Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent speculation is that an individual who is nominally in charge of one of the most powerful capitalistic entities on the planet and ‘has his finger on the nuclear button’, may be the ‘Antichrist’. Karl Marx noted that recourse to the ‘mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’ show that ‘in that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race.’ The Antichrist is, along with other made-up things, a product of the human mind so we’re not taking it seriously.

Pope Leo XIV has incurred the wrath of the megalomaniac currently spreading death, destruction and mayhem everywhere. On his social media the egoist said, ‘he’s WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.  I don’t want a Pope who criticises the President of the United States.’ It’s not known if he’s asked how many divisions the Pope has yet.

The ‘leader’ of the ‘most powerful nation’ on earth, one comprising a hell (sic) of a lot of Christians who look forward to the ‘end times’, also posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Jewish soothsayer. One of his previous gung-ho supporters said it’s ‘more than blasphemy’ and ‘it’s an Antichrist spirit.’ Given how ‘his’ adherents proclaim the sanctity of life and love for your neighbour, their continuing support for someone who threatened to blast a civilisation back to the stone age ain’t very Christian at all.

Is the Islamic Republic of Iran still fighting with the Great Satan and the Little Satan? Back in 1979 when Iran’s monarchy was replaced by an Islamic theocracy a ‘leader’ coined the Satan expressions including the Lesser Satan (the Soviet Union). In July 2014 the Socialist Standard noted that Pope Francis blamed Satan for the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians saying ‘More than once we have been on the verge of peace, but the evil one has succeeded in blocking it’.

Quoted in the Mail Online from an original podcast run by an American Christian ex-Navy SEAL, a Catholic priest suggested that the time of the Antichrist may be near. He said that the AC would rule the world through ‘economies’ and that ‘modern financial systems and emerging digital technologies could potentially create the kind of centralised economic control described in biblical prophecy’. Revelation 13;16-17: ‘And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads; And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name’.

Sounding more like an anti-globalist, he opined, ‘one of the ways how he’s going to control people is through digital currencies, and he’s going to just shut people off, and that’s how they’ll be able to basically starve people out…’

DC

Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo! column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now supposing there was such an entity as a god, what would you think of a supreme being who demanded that males, while still a baby, were compelled to have their reproductive organs mangled, maimed, mutilated and chopped about?

‘God says, “This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your descendants after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised”. The act of circumcision is to be performed on every male child on the eighth day after birth, whether born into the household or purchased from a foreigner, and it serves as a physical sign of the covenant between God and Abraham’s lineage’ (Genesis 17.10.).

Male circumcision is not mentioned in the Quran but it is practised by followers of Islam too.

Unless you’re a misandrist feminist there is nothing at all humorous or jokey in the act described above. And there’s nothing funny about the mangling, maiming, and mutilating carried out on females in the name of religion either.

A UNICEF report issued in March 2024 on the subject of FGM (female genital mutilation) noted that 230 million females, young and adult, had been subjected to FGM. The report noted that over an eight year period, from 2016 to 2024, 30 million more individuals, a 15 percent increase, had had FGM imposed upon them. The report said that there were grounds for believing that FGM was being carried out on girls at even younger ages, ‘often before their fifth birthday’.

A little like the creationists in the USA who are always trying to get rid of Darwinist teachings in schools there are those who use the judicial process to maintain the continuation of FGM. In Gambia at the end of 2025 its supreme court heard from ‘religious traditionalists who are hoping to topple the country’s poorly enforced ban on female genital mutilation.’ Apparently, ‘The Gambia has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world, with 73 percent of women and girls aged 15 to 49 having undergone the procedure (Unicef). FGM was outlawed in 2015 in the West African nation by then dictator Yahya Jammeh, who branded it outdated and not a requirement of Islam. The ban was subsequently upheld in July 2024 when lawmakers rejected a controversial bill… plaintiffs filed an appeal with the Supreme Court in April, arguing that the procedure is a deeply rooted cultural and religious practice’.

In Kenya, The Standard reported that attacks had been carried out on church property and personnel and on girls and male church associates and that some of their members had been forcefully re-circumcised. The report gave no indication as to who was carrying out these attacks.

A December article at LBC is unequivocal as to FGM: ‘FGM/C is not a cultural ‘practice. It is not a medical ‘procedure…It is not an “ethical dilemma”. It is violence against women and children.’

DC

Letter: Speaking out against religious fanatics (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speaking out against religious fanatics

Dear Editors,

First of all, may I congratulate you on your fine work and struggle against this capitalist regime. I have voted Labour all my life, but only recently have become more involved with proper socialist organisations as yourselves and the SWP.

I read with much interest your short article about “Socialism versus Islam" (July Socialist Standard) and may I say that I couldn’t agree with you more. Islam is a very oppressive religion depriving women, gays and other minority groups of fundamental rights. In fact it is a well known fact that Muslim countries have a record of abusing human rights.

I am Asian and, although an atheist, it does not stop people associating me with this religion. Thank goodness that organisations like yourselves have no fear in speaking out against these fanatics.

A. Ditta,

Wolverhampton

Reply:

Thanks for your support - though it must be said that Leninist organisations like the SWP are similar to fanatical religious cults and their heroes in the Bolshevik Party knew a thing or two about human rights abuse.

Editors.

Pakistan’s power élite and the working class (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

A comrade from Pakistan was due to attend our Annual Conference in London over Easter but was refused a visa by the British High Commission in Islamabad. This is the speech he would have delivered

I hail from an extremely conservative region in Pakistan, indeed in the lap of Taliban, where there exists no tolerance as far as dissent of opinion is concerned. Dissenting against the prevailing view is simply blasphemous. This makes our work more difficult. Coupled with this you always have this fear from the state and agencies sleuths who might take you for an enemy agent or some one involved in subversive activities. Anyhow this is not something to deter us. Before joining I knew what it means to be a socialist. I have not had any great trouble over the past four or five years that I have been a member. But you hardly find people agreeing to your views. One has to have steel nerves to cope with such a situation. 

Recently the whole of Pakistan and the NWFP in particular have been swept by a wave of religious militarism and fanaticism. The religious maniacs openly display arms and recruit youth to fight a holy war against the infidels. In such a scenario one has to be very cautious lest one should fall a victim to their wrath. I was glad when five of my friends and colleagues expressed their willingness to join the party. Of course there are people who think differently but because of the intensive propaganda and power at the hands of the militants very few dare to speak otherwise. Pakistan is a country where extreme luxury and riches and extreme poverty exists side by side. As everywhere the teeming millions have been made hostages to the lust and greed of a few lords, nawabs and petty feudal. The power or ruling élite consists of these very people whose grip on the country’s resources and people is as hard as can be. Come election time and these millions of poor are herded into polling stations to elect their so-called “representatives”. The game is repeated after every two or three years, as the assembly does not last long, with either the president or the ubiquitous military dismissing the government for being too “corrupt”. 

