Against religion (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the first things the pope did as soon as he got off the plane was to launch into a bitter attack on “aggressive secularists” and “extremist atheists”. Here’s our reply.

The only reasonable position to adopt towards any religion is one of atheism: unbelief. There is a presumption in favour of not believing fantastic claims. It is up to the believer to present proof for the existence of God or life after death. After all, few are agnostic about Father Christmas, fairies or unicorns; we know they don’t exist. The same scepticism should also apply to the extraordinary beliefs of religion. With religious believers, however, there is a willingness to believe despite the lack of evidence. And it is this gullibility which socialists find to be dangerous and objectionable.

Of course religious believers do claim to have evidence, and they cite their holy texts as proof of the infallible word of God. But these writings contain so many contradictions and absurdities that no reasonable person can take them seriously. Traditional interpretations of the Bible, for instance, are highly selective and leave out the inconsistencies. In the Old Testament there are two different creation stories (Genesis 1-2, 4;2, 4-24) and two different versions of the Flood (Genesis 6,5-9,17). Needless to say, geological evidence does not confirm the Biblical accounts of the Earth’s age or the Earth being flooded to a depth of five miles all over its surface.

Nor do the prophecies fare any better. No unicorns or dragons have been found, as foretold (Isaiah 13,22;34,7). God promised the Jewish people that they will never lose their land (Psalms 89,3-4), that no uncircumcised man will ever enter Jerusalem (Isaiah 52,1) and that Jerusalem will always be a quiet place, undamaged by war (Isaiah 33,20).

In the New Testament Jesus is often reported as saying that the world is about to end, and that the end will come in the lifetime of his listeners (Matthew 4,17;10,23,-16,28;24,34). This is why he advocated giving away personal possessions, and forms the basis of the myth that Jesus was an early socialist. There is nothing socialist about making yourself deliberately poor in any case. Jesus is usually portrayed as peace-loving, but he also said: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10,34). Carl Lofmark, from whom many of these examples are taken, comments in his book What is the Bible?:

“This passage has been useful to army chaplains and church leaders who have had to persuade people that they should go to war in spite of all that Jesus said about peace and forgiveness.”

But if the Bible and other religious texts are not literally true, as many theologians now accept, are they true symbolically? As with the above examples, do they have a “deeper” meaning? The trouble with this line of argument is that it is even more selective in choosing what to believe. It means turning a blind eye to the contradictions and obscenities and choosing to believe something you know is not true.

Once you have rejected the special authority of the Bible (or whatever text) as the infallible word of God, how do you know that you have interpreted the symbolism in the way the writers intended? Fundamentalists have a point when they say that this changes religion into a form of art appreciation.

Then there is morality. Many who would not describe themselves as religious will, nevertheless, have their children given religious indoctrination at school on the grounds that it will give them a moral education. In this country the law requires that Religious Education be “broadly Christian” in content. But would you want your child to be stoned to death for being disobedient, as God commands (Deuteronomy 21,18-21)? This is the morality they keep quiet about. If a husband finds that his bride is not a virgin on her wedding day, then she shall be stoned to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22,21). God instructed Moses:

“Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourself” (Numbers 31,17-18).

Not only does God give this approval of the murder and rape of children, but slavery also (Exodus 21,1-11). Jesus says that to be a true believer you must hate your mother and father and “yea, and his own life also” (Luke 14,26). For the unbeliever, “thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of they daughters” (Deuteronomy 28,53). Jesus says that anyone who does not believe him will burn forever in hell (Mark 16,16). It has frequently been said that it is a very sick morality which can punish by sending people to hell. Even Hitler and Stalin only had their victims tortured and killed and then their suffering ended, but God wants the suffering to continue – literally –- for an eternity.

Faith is the last refuge of a believer. Religious faith, however, would only make sense if what was believed in were plausible. Neither the existence of a God nor life after death are plausible, though faith in them undoubtedly offers solace to many. It can make the unbearable seem bearable. But why should an all-loving God allow so much suffering, so much pain in this world – including the so-called “Acts of God” – earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and the rest? If God really did exist, we have no reason for supposing that he cares for us.

For some in recent years religion has combined with New Age beliefs, largely at the expense of the traditional religions whose emphasis on personal guilt, sexual repression and the inferiority of women have become unacceptable. This pick and mix approach can combine elements from the New Testament, Buddhism, psychoanalysis, paganism, astrology and various other bits of the occult. So why, the, the persistence of religious belief?

