs for Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, is available from:  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

It’s strange how many people are surprised by the answer to the question: what do atheists do at Christmas? Because, of course, that answer is: pretty much the same as anyone else.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Hell, it’s not even November yet and he’s talking about Christmas.”

Well, it’s because of the publication of a new book: The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas edited by Ariane Sherine. Here’s the description from Amazon:

42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season. Last year, Guardian journalist Ariane Sherine launched the Atheist Bus Campaign and ended up raising over GBP150,000, enough to place the advert ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ on 800 UK buses in January 2009. Now Ariane and dozens of other atheist writers, comedians and scientists are joining together to raise money for a very different cause. The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas is a funny, thoughtful handbook all about enjoying Christmas, from 42 of the world’s most entertaining atheists. It features everything from an atheist Christmas miracle to a guide to the best Christmas pop hits, and contributors include Richard Dawkins, Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown, Ben Goldacre, Jenny Colgan, David Baddiel, Simon Singh, AC Grayling, Brian Cox and Richard Herring. The full book advance and all royalties will go to the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust.

So, a worthwhile cause and a fun read. Yet it probably won’t be enough to satisfy one group of people apparently intent on being confused by the idea that atheists celebrate Christmas at all. Yes, I’m talking about journalists. According to a recent bulletin from the British Humanist Association:

The BHA has started getting the yearly media calls about humanists at Christmas. Many journalists seem utterly confused by the concept that someone can have a turkey (or nutroast) dinner, decorate a tree, see family and friends and give and receive gifts yet still be non-religious … we try to explain to journalists is that there is nothing hypocritical about enjoying oneself over a certain period whilst at the same time believing that we are not celebrating the birth of anyone’s messiah.

Let’s face it, for the majority of people – particularly in Western Europe – the religious significance of Christmas is nominal at best. The nativity is a great story, that we can all enjoy at the level of a fairy tale. And we can all have a wonderful time singing carols while knowing that the message they convey is an ancient fiction.

We each decide what Christmas means for us. For many people, it’s about getting together with family. For others, it’s about having a holiday with lots of good food, booze and gifts. I’ve even known non-religious people attend Midnight Mass (I did it once myself, at Truro Cathedral: an amazing spectacle but I found it deeply creepy). And, being humanists, many of us will take the time to reflect on those less fortunate than ourselves and do something about it.

And even if you’re a Christian, it doesn’t pay to dig too deeply into the genuine meaning of Christmas. I’m sure we’re all aware by now that its origins are pagan – a celebration of the Winter solstice and the rebirth of the year.

And many of the symbols of Christmas – Xmas trees, yule logs, Santa – are pagan, too. Or Roman. Or Victorian inventions. As a festival, then, what we’re celebrating is largely the Christian theft of an older ritual.

So let’s forget about all that silly supernatural nonsense. And why not buy The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas as an Xmas present for someone you love – someone intelligent who will appreciate the irony.

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas is available from:
 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

Update: For some more excellent atheist reading this Xmas – and the perfect gift ideas for the humanist in your life – check out our Top 6 Books for Atheists this Xmas.

The UK arm of the Alpha organisation has a poll on its website’s home page – does god exist? And when I visited the site, the response was pretty overwhelming: 96% of the 87,602 voters had said … NO.

And that’s surprising, because Alpha is a Christian organisation dedicated to getting people to believe in god. It’s an evangelical outfit with a soft voice, which uses low-key indoctrination techniques to suck in the vulnerable and credulous. It’s love-bombing for the iPod generation.

I’ve no doubt that, soon, the poll will be taken down or, um, ‘adjusted’ somehow. But just so you can enjoy what I experienced, here’s a screengrab (I’ve enlarged the relevant bit to ensure it’s readable):

Meanwhile, the ‘Belief’ section of The Guardian newspaper ran a poll (due to close on 22/10/2009) which asked the question, ‘Can you be good without God?’. With one day to go, the results were that 93% said ‘Yes, of course. You don’t need religion to be morally driven’. So much for ‘no morality without religion’.

Update 23/10/2009: The number of votes is up to 154,500 and the percentage of No votes has increased to 98%! Looks like the Alpha people have their work cut out…

Evolutionary studies have brought some bad news for certain types of evangelical Christian. According to new research, large broods lead to low-quality offspring, who then seek out low-quality mates.