Now that the country is in the strong grip of the military with no intention to go back to the barracks, no matter how much Robin Cook or the Commonwealth secretary cry themselves hoarse, the people of Pakistan are more than ever dissatisfied and worried about what they should look for or turn to. The country’s economy is in a mess and more loans from the IMF means more punishment for the poor in the shape of price-hike and taxes. Actually Pakistan’s power élite has a clash of interests among themselves. The discredited former Prime Minister Nawas Sharif, now in exile in Saudi Arabia, had been a blue-eyed of the military and establishment. The moment he meddled with the military he was thrown out in a coup. The same corruption scandals, Swiss banks, and so on and so forth. There is also a nexus between the military, bureaucracy and political élite who safeguard each others interests and rule the roost. 

Fifty-two years after the British left the sub-continent and Pakistan appeared on the map of the world, the ordinary Pakistanis are still groping in the dark. They still have to learn that they will suffer at the hands of those who promise them heaven on earth but turn it into a hell once they come into power. But at elections they do not have a choice and alternative. They either have to vote for one of the rogues styled as a leader or have to stay at home. In both cases they are losers. For them more elections means more trouble. The problem persists as one looks at literacy rate in the country, which is not more than 30 percent. Mass illiteracy makes people follow their leaders blindly. Not aware of their rights they are simply led the way they are asked to. A lot could be said on how people are systematically brainwashed about the country’s priorities. Watching the state-controlled media, one gets the impression that Kashmir or fighting a war with India are the most pressing issues facing the country. Behind the smokescreen of Kashmir the need to address education, health, sanitation, environment and access to clean drinking water is washed down the drain. Such have been the priorities of the government’s recent and past, with the result that people – the hapless poor – commit suicide because they cannot feed themselves or their families. The rich realising that Pakistan is getting barren pack up with their money and leave for greener pastures in Europe or Canada or US. The rest are just left to burn in a cauldron. Capitalism does this to every region and country in the world. The need, however, is to approach those who understand the workings of the system and join them in a campaign that promises a world entirely different than what they had seen so far.

AH

Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is amongst the top ten American capitalist ‘opportunities’ (read scams) for becoming rich in the USA? One in particular is also popular in other parts of the world. Become a preacher. Grow a congregation. Rook them for as much money as you can.

At a Pentecostal Assemblies of the World Convention a preacher said it had cost him $2,000 to renew his ordination and license. Can y’all contribute toward that? Yahoo reported that he ordered the doors locked on the one thousand people there and demanded that they each give twenty dollars. And the same from the online audience. Nice work if you can get it, Rev. He’s quoted in the piece as justifying the action on the following grounds: ‘The truth is, when finances are being received in any worship gathering, it is one of the most vulnerable and exposed times for both the finance and security teams. Movement during this sacred exchange can be distracting and, at times, even risky. My directive was not about control it was about creating a safe, focused, and reverent environment for those choosing to give, and for those handling the resources’.

Chutzpah on a grand scale. Wonder if he had the American equivalent of Securicor waiting outside to safely carry off all the loot? Credit where it’s due, he’s merely following all those who recognised early on that religion offered power over the masses and oodles of boodle.

* * *

The Socialist Party is wholly in favour of free speech, even when religious nonsense is being propagated. That’s because we have a long history of refuting such hokum with empirical evidence. In the USA the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, and free exercise of religion except where it doesn’t.

In Kansas, according to AlterNet, the ‘Satanic Grotto, a group of Kansas religious anarchists’ wanted to hold a ‘black mass’ inside the Statehouse.

In a fine display of sensitivity, the SG noted that ‘The event would not be the full “black mass” the group normally observes because that would involve nudity, drinking and other activities discouraged at the Statehouse. There also wouldn’t be fire or anything used in the ceremony that might pose a physical risk to the public’.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property organised an online petition. It’s described in the piece as a ‘traditionalist Catholic advocacy group’. Private property, eh?

Surprisingly not, the Kansas Governor responded with ‘computer says no’.

The article author points out that encouraging deference to religion can lead to ‘true believers’ resorting to violence to end perceived blasphemy. His example is the attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, who was left blind in one eye.

Jonathon Turley, a US First Amendment lawyer, said: ‘Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has announced that the government will be further cracking down on hate speech with a new working group tasked with defining “Islamophobia”’. The effort to crack down on “Islamophobia” could create a type of blasphemy standard if it encompasses criticism of the faith or its practices’.

DC

Editorial: Brimstone and Treacle. (1908)

Editorial from the July 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speaking at Leicester on May 24th, Ramsay MacDonald, in moving a vote of thanks to “General” Booth, stated (Morning Leader, 25.5.08) “I have a good many irons in the fire, but there is not a single iron that I find the Salvation Army does not hold one end of.” So much the worse for the irons of Ramsay MacDonald.

o o o

“I am sitting on the Committee dealing with the Children’s Bill, and when we get into any difficulty or want any particulars,” he went on, “below the bar sit two representatives of the ‘Army,’ and they are prepared to extricate us.” Verily the source of MacDonald’s inspiration is enough to justify any act of political lunacy he may, and frequently does, indulge in. If having so many irons in the fire compels him to rely upon officers of the Salvation Army for information on the condition of the children question, it’s certainly time he took a few irons out. It is not an edifying spectacle to see even Ramsay MacDonald burning his fingers.

This, however, may be relied upon. Directly it may safely be done, MacDonald will burn his boats at present moored to the Salvation Army pier. Therefore, “lest we forget,” we credit his political account with this laudation of the most expert sweating organisation extant.

____________________

More Labour Unity.

Will Thorne, fellow-member of the Labour Party with Ramsay MacDonald, does not agree at all with the latter’s estimate of the utility of the Salvation Army. While MacDonald (same speech) thinks that “whatever agency comes and goes, the country cannot spare one agency—and that is the Salvation Army,” Thorne expresses the hope (Reynolds’s 31.5.08) that “the Salvation Army would soon be wiped out, and all such sweating organisations.”

o o o

Credit where credit is due. Will Thorne sometimes blunders into a correct position. How it is managed, I suspect, not even William could inform us. “Act of God or the King’s enemies,” as the way-bill puts it, probably ! The Salvation Army is an absolutely anti-democratic, quasi-religious body, trading upon ignorance for its membership, working upon credulity and barbaric fear for its funds, acting as capitalist hack and agent in its administration. With unctuous ostentation it professes to be saving the souls of the poor, while all the time it is damning their bodies, wringing profit out of their necessity, kudos out of their misery, and advertisement out of their weakness.

o o o

It is a blend of Pecksniff and Gradgrind, with an infusion of the Cossack. It combines the methods of the Charity Organisation Society and the Inquisition. It is at once a fire insurance company, a sweat shop, and a black-leg purveyor. It grinds the faces of the poor in defiance of the biblical injunction. It is prepared to accept the money of the usurer who was whipped out of the temple, the Judas who sold his master, the welcher, the pimp, and the rest of the congregation fore-doomed to the lake of fire which burneth for ever—according to the book of love. Has not the “General” announced that he is ready to take contributions from anybody and sanctify them in further use ?