The socialist analysis of religion derives from our basic materialism (not in the acquisitive sense, but how we view the production of wealth in society and the sort of ideas it gives rise to). Historical materialism traces how religions have evolved, from their beginnings in ancestor worship and private property in primitive societies, to established social institutions. Marx hit a number of nails on the head when he described the social psychology of religion:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people . . . The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion in therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.”

For the materialist, in other words, society is not really under human control and humans really are at the mercy of blind, impersonal forces – in ancient times the forces of nature, in the modern world the economic forces of capitalism. Under capitalism people feel, rightly, that they are governed by forces they can’t control but attribute this, wrongly, to forces operating from outside the world of experience. Churches of all types are then at hand for the sustaining of fear and superstition. For the socialist alternative to our lives being controlled by impersonal forces we must bring about a society in which humans consciously control the forces of production.

It is on this basis that we can say, rather than being abolished, religion can be expected to (as Engels put it in another context) “wither away”. And it can be seen that the socialist case against religion differs from the usual humanist position: there are rationalist superstitions as well as religious. For humanists, criticism of religion is a process towards the eventual “triumph of reason”. But they ignore the material circumstances which give rise to superstition:

“Consequently, in his worship of the ‘Idea’ the bourgeois freethinker is, like the Christian, attributing miraculous powers to the figments of men’s brains” (Socialism and Religion, Socialist Party pamphlet, 1911).

Capitalism has many opiates to offer the unwary. Reject the pedlars, reject the product, but above all, reject a society which can create such an unhealthy psychological dependency. On the new basis of material security and social co-operation individuals can gain a sense of meaning in their lives, and hope for a future free from the dead hand of religious belief and tradition.

 Lew Higgins

Voice From The Back: A Billion Reasons For Socialism (2009)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Billion Reasons For Socialism

 There are many reasons why socialists want a complete change in the basis of society. Why we want a new society based on common ownership and production solely for use. Today we have poverty amidst plenty, international rivalry leading to wars, the destruction of the planet because of the profit motive – the list goes on and on. The following statistics though are probably the most compelling of all. “One billion people throughout the world suffer from hunger, a figure which has increased by 100 million because of the global financial crisis, says the UN. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said the figure was a record high. Persistently high food prices have also contributed to the hunger crisis. The director general of the FAO said the level of hunger, one-sixth of the world’s population, posed a ‘serious risk’ to world peace and security. The UN said almost all of the world’s undernourished live in developing countries, with the most, some 642 million people, living in the Asia-Pacific region.” (BBC News, 20 June) We live in a society that destroys food to keep up prices while people die of starvation Never mind the statistics, a kid is dying today because of the profit motive. Get up off your knees and organise for a world based on production solely for use. We owe it to the world’s children.

This Sporting Life

 Capitalism corrupts everything it touches. In this society the cash nexus is everything. Sport may be defined in dictionaries as “pleasant pastime, amusement, diversion” but in modern society it is just another business. Sport, of course, is all about the glory of winning and (if you are British) the nobility of defeat. Oh no it’s not. It’s all about the money. Which is why, Max Duthie, of Bird & Bird, says: “In almost every major sport today there are tensions between the regulatory bodies on the one side and the players or the teams on the other – and normally the argument is over money.” Patrick Wheeler, of Collyer Bristow, says that “there are four key areas of law that come into play in a sports dispute: intellectual property, contract, competition and regulation.” (Times, 25 June) Not so much an arena for sporting types more a fertile field for lawyers and accountants.

 

A Clueless Pope

 At first glance it might appear that His Holiness is getting bang up to date and having a go at the capitalist system, but on closer examination it is no such thing. “Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the ‘grave deviations and failures’ of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a ‘true world political authority’ to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy. The pontiff’s call for stronger government regulation was made in his third and eagerly awaited encyclical, Charity in Truth, which the Vatican chose to issue on the eve of the G8 summit of rich nations being held in Italy.” (Financial Times, 7 July) What kind of fairy tale society does he live in when he talks about “a return to ethics in the global economy”? Capitalism is a society based on class ownership, exploitation and the profit motive. To talk of ethics in such a society is nonsensical and “government regulation” is powerless to deal with the slump and boom cycle of capitalism. The Holy Father should abandon his foray into political economy and stick to what he does best – scaring the shit out of believers and passing the collection plate.

A BNP Submarine? 