Clearly, this is bad news for the Quiverfull movement. Adherents of this conservative, evangelical lifestyle promote large families as a way of populating the world with more Christians. Alas, it seems that what they may actually achieve is an increase in the world’s supply of idiots. Whether this is a good or bad thing for the continuation of the Christian faith will depend on your point of view.

The results of the research – which involved zebra finches – surprised the researchers, too. Scientists always believed that females of any species would always seek out the best possible males with which to mate. It turns out, however, that the female finches tended to mate with males of their own level. Low-quality females went for low-quality males – birds whose songs weren’t quite up to scratch or whose plumage was maybe a tad tatty.

Large broods have a tendency to result in larger numbers of low-quality females, because of the competition between siblings.

So where does this leave Quiverfull? Given that members of extremist cults tend towards intra-sect breeding, if not actual inbreeding, can one expect an inevitable decline in IQ levels among these Christian families?

A Brazilian archbishop has provoked a storm of protest through an act of excommunication. He expelled a woman from the faith – and condemned her to eternal torture – for failing to prevent her nine year-old daughter from having an abortion.

This heartless behaviour by Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho has itself been roundly condemned by politicians and even some theologians.

The girl was repeatedly raped by her stepfather over a period of at least three years. The stepfather has not been excommunicated. That retribution was saved for those who displayed compassion and understanding towards the girl – her mother and the doctor who performed the procedure.

What is surprising, though, is that people are surprised.

Sobrinho acted correctly – at least within the strictly limited boundaries of his world.

A religion is defined (and differentiated from others) by its belief system – its rules, its doctrine. The particulars of any one religion lie at the root of its claim to be the only true religion. They are what falsify all other faiths.

These rules and boundaries exist because they are the means by which the specific faith declares “this is who we are and what we stand for”. They are claimed as truths before which we must all yield. They are also the framework for the faith’s claim to morality.

This raises a problem. Although religious believers often lay claim to a moral superiority, the fact is that this doctrine represents a straitjacket. It denies the believer many avenues of moral, ethical, empathetic and humanitarian action.

Adherents must act according to these rules, otherwise they are not true believers. In that context, Sobrinho not doubt understood that excommunication, however immoral and uncaring it may seem to the rest of us, was unequivocally demanded. The basic tenets of the faith trump all humanity.

Now, it’s entirely possible that some bigwig in the Roman Catholic church – the Pope himself, perhaps – might override this decision. It’s happened before when such an act of faith has resulted in a PR nightmare for the church. What what would that mean for the religion?

If matters of doctrine become flexible, they also become meaningless. These matters are not defined and guided by reason. They are deemed to be eternal ‘truths’. As soon as they are seen to be alterable, in the interests of good publicity or other less spiritual motives, then they reveal the entire faith as hollow.

This might go some way to explain the diminishing of religions like Roman Catholocism. Either they remain rigid, true to their core beliefs – and thus reveal themselves as uncaring, inhuman and irrelevant to modern life. Or they adapt, and thus admit that the ‘eternal truths’ at the heart of the faith are nothing of the sort.

It’s a stark choice – to be irrelevant or meaningless.

The BBC series ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths’ has come to an end, and it seems like it was not a moment too soon.

Not that it was a bad series. Far from it. As a whirlwind tour of all varieties of mankind’s credulity, it was highly entertaining. The problem was that it was (perhaps necessarily, given the number of faiths) disappointingly superficial.

The presenter, Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones, seemed to do his best to engage with each faith, though it was easy to see how he was predisposed to like some more than others. However, it was hard to shake the impression that this was little more than religious tourism of the most shallow kind.

Even when Owen Jones seemed to attempt to pursue a more profound question, it was usually done and dusted within a couple of minutes of airtime. Take, for example, his acknowledgement in the last programme of Martin Luther’s vile anti-semitism – a model that the Nazis referenced and on which they built. Owen Jones made a show of being guilt-ridden by this dark and shameful part of his own faith, because he was, that evening, to share a meal with Jews. When he brought up the subject over dinner, his Jewish host gave a generous response – that acknowledging the problem was the first step to solving it. This was, perhaps, more indicative of traditional Jewish hospitality than a highly developed philosophy. Owen Jones’ response was to treat the camera to one of his trademark gormless smiles and a statement to the effect that ‘that’s alright then’.