____________________

The Last Straw.

With the result thus acquired the Salvation Army dispenses hell and skilly to the “submerged ten” (human derelicts who, forced to choose between the devil and the deep sea, select, for some unknown reason, the former) in the proportion of a full pound of spiritual brimstone to a pennyweight of carnal flour water. Its special line, apparently, is the saving of souls from the pit by the plentiful mortification of the flesh, and—it is the sort of organisation that Ramsay MacDonald delights to honour !

o o o

All the same, I’m surprised at Thorne. If he’s not careful Ramsay will be cutting off his two hundred. He may protest that Ramsay couldn’t, but there’s no knowing what the MacDonalds and the Hendersons couldn’t work between them. There’s no knowing what they are doing. All that Thorne and Macpherson and the rest of the Labour Party know about the inside affairs of the Labour Party in Parliament is what MacDonald and Henderson tell them. Of course it will be a “dirty shame” if Bill is cut off with a shilling, but if Bill calls Henderson names in the “House” and flouts MacDonald’s opinions outside it, what can he expect ? Besides, Bill, what about that unity of purpose on all questions affecting the working class ? What about that solid front ? Where’s it gone, Bill ? Oh, Bill! you are a naughty boy!

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo! column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shakespeare used the idiom ‘He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon’. The ‘Devil’ is a character in a fairy story, similar to the one wherein this month millions still ‘celebrate’ the birth of a made-up ‘messiah’.

As a writer in a previous Socialist Standard wrote, ‘religion is intensely anti-working-class… the whole panoply of belief, ritual, salvation and miracle stands against the interests of all working people.’ The Catholic Church and totalitarian states have much in common.

Proponents of mumbo jumbo, the Catholic Church, should have used a longer spoon. A United States Commission on International Religious Freedom report noted that ‘the Vatican entered into an undisclosed agreement with the Chinese Communist Party (sic) in 2018 that established cooperation between Church authorities and Chinese officials in appointing bishops. But “the government has unilaterally installed CCP-aligned bishops without the Vatican’s consultation and approval” despite that agreement’.

‘Chinese officials have ordered the removal of crosses from churches and have replaced images of Christ and the Virgin Mary with images of President Xi Jinping. They have also censored religious texts, forced members of the clergy to preach CCP ideology, and mandated the display of CCP slogans within churches. “Ultimately, the Chinese government is solely interested in instilling unwavering obedience and devotion to the CCP, its political agenda, and its vision for religion, not protecting the religious freedom rights of Catholics”’ (Ncresister.com).

#    #    #    #

In Malaysia, where almost two thirds of the populace practise Islam, the state’s official religion, the government is seeking to enact a Mufti Bill which would grant ‘greater authority to religious courts, potentially eroding the rights of non-Muslims’. ‘The Mufti bill is not just about religious matters. It’s about power and control. If this bill passes, it could lead to a situation where religious authorities have the final say on a wide range of issues, from personal relationships to public policy. Supporters of the bill contend that it is necessary to strengthen the role of Islamic law to uphold traditional values. They argue that the bill would not infringe upon the rights of non-Muslims.’ Flying pigs come to mind. Oh, not halal. Flying gibbons or crocodiles?

#    #    #    #

Christmas, and hopefully all other religious festivals, may be on its way to extinction. The UK now has more atheists than people who believe in the existence of God.

‘Queen’s University Belfast, in a global project Explaining Atheism (nearly 25,000 people from six countries surveyed) to find out why people become atheists and agnostics. found that the common notion of the “purposeless unbeliever”, lacking a sense of ultimate meaning in life, objective morality, and strong values is not accurate, challenging the stereotype that atheists lead lives devoid of meaning, morality, and purpose. Dr Lee said: “The UK is entering its first atheist age. Whilst atheism has been prominent in our culture for some time, be it through Karl Marx, George Eliot, or Ricky Gervais, it is only now that atheists have begun to outnumber theists for the first time in our history”’.

DC

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire wealth has risen by more than 1,000 percent since 1989, with the number of billionaires tripling to 164 since 2010. Over the same period, the average worker lost £10,200 through wage suppression enforced through record-low strike activity policed by the trade union bureaucracy. One-fifth of people in the UK live in poverty, and 25 percent of all children. Nearly 3 million rely on food banks. For the poorest 10 percent of UK households, living standards have fallen by 20 percent compared with 2019–20—a drop in income of £4,600. 

(WSWS, tinyurl.com/mjajcj6m)

Pastor Mboro is a self-styled prophet with thousands of followers across South Africa. He has claimed to perform miracles such as healing people during sermons and delivering a fish from the womb of a pregnant woman. 

(BBC tinyurl.com/58t68xuj)

The book begins with a poignant reminder that we are all migrants: ‘Even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated, you would not be alive’. 

(Impact Investor, tinyurl.com/4xuemy6c)

I meet Najwa Abdul Awa, holding an image of her dead son. I ask her if she’s scared about what might be around the corner. ‘Of course not’, she replies with a smile. ‘I sent my first son for martyrdom with pride. And I’m willing to send my second and my third son too. We will not stop, she says, until Israel vanishes’. 

(Sky News, tinyurl.com/mxx8rm33)

The pro-Palestinian organizers gathered for ‘coffee with comrades’ …The main speaker, a University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD candidate, took the stage. He donned a keffiyeh and a Cuban Communist Party cap emblazoned with a red star, and began discussing readings by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leila Khaled, a former Palestinian militant and first woman to hijack an airplane. ‘Our political system is falling apart’, William Chaney, the PhD candidate, said in an interview just before his lecture began. ‘If we want to leave the world better, we have to look back and learn lessons’.

 (Boston Globe, tinyurl.com/5ductrb3)

In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can’t afford healthcare. 

(Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/wptkejj2)

… the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. 

(UnHerd, tinyurl.com/2d8a9ah2)

In general, human beings are remarkably altruistic. Rather than feeling destructive impulses, most of us feel a natural impulse to help others, to nurture their development and alleviate suffering. 