The success of the British National Party at the recent European elections surprised many. Their success was put down by some as due to their new more “moderate” policies. How “moderate” they have become can be gauged by the following.” Boats carrying illegal migrants to Europe should be sunk Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, said yesterday. In a provocative intervention, Griffin, elected to the European parliament last month, called on the EU to introduce “very tough” measures to prevent illegal migrants entering Europe from Africa. “If there’s measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we’d support that,” Griffin told BBC Parliament’s The Record Europe. “But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats.” (Guardian, 9 July) Nick Griffin as a U-Boat commander is the sort of fantasy that must appeal to the crazed nationalism of some of the BNP membership.

Pathfinders: How scientific are scientists? (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is Andrew Marr, a well-known political commentator, doing presenting a BBC2 science programme about Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’? Evidently, having  used up their stock of one biologist the previous month when they trundled  David Attenborough out of retirement, the BBC are now reduced to pilfering  from the politics office. The first thing our ex-Presbyterian Andy does in  his new role of science correspondent is issue a dire warning that we  shouldn’t treat Darwin as a deity or Darwinism as a religion (The Danger of  Worshipping Darwin, BBC Online, 5 March).

Socialists have heard this sort of criticism before, from people who equate any system of organised thought with religion, in wilful disregard of the difference between organised thought and organised fantasy. Scientists do have their heroes, but they don’t worship them as infallible gurus because it is recognised that argument from authority is inferior to argument from evidence. Socialists take the same view of Marx and other revolutionary  thinkers.

It’s a pity Marr couldn’t direct his uncalled-for advice where it might do some good – at real rather than imaginary religious folly. Someone who does  think he’s an infallible guru has just lately been going round Africa telling the locals that wearing condoms will make their AIDS problem worse, not better (BBC Online, 18 March). Yes folks, the Pope pulls another blinder, advocating ‘fidelity and abstinence’, straight after criticising  his own US division for last year’s record-busting 800 sex-abuse cases, which cost the Catholic Church $436m in 2008 (BBC Online, 14 March). Mind  you, this is the guru who told us recently that Darwinian evolution is consistent with the book of Genesis.

Socialists are opposed to all religious superstitions but don’t often  trouble to condemn them because their advocates seem to do that better themselves. In Tanzania, the latest get-rich-quick scheme is to round up albino humans, murder them, cut them up, and sell their body parts as magic potions promising to make the owner wealthy. Meanwhile in South Africa there is an epidemic of what is called ‘corrective rape’, where lesbian women are gang-raped in order to make them ‘girls’ again. The fact that the women are often murdered afterwards suggests the rapists are not too interested in the ‘corrective’ aspect of it all. Unless they’re thinking of the afterlife.

Someone else keen to send women to an early afterlife is Samira Jassim, aka ‘the Mother of Believers’, who tells us how she recruited 80 female Iraqi suicide-bombers. Her clever trick was to have the women raped by her pious and devout male assistants and then tell the victims they would never get into heaven unless they committed a ‘purifying act’ to expunge their  ‘shame’. What this shows is not only the folly of ignorant belief and the despicable manipulation that ‘gurus’ can exercise, but also that these ‘gurus’ don’t believe this hokum themselves. It has often been observed that the higher one goes in any religious organisation, the less belief there is.

Perhaps, at bottom, religious people don’t really believe, but they force themselves to pretend to. There are signs that this is the case. One piece of evidence was the huge outpouring of obviously genuine grief among Catholics when the last pope shuffled off his mortal coil. Since, according to doctrine, he had gone off to sit on the right hand of God and enjoy perfect bliss, one might have expected them to celebrate. But they don’t, and in fact new research suggests they fight against death harder than  non-believers, demanding every treatment and medication in the book, even when prolonging the agony actually increases their misery (Pious ‘fight  death the hardest’, BBC Online, 17 March). Again, this is the opposite of  what you’d expect if religion was giving these people any real comfort. It seems that the Pope and his ilk aren’t very keen to check out themselves, although they’re often happy enough to speed other people on their way, through murder or murderously bad advice.

So how does Andrew Marr have the effrontery to equate science with religion? It seems utterly daft. But does that mean science is a noble endeavour and a  paragon of value-free rationality?

