by Nick Wormley
Religion is the ultimate arrogance and conceit of an animal that randomly came into existence through evolutionary, natural selection, and which has a massively over-inflated idea of its importance in the universe.
I could end there, because that single sentence is enough to blow all religions out of the water and sink them totally to the bottom of the ocean.
Millions of people don’t want to accept that, however, and either ignore it or, in recent years, some have started ditching, re-writing or editing/re-assessing big chunks of their scriptures to brush numerous awkwardness-es under the carpet. They feel this enables them to say: “We shouldn’t get bogged down in background details; the most important thing is to concentrate on the core message.”
In the 21st Century this is religion on the run, struggling desperately not to sink into oblivion. No Victorian clergyman would have countenanced that sort of thinking. Today, however, the situation is different. In England, where I live, religious belief is dwindling rapidly to a minority of the population and the official Church of England is showing hints of panic. Current opinion poll and census trends suggest that our national Protestant Church could become extinct in less than 40 years. Few British young people in their teens and 20s have any interest in religion at all. Old people might say they were brought up as children to believe in Christianity, and they are most of today’s last churchgoers, but frankly it is not really now important to the majority of people.
Islam has grown here, considerably, as a result of many years of mass immigration, but mostly in cities and large towns. It is only rarely adopted by non-Moslem families and there are very few converts to it.
To most intents and purposes, Britain in the 2020s is becoming a secular society, with a religious fringe still holding some degree of vestigial influence.
It appears to me that religion seems to remain somewhat stronger in the United States and still holds enough power to indoctrinate large numbers, although it is shrinking. Statistics I have read suggest there is a much larger church attendance in America than in Britain. I feel this must be frustrating in a modern, advanced country. Nil desperandum good Americans. I am sure that intelligence will prevail and you will catch up with the European leaders of the field!
PS. I love our beautiful English medieval churches; their long history, their wonderful organ music, and in my mind I can envisage generation after generation of good, sturdy Englishmen and their families attending every Sunday service for hundreds of years. To me personally (as someone who grew up in the 20th Century) this is a patriotic feeling of pride and emotional attachments to my land, its people and culture.
But that doesn’t make religions true, real or acceptable. What I have just described are human feelings, nostalgia and emotions that falsely help to keep religion afloat.
Every brain cell in my head tells me that all religions are man-made inventions. The Jewish-Christian-Muslim trilogy of ancient Middle Eastern mythologies – Christianity being the first sequel and Islam the second sequel – was thought up in the imaginations of a large number of, by modern standards, uneducated and extremely ignorant, unidentified men (and they would pretty certainly have been men, not women), living at unknown places, somewhere in the Middle East, at unknown dates, many hundreds and thousands of years ago.
There are no original texts and no logical, sensible, rational reasons to think that the folk stories ancient, unidentifiable people created are real. Nobody would apply such a way of thinking to any other subject and cling, immovably, to ultra-archaic attempts to answer our “big questions” with “solutions” that modern knowledge now shows were absurdly ridiculous. Many things in the Bible cannot possibly be true. They clash head-on with science and it is not possible to believe in both. Religion is the product of ignorance. I suppose you can believe in science and in religion, but only if you cheat.
Even in the approved Gospels there are many things that strongly smack of fiction. In the Nativity Story, did three kings from the Orient really ride on camels bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for the baby Jesus, pinpointing him to a stable because a bright star was shining above it? I think this story belongs in Santa Claus land, like a peasant husband and wife, all by themselves, using early hand tools, building and stocking Noah’s Ark, and Jonah being swallowed by a whale, but then regurgitated later still alive. Noah’s Ark would have needed to be bigger than any ocean-going liner, and no whale known to science could possibly swallow a human being.
[Part 2 Next Wednesday]