(The Conversation, tinyurl.com/2u85xn4w)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Halo Halo (2024)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

As Horace Walpole said, ‘This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.’ Rationalists find plenty within religion as a whole to occasion mirth, with some individual ones especially capable of producing belly laughs. But there are times when it’s very hard to echo Eric Idle’s exhortation at the end of Life of Brian to always look on the bright side of life.

Michael Palin said this about the 1979 television debate about the controversial film:

‘He (Bishop of Southwark) began, with notes carefully hidden in his crotch, tucked down well out of camera range, to give a short sermon, addressed not to John or myself but to the audience… He accused us of making a mockery of the work of Mother Teresa, of being undergraduate and mentally unstable. He made these remarks with all the smug and patronising paraphernalia of the gallery-player, who believes that the audience will see he is right, because he is a bishop and we’re not’.

American bible-bashers continue to press for their fantasies to be imposed upon children within public schools:

‘At a curriculum committee meeting school board Director Jordan Blomgren requested that “both sides” should be presented to students about evolution and climate change, stunning onlookers. ‘My question always comes down to the content,’ said Blomgren, who is also a teacher. ‘Like, you know [the] Earth’s been around for billions of years. Are you talking about both creation and evolution, like just having both… making sure that we’re showing both sides.’ A mother said “My kids are heavy into STEM, I don’t want them to be ill-prepared because Jordan wants to take up space complaining about fossils. I really don’t want my kids to be taught creationism. That’s for a Christian school, not a public school”’ (Buckscountybeacon.com 5 June).

They don’t give up, do they? Oklahoma’s top education official has ordered all public schools in the state to teach the Bible and the Ten Commandments to their students, a move that critics claim violates the US Constitution:

‘He called the Bible ‘one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution and the birth” of the United States. It is a necessary “historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system”. Every classroom in Oklahoma from grades five to 12 must have a Bible, and all teachers must teach from the Bible in the classroom.’

‘Requiring a Bible in every classroom does not improve Oklahoma’s ranking of 49th in education,’ State Representative Mickey Dollens said in a statement. ‘The state superintendent should focus on educating students, not evangelizing them.’

‘The Oklahoma directive comes a week after the governor of Louisiana signed a law ordering all public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.’

It’s August. Time to start buying those Chrisfest baubles now appearing in a store near you.

DC

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of convents? Bitter Winter (19 April) reported that the French Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit were so aggrieved at the behaviour of one of their nuns that they asked the Vatican to send in one of its Gumshoes to investigate her. The Sister was then effectively fired. Displaying secular umbrage she then took herself off to a tribunal and got herself awarded two hundred thousand euros for false dismissal. The tribunal apparently found the investigation biased because the Cardinal in charge of it was ‘friendly’ with another nun known to be an opponent of the one in question’.

#    #    #    #

‘An influential traditional priest aged 63 has sparked outrage in Ghana by marrying a 12-year-old girl… During the ceremony, women speaking in the local language Ga told the girl to dress teasingly for her husband. They can also be heard advising her to be prepared for wifely duties and to use the perfumes they gifted her to boost her sexual appeal to her husband.’ Apparently, the girl (shouldn’t that be child?) ‘started the rites to become the priest’s wife six years ago, but the process did not interfere with her education.’ She will also be ‘educated’ in her ‘marital responsibilities such as childbearing’. An NGO reports that 19 percent of girls in Ghana are married before they reach eighteen and 5 percent get married before their fifteenth birthday (BBC 1 April).

#    #    #    #

Charlie Hebdo is a French Private Eye-type magazine. In 2006 the magazine reprinted twelve cartoons depicting the founder of Islam which the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten had published in 2005. This did not go down well in certain sections of society. In 2015 two Algerian brothers entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve of the staff and wounded eleven more.

In 2022 Salmon Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses was attacked in New York. He was stabbed several times and as a result lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

In 2021, an educator in West Yorkshire was teaching religious studies. ‘The lesson that sparked the controversy was designed, ironically, to explore issues of blasphemy and free speech, and of appropriate ways of responding to religious disagreements’ (Guardian 31 March). What triggered the subsequent furore? He showed a cartoon which may have been one of those originally published by Jyllands-Posten. ‘The school immediately suspended the teacher, and ‘unequivocally apologised’ for using a totally inappropriate resource, promising to review the curriculum with “all the communities represented in our school”’.

The teacher was forced to leave his post and is apparently still in hiding.

Ain’t religion wonderful.

DC

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social media shorthand SMH means ‘shakes my head’. When the German Hindenburg airship caught fire landing in New Jersey in 1937 the radio commentator cried out, ‘oh, the humanity!’ The current seventh-century rulers of Afghanistan cause both of those reactions. The Telegraph, 25 March, reports that a Mullah there has declared, ‘we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public.’ Words fail.

*****

Fulcrum7.com in a book review says the author posits the ridiculous theory that Noah carried dinosaurs onto the Ark as juveniles or even as eggs. Because obviously think of the space a pair of eighty-foot dinosaurs would take up! The reviewer says, rubbish! Well of course. That’s like the old comedy routine where someone claims to have two lions, a giraffe and an elephant in a shoebox they’re carrying. The reviewer then says, ‘I believe the dinosaurs were among the “confused species”, which were the result of genetic engineering and one of the reasons for the Flood was to destroy those animals’. Words fail.

*****

In June 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte and his French army invaded Russia. In 1812 Mary Anning and, initially, her brother dug the skeleton of an unknown seventeen-foot-long creature from the cliffs of Lyme Regis. Now it’s known that it was the skeleton of an ichthyosaur from the Jurassic period. Mary Anning was aged twelve when she discovered this.

With hindsight, which of those two events was the most important? It’s not known if this is one of the animals that the Flood failed to destroy.

Mary Anning and her family were avid fossil harvesters selling their finds to tourists. Oxford professor William Buckland teamed up with Mary. Peal writes that Buckland was a committed Christian who had difficulty in reconciling Mary’s finds with Bible stories. To maintain his delusion Buckland said that the skeleton must have come there as a result of the Flood.

Mary also discovered a plesiosaur and a pterodactyl. She is quoted as saying that, ‘great men of learning had taken advantage of her.’ ‘They ‘sucked her brains’ of her knowledge, and stole the glory of her discoveries for themselves’ (Meet the Georgians, Robert Peal, 2021,).

*****

The protagonist sees a group of flagellants in St James’s Park. He converses about it with his chauffeur who says; ‘I find it ridiculous. If God exists and He’s decided He’s had enough of us, He isn’t going to change his mind because a rabble of no-hopers dress up in yellow and go wailing through the park.’

‘Do you believe He exists?

‘Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong. Perhaps He’s just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power for one intervention. So He made it. Whoever he is, whatever He is, I hope He burns in His own Hell’ (The Children of Men, P.D. James, 1992).