One man who doesn’t think so is the physicist Lee Smolin. He is scathing about the ‘sociology’ of the science community, which he invokes to explain why physics has languished for the last thirty years in the doldrums of unverifiable string theory rather than investigating any more promising avenues of thought: ‘Good ideas are not taken seriously enough when they come from people of low status in the academic world; conversely, the ideas of high-status people are often taken too seriously’ (The Trouble With Physics, Allen Lane, 2006). For Smolin, the old-boy culture of risk-averse conservatism is so strong that it has brought physics to a crisis where one must ask fundamental questions about what science is.

It is a shame that Smolin, following Popper, carelessly brackets ‘Marxism’ with witchcraft and Intelligent Design. He would be surprised to know that  socialist theory (rather than the state-capitalist parodies of North Korea etc that he has in mind) actually accords very well with the principles of scientific enquiry he himself sets out, and that socialists could help to contextualise the problems besetting physics.

Smolin points out that there are more scientists working today than in the whole history of science, however he doesn’t consider that many of them are doing things which are utterly useless or downright destructive because science, like any industry, has to operate within the priorities and limitations dictated by the capitalist system. He recognises that the scientific method suffers because science is organised hierarchically, but doesn’t see that the same criticism can be applied to all branches of human  activity. He demands democratisation and diversity in physics as if physics alone is the problem and these things are already established in other fields.

What sets science apart from religion is not that it works perfectly, but that it has the capability to be self-correcting. This is also the crucial distinction between capitalism, which is unable to correct its own suicidal blunders because it is in thrall to uncontrollable economic laws serving a powerful elite, and non-market, non-hierarchical socialism, which has no such agenda and which can therefore collectively determine the best course of action based on the available evidence.

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: The Failure of Reformism (2006)

The Voice From The Back column from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Failure of Reformism

We are opposed to trying to patch up capitalism, we always say that such reforms will end in failure. So often do we engage in attacking these schemes that cynical opponents have dubbed us the “we told you so” party. Now we have one of the reformers telling us that his reforms are useless. “Tony Blair began his Let’s Talk initiative yesterday by admitting for the first time that both his Sure Start scheme for under-fives and policies for children in care have failed the socially excluded” (Guardian, 16 May). But he will carry on his task of patching up capitalism. “If we are to change that we need a different way for government to operate …” When this “different way” ends in failure, remember – “we told you so”.

The Power of Prayer

“Ken Lay, his family, his friends and legal advisers joined hands in a circle of prayer on the steps of Houston’s Federal Court last night and, with the help of their family pastor, asked for divine intervention. But their plea came too late. A 12 strong jury had already decided Lay’s fate and that of Jeff Skilling his right-hand man in the most celebrated criminal enterprise in Wall Street history” (Times, 26 May). The multi-million dollar fraudsters of Enron now await jail sentences for the 25 guilty verdict between them. Although Mr Lay’s faith in prayer might impress the gullible it should be noted that Lay and Skilling also employed a team of lawyers costing $20 million. So they weren’t only relying on divine intervention.

Outdated Marxism?

Away back in 1848 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. Ever since its publication it has been attacked by supporters of capitalism. Today the main criticism is that it is outdated and old-fashioned. Is the following passage outdated? “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet. the man of science, into its paid wage-labourer.” The Guardian (31 May) carried the following report, “Lecturers today threatened to take further strike action and toughen up “other sanctions”, after they voted to formally reject the latest pay offer from universities.” Far from being out-dated the Manifesto appears to be bang up to date.

A Mad Social System

The madness of capitalist production was recently illustrated by a European Commission directive to order nearly a billion bottles of French and Italian wine to be turned into fuel and disinfectant. “The commission’s announcement that it would spend 2.4 million euros to distil 430 million bottles of French wine and 371 million bottles of Italian wine into fuel was met with protests by French wine growers …” (Times, 8 June). Another 2.4 billion euros is to be spent digging up vineyards across the continent. Inside a socialist society wine like every other product will be produced to satisfy human needs not to make a profit. Jesus was supposed to have turned water into wine, but only capitalism would turn wine into disinfectant.

Good Question

Pope Benedict XVI raised an interesting question when he recently visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. “In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God. Why Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?” (Time, 12 June). Like we say – it is a good question, but we doubt if the holy father has had any reply. God has remained singularly silent since biblical times.

