These days, though, government and religion seem to be heading toward a reconciliation. Religious groups are being treated as if they have legitimate claims on society as a whole. The most striking example recently [Editor’s note: This article was first published in 2006.] has of course been the worldwide protests against the publication of caricatures of Mohammed by an obscure newspaper in Denmark. One government after another has said that it deplored the violence of the protests, but that it also deplored the offence which had been given to Islam by the cartoons. This approach neatly placed irreligious cartoonists on the same moral plane as religious arsonists, bombers, and murderers – You think the killing of all those Christians in Pakistan was bad? What about those awful cartoons!
The new Canadian government wants to hold a vote on whether to restore the traditional definition of marriage to replace the definition currently in effect which allows people of the same sex to marry. The so-called traditional definition of marriage, however, turns out to bear a strong resemblance to the predominant Christian one. The traditional views of the non-Christian members of our diverse society will not be presented as options. And for sure the Mormons needn't hold their breaths thinking their traditional definition is going to be legitimated.
The problem is that political parties have done so well in gutting the political philosophies they supposedly represent of any distinctive meaning that they can no longer count on voters inspired by the same principles as they to support them. In Canada the supposedly socialist party now devotes itself to proportional representation rather than to economics. The supposedly conservative party is still trying to patch together a compromise position on what conservative principles are that will satisfy both the factions which recently patched themselves together into a single party, and the supposedly liberal party tried to inspire the populace during the recent election campaign by claiming the leader of the conservatives was a secret American agent. Any comprehensive analysis of society that can withstand intelligent questioning for longer than ten seconds is beyond all of them.
So not for them any ringing declarations of the priority of freedom of expression over the violent propensities of the faithful. Not for them a declaration that the civil definition of marriage is something different from the religious one. Not for them a further change in the definition of marriage to assert the primacy of civil marriage over marriages performed by clerics.
Instead, political parties have started trying to co-opt the inspirational power of non-political ideologies – environmentalism, feminism, religion. Of these the most dangerous is religion. Environmentalism and feminism are, whether you agree with them or not, characteristically reasonable. Their tenets are expressed in ways which can be tested. Religion, however, brooks no testing. Its tenets are not descriptions of the world but arbitrary assertions about it which the religious refuse to modify. The religious deal with the resulting inadequacy of these tenets to account for what happens in the world by attributing their failure to the actions of enemies – Satan, liberals, Danish cartoonists.
The extent of the danger can be seen in the current plight of the Republican Party of the United States. From one point of view, the Republicans have done well from their courting of the religious. They have a stranglehold on the federal government.
From the point of view of the United States as a whole, though, the deal looks less desirable. The religious faction in the Republican Party tends to come from the Word Faith branch ofevangelicalism, a branch that holds views that are highly compatible with making unsubstantiated claims about the threat posed by Iraq – and with believing them. According to Word Faith theology, any assertion of yours that arises from your faith must be true. The next step is believing that whatever you believe was told you by God, and therefore inerrant. The step after that is acting on those beliefs.
The previous post, about neo-corporatism, points out that the traditional democratic view of society as composed of equal individuals is being replaced by a conception of society as composed of "communities" with unequal rights which need to be made equal. Labour is considered to be such a community, women are one, minorities are all communities, and religions are being seen more and more as communities.
The idea that any of these groups is a community or any other type of cohesive group doesn't stand up to scrutiny, of course. The idea that Christians are a community (and they are frequently discussed as if they are one) is belied by phenomena such as the detestation of many Roman Catholics and Protestants for each other. Evangelical Christians often find it necessary to send missionaries to Catholic countries to convert the benighted papists.
The idea that Muslims are a cohesive group is just as questionable. A civil war is going on in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, but we are expected to believe that there is a single entity called Islam. Once we believe that there is a single entity called Islam, then logically we believe that it can be offended. And if we're one of those religious people driven into paranoia by the futility and irrationality of the principles we accept as guides to life, we think something needs to be done to punish the offence, whether it's real or imagined. Whence abortionist-killers, embassy-burners, and Peter McKay's cowering before the might of Islam.
So we may be on the verge of a society in which we have freedom of religion but not freedom from religion. Nor will we have the freedom not to have a religion. If the religious get their way, every law of a once democratic society will be made to conform to the paranoid preferences of the religious. That idea might sound paranoid itself, but we need only consider the conformity of the Bush administration to the agenda of evangelical Christianity to see that it's not.
Unfortunately, Canadians seem to be falling for this idea. Most think it was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, and from there it is but a short step to believing that their publication should have been prevented.
There's only one thing for it, I'm afraid. Sane people must start their own religion, the key principle of which is that it is unafraid of criticism.
What kind of God is it, after all, who can't tolerate the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark? Not a very self-confident one, it would seem. And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity like that?
What kind of God is it that can give His people a Bible which no two of them understand to mean the same thing? Doesn't the multiplicity of Christian denominations and sects suggest that the Christian God is a pretty ineffective communicator? And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity who can't make his advice clear?
A real god would be unafraid to state his or her principles clearly. A real god would pity unbelievers instead of craving their painful and eternal punishment. A real god would not be offended by the actions of people he or she created.
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