DC

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sun, 28 January, had American Christians seeking both to propagate creationism and coin a few dollars – more than a few as two million visitors a year at fifty quid a throw for adults were expected to visit a creationist museum in Kentucky which features a five-hundred-foot-plus model of an Ark based upon the ‘Noah and the flood’ fairy tale. A hundred million dollars to build allegedly. Sure they could have got some cheaper wood from somewhere. It doesn’t say whether that figure is inflation-adjusted from the time of the event which supposedly took place a few thousand years ago. In the real world it’s generally agreed that dinosaurs became extinct sixty- five million years ago. Inside there are models of dinosaurs because dinosaurs and humans apparently existed side by side.

If you can believe that someone in the sky was responsible for making the Universe and everything in it then you can believe any old twaddle.

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Another American group of similar ilk aims to ‘open people to the gospel by revealing God in science’. ‘Do Extinctions in the Fossil Record Undermine Creation?’ (Reasons to Believe, 31 January). Guess what their ‘scientific’ conclusion is. They conclude, ‘It means that mass extinctions and mass originations were part of a divinely orchestrated natural history.’ It’s a heads I win, tails you lose sort of thing. Can’t argue with the ‘science’!

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There’s a painting in a church in the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, of Lenin being cast down into ‘hell’. A futile gesture but given its history under the Soviets it’s probably the equivalent of a traditional British ‘up yours’. Whatever makes you happy. Have the Georgians consigned Stalin to the same ‘fate’ or are they still proud of one of their own?

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James Joyce’s 1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, contains a sermon, delivered by a Catholic priest, on the subject of hellfire and damnation. It’s a powerful piece of writing and may have come from Joyce’s own experiences within the Catholic church. Is hellfire still a tool to keep the sheep under control? Perfectly normal to have depictions of the savage Roman method of execution, crucifixion, looming over them?

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‘You couldn’t make it up’ news that a man in Iowa, USA, is facing criminal charges for beheading a statue. Where was it? In a Satanic Temple. Apparently, Satanism is designated an ‘official religion’ which makes the vandalism a ‘hate crime’.

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‘Liberation Tarot seeks to serve as a tool for those inspired towards revolution in the face of the able-centered, capitalist, hetero-cis-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy. Tarot helps us rewrite the vocabulary of power, and with it, to strengthen our muscles of radical, revolutionary, and abolitionist dreaming. The deck eschews conventional tarot cards. Figures in the deck have bodies of all shapes and sizes, colors, genders, ages, and abilities—together, elaborating a vision of collective liberation and co-resistance.’ Whatever. Bargain at fifty dollars. Sarcasm redundant…

DC

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religions, well some anyway, amongst other things, preach tolerance don’t they? Not in Kansas, USA, apparently. A new after-school club is causing such a kerfuffle that a petition has been raised against it. The petition says: ‘Satanism has a strong history of persecution and violence towards the church and those who believe in God.’ And goes on ‘Whether you believe in God, are a Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Hindu, Buddhist or even atheist you should see that ending this club is not just because it opposes Christianity but because what they stand for and the actions they will make are wrong and immoral. This isn’t an argument over religion and Christianity but of right and wrong.’ (Newsweek 27 December). It’s a Satan Club. Are young folk setting out to wind up their parents and authority?

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In Iowa, ‘the Satanic Temple of Iowa placed with state permission a small altar on the first floor of the Iowa State Capitol. It displays what are described online as the seven fundamental tenets” of Satanism, including the statement that “the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend”’ (YahooNews 13 December). The incensed State Representative wants to bring in a law to display ‘the Ten Commandments in all state buildings, including the Capitol, and in Iowa public schools’, but admits ‘few people think there is much that can be legally done about it because of free speech and freedom of religion.’

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Richard Dawkins in his 2009 book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, notes that in 2008, a Gallup poll, in response to three questions regarding the origin and development of humans on this planet, found that 36 percent of Americans thought that evolution had taken place over millions of years but that God had kick-started it; 14 percent thought yes, millions of years of evolution but definitely no god: and a staggering 44 per cent thought (rather believed because thought implies rationality) that God was responsible for the creation of humans within the last ten thousand years. The percentage of the latter who favoured October or some other month is not known.

A Gallup poll along similar lines in 2019 appears to show that the 44 percent is down to 40; the 36 is down to 33, and the 14 has seen a large jump to 22 percent. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of Protestants consider themselves ‘born-again or evangelical Christian.’ Opiates are hard to kick.

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Now the stepmother of US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has called out his extremist Christian beliefs (LBTQNation 13 December, quoting a Guardian interview). She says that Johnson, who is a creationist, has an indifference to environmental issues because he believes that ‘God will take care of you.’ So stuff the environment. An ideal capitalist politician given the damage capitalism causes.

Besides refusing to fight climate change, Johnson’s religion has fuelled his virulent anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs.

DC

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics’

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love, 1973.

As if flying wasn’t stressful enough, two instances have been reported of aircraft passengers being subjected to close encounters of the weird kind on American air transportation. Is it a mania brought about by, in their own minds, being twenty thousand feet nearer to the North Korea in the sky to which they aspire? Remember, Jesus and his dad ‘love’ you, but only if you give them blind, unconditional, fanatical, eternal praise and devotion, otherwise it’s ‘off to the gulag with you laddie and lassie’.

On Delta airways an American female gospel singer was in an altercation with a flight attendant after she attempted to perform and proselytise to the passengers. ‘I’m doing what the Lord is telling me to do,’ she said. Voices in the head; isn’t there a term for that? At least those who used to stand on the street wearing a sandwich-board that said ‘Repent! Judgement is at hand’ could be more easily ignored. As could Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormons appearing on your doorstep. Two steps backward and a shut door in that instance prevent further unwanted disruption to your life. But imagine if you’re captive in an aeroplane and…

…here we go again. A woman is having what’s described as a ‘huge meltdown’ on a Frontier Airline’s flight. A beanie-wearing female passenger shouts that the breakdown is being caused by a ‘real devil that wants to kill each and every one of y’all including your family members’. Isn’t she getting her religions mixed up? ‘She’s possessed!’ The devil is real, beanie woman shouts. ‘She needs help! I’ll tell you right now, Jesus Christ is the way, there’s nobody that’s gonna come to God, the Father, without Jesus Christ.’ ‘Who doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ?’ (educate yourself; read the surveys, more and more every day), the woman demands as people mutter. ‘If y’all don’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ, I suggest you find one.’

It’s not reported whether this suggestion was politely declined or whether other suggestions of their own came from the passengers subjected to this unwanted tirade (MailOnline 12 and 22 November).

These ladies have been missing a trick, which is, this sort of thing with a television audience of many more than a plane full can earn you loads of bucks.