Suffering in Silence

A recent study by the charity Men’s Health Forum, that questioned 1,212 men, found that 66 percent  of them experienced depression or anxiety at some period in their lives. “Depressed men often suffer in silence, under pressure to keep up a macho front. …The most common causes of anxiety and depression were work (44% of sufferers said it was a factor), financial worries (44%), fast paced living (27%) and relationship problems (25%)” (Herald, 12 June). It seems that capitalism is turning large sections of us into basket cases. Let’s throw capitalism into the out-basket of history.

Halo Halo!: Fitting God into the 21st Century (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s not for us to advise the Pope, or the outgoing Archbishop of Cant and his successor on their image or on how to run their religions, but you do have to wonder, on what planet and in which century, do they think they are living? If they enjoy dressing up in ridiculous hats and robes to contact an invisible man in the sky and inflicting his unwanted views on us, fair enough. But expecting us to accept that their hallucinatory communications have a beneficial effect on our lives is pushing it a bit too far.

To be fair having a figment of your imagination as your boss who, by his own admission, moves in mysterious ways must make the job difficult. And having to take his ‘holy word’ seriously can only add to the confusion.

As for God, one of the problems he has as someone who doesn’t actually exist is that he was unable to write his biblical horror stories himself. He had to rely on his early followers, St Paul for example, to do it for him. And Paul by all accounts was a bit of a lad, a persecutor of Christians before his own conversion to Christianity, and probably not best known for his pro-feminist views afterwards. And this, unfortunately, has been causing problems for some believers.

‘Let your women keep silence in the churches.’ said Paul. ‘For it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.’

And while these views of Paul’s in his letter to the Corinthians have apparently been quite acceptable until recently, the trendy wing of the Church who hope to drag it out of the dark ages find them a bit inconvenient – especially now that those who take them as gospel have voted against the ordination of women bishops.

Meanwhile the Pope, who doesn’t seem to have problems with women not knowing their place in the Catholic Church, is also trying to update his image. As from 12 December he will be on Twitter to keep us updated with all the latest titbits about God.

And in November he published his new book about Jesus – The Infancy Narratives. He is now able to inform us that the stuff we had previously been told about the nativity was nonsense. Well, some of it was. The bit about the virgin birth was true of course. And about there being no room at the inn, and the three wise men, and the star that hovered above the stable was all true. But now he informs us that there were no singing angels, and probably no ox and ass in the stable either.

Some believers were disappointed at these revelations. A review of the book appeared on http://catholicism.about.com and comments posted below included

  ‘What purpose does Pope Benedict want to accomplish by taking the angels and the animals in the manger out of the story? After all he wasn’t there when Christ was born. I believe angels are always all around us’.

and

  ‘I was told that the pope was revealing secrets not revealed to the public before. Things like there was really not a crib when Jesus was born, the fact that space aliens are also children of God, and the treasures the Vatican has that the world will never see’.

Maybe getting God into the 21st century is being a bit ambitious. Try getting him into the Middle Ages first and see how it goes from there.

NW

Upon My Pontiff! (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once the tabloids had their teeth sunk into that nice, juicy horsemeat scandal story that had been dominating the headlines it needed something of global importance to knock it off the front pages. But on 11th February the prayers of the meat industry were answered. The fact that they’d been feeding us minced nag labelled as beef for ages and that no-one had a clue about its origin, or what equine drugs had been injected into it were forgotten, temporarily at least.

The tired and confused 85 year old Pope Benedict XVI had jacked in his job and until a successor could be appointed the world was without its direct link to God. This was almost unprecedented. Popes are supposed to go on until they die. They are infallible.

Pope Benedict became infallible in a puff of white smoke eight years ago and his resignation raised an important question. You may remember that episode of ‘Father Ted’ where a visiting bishop had a Grade Two holy relic, ‘the holy stone of Clonrichert’ rammed up his backside by Father Jack, and Father Ted asked ‘will it still be a Grade Two when it’s removed?’ The question now applies to the ex-Pope’s infallibility. Is he still infallible now?

It’s not a question we’ve had to consider recently. The last  Pope to resign was Gregory XII in 1415, and before that in 1045 Pope Benedict IX resigned after being accused of ‘feasting on immorality’, committing ‘many vile adulteries and murders’ and of being ‘So vile, so foul’ and ‘so execrable’. He then sold the papacy to his godfather who became Pope Gregory VI, and himself resigned the following

year.

But at least it’s not bad news for all the doomsday theorists out there. The 12th century St Malachy, an Irish archbishop prophesied that there would only be 112 more Popes before the Last Judgment and Benedict XVI was the 111th. Watch this space.

NW