... In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice III ii 77-80, Bassiano
Religions are memes of geography and upbringing, and manacle where in the world your mother sprogged you. Why would God plump for an Anglican bent and entrust Her church to the murderous tyrant Henry VIII? Life could be worse — if you were born in Salt Lake City you would stand a more than 50/50 chance of being raised Mormon. The umbilical cord between country — God’s country — and religious sect — God’s sect — is seen by the faithful not as an inbred weakness but an iron-boned strength: ‘Certainly the religious overlay of patriotism has come into fashion. It’s always there of course.’ Arthur Miller
Mormons believe the Garden of Eden was not to be found in the Near or Middle East but — go on, have a guess! Off you go to teacher for an extra bit of tuck if you guessed God’s own country — naturally, Missouri. Mormons’ treatment of Jesus has him while winging his way to Heaven stopping over in God’s own country to offer private tuition to, and smoke the peace-pipe with, Native Americans — dubbed Lamanites and Nephites – whose ancestors had arrived in magic submarines from Jerusalem. Perhaps Joseph Smith could not envision the advent of DNA which proved that the principle ancestors of Native Americans emigrated from the Fast East — Mongolia. This devastating discovery did not daunt the Mormon high-command who simply changed the commentary to the Book of Mormon to cite Jewish blood merely as contributory to the DNA ancestry of Native Americans. And the Lamanites were quickly buried and forgotten. The distance between Jerusalem and Mongolia has never seemed so remote.
We gaze with quizzical wonder on the religious zealot frozen without — in a state of cold certainty — yet burning within like a brazier for a brand of religion that at best is beset with impurities. The certainty of the zealot contrasts with the quantum puzzlement we feel in a varied and uncertain universe: ‘All the matter in the universe is made of atoms and sub-atomic particles that are ruled by probability, not certainty.’ Brian Green, astrophysicist
The fundamentalist sheds a healthy hue of scepticism and scientific enquiry, but in those odd moments when the universal truth shoots like a dart through the fiery blood, the fundamentalist suffers a battle of humours and a sickness of cognitive dissonance that must be suppressed:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. Oliver Cromwell
The representative of God revels as a receiver of private revelation, claims a cold reading of the mind of God and reacts to a hot burning of the bosom as sole arbiter of God’s battle-plan.
Shelley rightly revolts against the Vulcan forces of intellectual stagnation: ‘There is no God ... Earth groans beneath religion’s iron age. And priests dare babble about a God of peace.’
The blacksmith batters base metal to brilliance and the idiot babbles like a sage but: ‘There is in every village a torch — the teacher; and an extinguisher — the clergyman.’ Victor Hugo
Denis Diderot, Dithyrambe Sur la Fête des Rois, applies a guillotine approach to the stiff-necked agitates of God: ‘Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’
Emile Zola leads a congregation ready to raze the roof: ‘Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.’
The disturbing certainty of the priest is based not on brilliant literature — nailed-on historic narrative dripping God’s own quill-pen — but on dull-dirgy, dowdy and destructive documents derived from hucksters and dealers of dodgy fantasy.
The simple fact that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with. H L Mencken, Treatise on the Gods
The murderous mania of the material is marginalised, and mistakes are made metaphor. The material magically morphs into magnificent morsels of wisdom, manna from the mouth of the Almighty:
Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
God’s mysterious masterstrokes flourish unworthy works of weak writing. The Book of Mormon is a terse, turgid, tangled collection of nineteenth-century assumptions, plagiarised unashamedly and plagued with anachronisms, lack of perspective, but prettified in seventeenth-century English to make you wonder where in their magic underwear Mormons keep their peep-stones of literary criticism.
Modern texts hyped as holy are hardly an improvement over the monstrosities of the Old Testament held as the highest handbook of moral certitude for children.
The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilisation is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible? Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Armed with their manuals of murder and the sword of truth, God’s band of white-collared soldiers march as to war for the fascist cause ... Forward! ... Right! ... Right! ... Right!
In 1099 God’s city Jerusalem was besieged and stormed by a Christian army. Jew and Muslim alike were enlightened to the fiery message of the Book: ‘70,000 men, women and children perished in a holocaust, which raged for three days. In places men waded in blood up to their ankles and horsemen were splashed by it as they rode through the streets.’ Desmond Seward, The Monks of War