The Guardian (4 November) reports that the new American House of Representatives Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, has an ‘inerrant biblical truth leading him to reject science. Johnson was a ‘young earth creationist’, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs’.

DC

Halo Halo! (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knock on door. Open to see two very smartly dressed mature ladies standing behind a smartly besuited gentleman. All smiling. Quick appraisal. Decide not Mormons because they only proselytise using males. Politely ask who they are. They offer pleasantries then straight into their sales pitch. Light slowly dawns. Ah, Jehovah’s Witnesses. They’re trying to fill their quota and sign me up. Haven’t they seen Life of Brian? Not worried about getting stoned then? Since it’s December I naughtily ask about their policies on Christmas and other Christian festivals. Aware it’s a no-go because they consider it pagan. Also ask about Easter. Wot, no pressies or chocolate Easter eggs? Even atheists say no thanks matey! Smiles become more strained.

Respond to their proffered leaflet with three copies of Questions and Answers about Socialism. After all, exchange is no robbery. Polite smiles quickly change to worried ones. He pulls back leaflet he was offering me. Exit right quickly. Socialism – the antidote to religion.

‘Witnesses believe that a “little flock” of 144,000 selected humans go to heaven, but that God will resurrect the majority (the “other sheep”) to a cleansed earth after Armageddon’ (Wikipedia). JW have eight and a half million adherents.

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On the second-largest island in the Philippines, an obscure religious movement, believed to be promoting an imminent end-of-the-world ideology, has been accused of engaging in sexual violence and forced marriage of its own members, including children. It is thought to have at least three thousand five hundred members. There are several religious groups in the Philippines that are labelled by authorities as cults (Al Jazeera 19 September).

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In November 1978, 900 Americans, adherents to the People’s Temple, died in Guyana after drinking poison at the behest of their leader, Rev Jim Jones. ‘Temple members were regularly humiliated, beaten, and blackmailed, and many were coerced or brainwashed into signing over their possessions—including their homes—to the church’ (Britannica.com).

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In Kenya, the Pastor of the Good News International Church was said to have told followers they must starve themselves to death. Why would anyone do that? Apparently, in order to ‘meet Jesus’. The Kenyan authorities had found over four hundred bodies. The news report noted, ‘Starvation appears to have been the main cause of death, according to government autopsies, but some victims – including children – had been strangled, beaten or suffocated’ (Sky News, 18 July).

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In Britain it used to be the norm when filling in any kind of form that asked for religion to respond with C of E. It often meant … well I’m not really religious but to avoid social disapprobation I’ll go with the flow. After all, if it’s good enough for the Queen/King it’s good enough for me. But now us ‘nones’ are coming out of the closet. A 5 October AP report notes that American and Canadian ‘nones’ are, give or take, a third of the population. Japan, Israel and Uruguay are listed as high in ‘nones’. Unnamed European countries qualify too.

DC

Halo, Halo (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life’ (George Bernard Shaw Androcles and the Lion).

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La République est laïque. The Republic is secular. French women want to play football. Bon. They petition to continue their religious repression by wearing hijabs when playing. Not bon.

French Football Federation says Non! If you want to play, remove them. Bon. The decision has to do with separatism rather than the obvious one, if in situ, how are they going to head the ball? How are you going to slow a forward who’s got a yard in pace more than you, with no hair to grab? Female basketball players are also prohibited from same. Who knew basketball was played in France? (BitterWinter, 30 June)

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Is female Islamic sport haram (forbidden)? An ‘expert’ says no, providing no men can see it, participants wear modest, covering clothing and the sport does not lead to any argument or conflict. Also, don’t copy female unbelievers’ hairstyles, clothing or names (Islam Question and Answer 18 September 2015). Some good stuff from the Imam there; no arguments or conflict. Pity religions don’t follow their own advice.

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It’s not all levity at Halo Halo. ‘A German woman who joined the Islamic State (IS) group has been jailed for nine years for crimes including keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave. She was also found guilty of crimes against humanity and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation. A Koblenz court said the 37-year-old had abused the young Yazidi woman for three years while they lived in Syria and Iraq and that encouraged her husband to rape and beat the woman. “All of this served the declared purpose of IS (Islamic State), to wipe out the Yazidi faith,” said prosecutors. In 2014, IS fighters stormed into Sinjar and thousands of men and boys over the age of 12 were summarily killed after being given the ultimatum to convert or die. Some 7,000 women and girls were enslaved and subjected to brutal abuses’ (BBC 22 June).

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Isn’t it odd how some religions eschew ‘love your neighbour’?

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A devout young female Mormon relates how, at age nineteen, she was sent to Argentina as a missionary, and was ecstatic to do so. Whilst there she says she developed horrendous health issues. She claims that indifference was shown to her health problems by the Mormon official in charge. When she asked for proper medical help the response given was, we’ll say a prayer for you. An acolyte of Mary Baker Eddy, do you think? She, and her family, are no longer members of the Mormon organisation (tinyurl.com/36xfsu49).

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The Mormons were founded by Joseph Smith following a visitation from an angel. Information regarding their wealth is hard to come by but like all ‘churches’ it’s beyond the dreams of avarice.

DC

Mad Monx (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1327 a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy suffered a calamitous fire which destroyed a magnificent collection of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. It was determined that the cause was arson. The perpetrator was an aged fanatical monk who sought to keep certain knowledge hidden away. Oh, that was fiction, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Marx was one of those whose books were destroyed by the Nazis, also keen to keep knowledge hidden. Burnt too were the works of Heinrich Heine. Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor, contains the line: ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too’.

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was also queasy at the repression being practised by the Soviet Union. Russians resorted to manual copying of literature (samizdat) and passing it from hand to hand.

In 1953, Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, appeared. Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which books burn. Set in a future America, it was the job of firemen not to extinguish conflagrations but to initiate them for the purpose of book burning.

‘Sticks and stones might break my bones but words cannot hurt me’ goes the old anti-bullying children’s rhyme, but publishing words can certainly lead to the violence it rails against.

Recent burnings of the Koran in Denmark and Sweden, which have freedom of speech enshrined in their constitutions, have led both countries to contemplate introducing laws to stop such actions. This is not the first time that such events have occurred and the consequences have, in some cases, resulted in extremely violent protests. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson warned that a spate of Koran burnings in the country has triggered ‘the most serious security situation since the Second World War’. One cannot believe he is referencing the Religion of Peace (sic).

Violent protests followed the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, called for the death of Rushdie. In August 2022 a stabbing attempt was made resulting in Rushdie losing the sight of one eye and the use of a hand.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40 percent) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of a god or of people or objects considered sacred. Twenty-two countries (11 percent) had laws against apostasy (abandoning one’s religion).