This was typical both of the programme’s superficiality and Owen Jones’ tendency to be easy on both himself and spirituality in general. He never really asked tough questions or delved with any seriousness into the causes or motivations of the faiths he briefly visited.

As the series progressed, he seemed in more and more of a rush. Perhaps his year-long odyssey was exhausting him, but by the last episode he seemed to be doing little more than name-checking faiths, with little attempt to explain their significance. His coverage of the Sami people in Finland, for example, amounted to little more than sitting in a tent with a shaman, grunting a little and banging a drum. He seemed unaware that joiks, the Sami’s unique musical form, is far more complex and rich than the simple chanting in which he momentarily indulged himself. Ray Mears covered this fascinating culture in far greater depth and with much more empathy, and did so as just part of a single programme.

The last programme was also marred by a naked display of prejudice. Predictably, the target of this bias was atheism.

In a series about faith, presented by a priest, I wasn’t expecting to see much coverage of atheism – let alone to see it presented as one of the 80 ‘faiths’. The only mention I’d seen so far (I missed one episode) was a rather sneering reference in the first programme which made the mistake of assuming that atheism is inherently reductionist and hostile to a sense of wonder. It is, of course, quite the reverse: but shedding the blinkers and restriction of religious dogma, it gies one the freedom to enjoy the full splendour, complexity and mystery of the universe.

Atheism, of course, is not a faith in that in does not require the suspension of rationality to believe in something for which there is no evidence. So counting it as one of the 80 faiths was, at best, a misrepresentation – one is tempted to use the word ‘lie’, and I’m not sure that I shouldn’t. Worse, Owen Jones decided to represent atheism by conflating it with communism, or more specifically, Stalinism.

This is a cheap trick, not uncommon among believers. Yes, Stalin both espoused and enforced atheism. But that does not make his actions or beliefs atheist. They were Stalinist. Stalinism was a totalitarian regime that, to aid its own survival, had to stand in conflict with other totalitarian regimes – notably, religion. Stalin’s repression of religion was ideological – and that ideology was communism, not atheism.

To use the excesses or characteristics of Stalinism to describe atheism – to equate the two – is not just logically and intellectually absurd, it is deeply dishonest. One might just as easily characterise and represent Christianity by the burning of witches.

Atheism is a philosphical (not religious) viewpoint – it is not a ideology. (And it should be noted that the richness of humanism, its history and philosophy, received only the curtest of passing mentions.) The tawdry trick employed by Owen Jones was the most obvious example of his prejudices coming to the fore. Of course, he wasn’t always called to the cloth: he is, in that respect, a convert. And it is typical of converts to turn their hate on what they may perceive as their own former inadequacies and on what they fear most.

Owen Jones also raved about the resurgence of spirituality in Russia (though not necessarily the old established faiths) without ever really questioning why this should be so. As presented, the implication was simply that, once the enforcement of atheism was lifted, people naturally return to religion. His interview with the token atheist went a very small way to suggesting an alternative – but not far enough.

Religion feeds on fear and uncertainty, and there has been plenty of both in post-communist Russia. People crave the stability of ceremony and community, and churches are happy to provide both. Hence people turn to the church – whatever church – not because the religion is offering something that is right or profound, but simply for the protection and comfort it provides. In this environment, an invisible pink unicorn or Flying Spaghetti Monster will function as well as Christ or Mohammed.

It would have been interesting if Owen Jones had thought to question the political and sociological forces at work. But his brief was very narrow and, being a believer, he is deeply biased towards believing that the embrace of supernatural ideas and submission to religious dogma are natural and right and trump everything else. This unwillingness to look further is a characteristic of the fundamental problem religion has with truth.

This series would have been so much more interesting, so much more valuable and profound, if Owen Jones had made his voyage alongside a humanist, or scientist, or psychologist. Then we could perhaps have had some answers to the key question, ‘why?’. But I don’t think Owen Jones would have had either the courage or honesty to do this.