In March 2023 the Spectator wrote:

‘No religion ought to be given the power to constrain political discourse or behaviour in order to protect its adherents from being scandalised, and no government should help it by silencing its critics. If a Wakefield resident was to burn the Quran publicly in protest at the pretensions of the fundamentalists (something, incidentally, that can now cause you to be arrested on serious public order charges by police increasingly desperate not to appear anti-Islamic, as happened some years ago), we should fight to protect his right to free speech in the same way as we would if he had been a secularist or left-winger who had burnt a Bible or an American flag’ (tinyurl.com/bdebukkd).

Theory at odds with reality?

Earlier in 2023 an American Tennessee pastor live-streamed a book-burning event urging his flock to throw their Harry Potter and Twilight copies into a bonfire. Because why? Because, he said, ‘IT’S WITCHCRAFT 100 PERCENT! All your Twilight books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting and occultism. Stop allowing demonic influences into your home’. Does he know it’s 2023 not 1933? Or perhaps he thinks it’s 1633.

Whatever the literary merits, or otherwise, of J K Rowling’s works – Harry Potter has sold over 500 million copies since 1997– in an example that modern heresy will still get you burned at the stake, metaphorically, Rowling’s defence of biological women has seen her banned from events celebrating her own books and films. The three main actors whose careers were kickstarted in the Potter film series have been vocal in condemning her.

Not much support for Voltaire’s ‘I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend with my life your right to say it’ there. Nothing is free under capitalism but free speech increasingly comes at a price.

‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. In George Orwell’s 1984 the protagonist Winston Smith is employed in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. Here he altered historical newspapers and photographs to concur with whatever the Party line was at the time. The removal of ‘unpersons’ was often carried out in this manner in the Soviet Union.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union statues of Lenin were systematically removed from the state the Soviets had previously controlled. Understandable if you’ve been subject to repression for many years but the removal of literary figures seems churlish.

As part of its de-Russification, Ukraine has been removing monuments to Alexander Pushkin the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist, thought to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature.

A few years back Iran was, allegedly, (the report comes from the American-supported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) considering removing Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam from its education curriculum. Changes were because ‘Officials believe that in order to attract the younger generation they must increase the intensity of their religious and ideological propaganda in schools. They think that a large proportion of young people are turning away from religion and government ideology because of the weakness of propaganda in the education system and the mass media’. Shades of Goebbels?

When William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476 he would have been unaware of the law of unintended consequences. Pity that so many are now experiencing them.

Dave Coggan

Between the Lines: Heart of a Heartless World (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Heart of a Heartless World

Marx saw religion as "the sigh of the oppressed". As oppression imposes itself upon people in ever new ways, from the crushing weight of the credit card to the mind-numbing sterility of Madonna, the religious cries in the wilderness become more pathetic, more ridiculous, more religious than orthodox religion. Everyman (BBC1, 10.30pm, 4 August) offered a glimpse into the crazy world of the Kensington Temple, an evangelical church for born-again inmates. They screamed that Jesus is Alive in much the way that born-again Stalinists used to stand on street comers yelling that inflation had been abolished in Albania. The spectacle is highly amusing, until you think that these are potentially intelligent beings throwing themselves before the mercy of an all-powerful invisibility above the clouds.

The documentary showed how one woman had turned from stealing and drug-dealing to running aerobic classes for nifty Christians and reading the Bible with her boyfriend instead of sleeping with him. Clearly, for her the religious hallucinations offered by faith gave a better escape route than the buzz from cocaine. Members of the Kensington Temple wander round street markets offering salvation to wage slaves looking for cheap goods. Fortunately, most of the people approached by them in the documentary told them that whatever else they needed, they did not want to find the Lord. If Christianity is to have a future in places like Britain where most workers are not interested in falling to their knees as a strategy for escape, it is the loud-mouthed, emotionally-crippling, morally-obnoxious evangelicals who will carry the torch. By and large, though, the workers of the more developed capitalist countries will have little time for religion. Secular capitalism creates new gods, one of the oddest of whom is the man who died fourteen years ago as a drugged-exit, drunk-out obese clone who was too incapacitated to even wipe his own backside: he spent his last months wearing nappies, apparently.

The cult of Elvis is a minor form of secular worship in the USA, as it is in Britain. Viva Elvis (C4, 10pm, 12 August) was a journey to the outer reaches of human absurdity. There was a woman who has an Elvis museum in her house, including such exhibits as the Great One’s toenail clippings and a wart which he once had removed by a surgeon. Another crank had a shrine to Elvis in his living room which was constantly attended by himself and his son — Elvis, of course. An Elvis look-alike competition was shown in which grown men performed before screaming women who looked like recent escapees from the Kensington Temple. In Mexico a man called El Vez translates Elvis's profound lyrics into Spanish so that those hitherto stuck with the limited offerings of an Aztec past can now sing and sigh to their heart's content about hound dogs and other pressing questions of the day. Why all of this searching for gods? People who are made to feel small and powerless look for something which is big and powerful. They look and are offered a menu of Jesus, Elvis, not to mention Ron Hubbard and Lenin. Shut your eyes and believe in religion; open them wide and you might just catch sight of how big and powerful we all are if only we decide to be.

A Vindication

The newspaper, Stage and Television Today (1 August) interviewed Michael Ferguson who has been executive editor of the awful EastEnders since 1989. Jane Gamer, the interviewer, reports that "He has delved deep into soap psyche and seen battles of good versus evil, the foundation stone of Passion Plays, plus myriad struggles of Common Man and an ability to tap a deep-rooted need in millions of viewers". In this column we have repeatedly stated how soap operas are moralising mouthpieces appealing to alienated workers. EastEnders, in particular, offers its viewers simplistic caricatures of Good and Evil to be followed or avoided in line with the consequences depicted in the drama. We were criticised in the tabloid rag, The People, for making such observations, but now we have it from the horse's mouth; says Ferguson, ". . . there is a strong tie in it for me with the morality plays, there is good and evil. Nick Cotton is the personification of evil . . . Dot Cotton is a good character, she has a high sense of moral duty." Wage slaves used to go to Churches to be told what their moral duties were. These days, those who are not having evangelical orgasms in the Kensington Temple or paying pilgrimage to Elvis's left toenail are watching Saint Dot fight the twice-weekly holy struggle against Wicked Nick to see how the good life must be led.

Cat Sense

There is an irritating ad for Whiskas which says that if cats could do so they would buy Whiskas. Cats have more sense than to buy anything. Cats take what they need. Cats do not go shopping or carry credit cards or have overdrafts or make adverts selling horrible, cheap rubbish. My cat runs a mile every time he smells Whiskas. Come to that, he never goes to Church, worships no gods and has never been seen near the hi-fi when Elvis is on. And he has no sophisticated consciousness like humans do. Come to think of it, humans would not buy Whiskas, or any other commodity for sale, if they thought about it for more than five minutes.

Steve Coleman

Virgin on the Ridiculous (1995)

TV Review from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four has recently been showing a season of horror films, and viewers could have been forgiven for thinking that the kind of torture exhibited in Witness: True Love Waits (4 July, 9pm) was an entirely new addition to the horror genre. The action centred on Nashville, Tennessee, where the devotees of the local Baptist churches have taken to insisting that their children take vows of celibacy until they marry. Much of the documentary was taken up with film of local church “leaders" instructing teenage children in what is, and is not, permissible behaviour before marriage according to the “Holy Scriptures". Teenage girls were advised to spend six months "finding Jesus" before entering into any sort of relationship with the opposite sex whatsoever, and after this period of holy probation, only talking, holding hands and some forms of dancing were deemed permissible.

And were the teenagers happy with this state of affairs? Were they buggery. Most were torn between guilt at offending Jesus before descending into hell for all eternity, and expressing their natural sexual inclinations in a healthy manner. The boys were sad and guilt-ridden, the girls either brainwashed automatons or tearful would-be rebels. Most demonstrated signs of what is commonly called neurosis. One teenager was so deliriously happy with her lot that, when asked to recant her past sexual indiscretions before the church, she spent the entire time sobbing her heart out, barely able to speak the guilty words that were tearing her apart. After the ordeal, she ran back into the congregation to the arms of her parents, looking for consolation from the twisted mentalities that were so intent on making her life a misery. She probably had nowhere else to run.

Truly, what bastards these Christians can be, like most fundamentalist religious fanatics. Brainwashing, manipulation and humiliation were the techniques used to get the right result for Jesus and that was only the public face of it. Without a doubt, True Love Waits was one of the most terrifying programmes seen on television this year, and should have been compulsive viewing for anyone toying with the ideas of any of the barmy god-squad outfits that infest modern capitalism. It was a truly disgusting sight to see slick twenty-something preachers feeding guilt on a plate to vulnerable teenagers. "No touching below the neck! No 'dirty talk’ and certainly no passing of bodily fluids!" Verily, the devil's liquids are everywhere and are not to be trifled with until couples are “united in Christ".

Good News

Despite all this nonsense there was some good news. For despite the attractions of the "community" of church, with its friendships. singing and sense of common purpose, there were doubts. Oh yes, big doubts, and the flock were forever in need of shepherding away from the green grass of Satan's meadows. Straying from the path seemed quite common, and the leaders always needed to be on hand to quell any misgivings or slap wrists (mind you, we weren’t told of their views on masturbation but can guess).

In one ceremony reminiscent of Nazi Germany, the young believers were encouraged to bring the Devil's Music to church and burn their tapes and records in front of the congregation. To put it mildly, most looked less than ecstatic at the thought, and one girl said that secular music played such an important role in her life that she wouldn’t. Some eventually turned up with bags of old tapes to destroy, but most did so with what was visibly no enthusiasm for the project These were, in truth, the sort of people who were manipulated into burning Beatles' records in the sixties when John Lennon made his famous remark about the Beatles being "bigger than Jesus". However, most modern Bible-bashers should care to remember that the fuss soon died down when American teenagers realised that Lennon wrote better lyrics than Jesus and could play the guitar as well.

What True Love Waits showed was what history demonstrates all the time. Religious indoctrination can never be wholly successful for the very reason that much of it is so evidently at odds with human instinct. Primarily the instincts to love, to play, and to have sexual intercourse for the sheer pleasure of it which characterise the human species. The turnover of adherents to Evangelical and Baptist churches seems to be even greater than that for those mind-numbing Trotskyist groupings, and it is not surprising.

Of course, even a broken clock is right twice every twenty-four hours and not absolutely everything in the Christian creed is wrong, just most of it. Indeed, if the teenage church-goers of America care to take one piece of advice from the Bible it might be "go forth and multiply", an adage which, in a slightly different context, should be directed at their religious manipulators and tormentors too.

Dave Perrin

Halo Halo! (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In Belgium only ten percent of its population now go to church regularly. Dwindling congregations means more socially useful churches. They’re being turned into hotels, breweries, libraries, cultural centres, and night clubs (Yahoo News, 22 June).

Think of the uses they can be put to in socialism.

Capitalism damages your health. So do religious beliefs.

The fanatical kind of American Christian believes that Darwin and evolution science is bunkum. They are convinced and conditioned that the Armageddon is imminent and when the Rapture occurs they will be transported up into heaven leaving the rest of us heathens behind.

Who knows if this involves travelling upwards in a space ship? In 1997 thirty nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in such a belief.

James Ussher (1581-1656), Armagh Archbishop, working from Genesis decided that the universe was created on Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE. Though apparently he didn’t know what time this occurred.

What’s Intelligent Design? Simply put it’s a denial of natural selection because you know there just has to be a supreme being behind it all. There just has! He/she/they created the dinosaurs and fossils as well, you know. Why? Don’t question the divine plan!

In 1925 a teacher in Tennessee. John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution instead of creationism – the Scopes Monkey Trial. The Discovery Institute, an American think tank, is now offering American home-schooling tutors ‘science’ material ‘from the perspective that nature reflects intelligent design.’

A writer in American Thinker, June 16, ‘argues’ that the birth, development and growth of children, of plants, and of the brain, is incontrovertible evidence of ‘intelligent design’. Maybe he’s descended from one of the prosecutors in the Monkey Trial.

The Reno Gazette Journal, June 1, reports a research centre’s findings that over a third of American parents believe, ‘it’s extremely or very important that their children have similar religious beliefs to their own’. The ‘balance’ in the piece comes from Richard Dawkins’ warning ‘don’t force your beliefs on your children.’ The RGJ asked its panel if parents should ‘pass along’ their religion to their children. Their panel consisted of: a rabbi, a Bahá’í, a pastor, a Muslim, a bishop, a Buddhist, and a Mormon. Bet you can’t guess what they all thought?

A scene in the 1979 Monty Python film, Life of Brian, satirises the absurdity of someone being stoned simply for uttering the name, Jehovah. To paraphrase Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo, ‘Infamy, infamy!’ Blasphemy, blasphemy. However, this is no laughing matter. In certain dominions the accusation alone can result in death.

‘Succumbing to the demands of a radical Islamist party, the Pakistan government has agreed to try blasphemy suspects under terrorism charges in addition to the other sections of the country’s penal code (Rediff.com, 18 June).

Twelve months ago a vicar was discovered, in a public place, having ‘relationships’ with a Henry hoover. Sexual proclivities are entirely a personal matter. Disseminating fairy stories is far more harmful.

DC