A slightly scary parallel.

At the weekend I started reading a book entitled The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman (which can be bought here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Closing-Western-Mind-Faith-Reason/dp/071266498X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327323426&sr=8-1 and is heartily recommended), which has me enthralled - but also worried.

The guy's a serious historian but he writes well for the layman; he's very fluid, and in many ways this book reads more like a novel than like a history book.  I haven't finished it yet, but so far he's been covering the mindset of the shifting ancient Greek culture, the alterations made by the Romans, and the backdrop that allowed Christianity to flourish and eventually displace the classical values of intellectual rigour, observation and the right to question anybody, no matter how highly regarded.

To put it in simple terms, the Greeks and later the Romans had no problem at all with the religions of those they conquered, and in many cases were more than happy to incorporate new gods into their own pantheon. Frequently when conquering a new territory the gods of those they defeated would then take a place in the ritual sacrifices and observances, and thus the new subjects would be free to worship their old gods as long as they were happy to play lip-service to the Roman gods too (declaring there were no gods at all could get you into trouble, but we are talking about a very ancient civilisation working with far less data than we have now. And we can't feel smug about it - we're not that different now).  Observances on holy days was simply part of Roman culture, and by showing deference to the gods one also demonstrated respect for its values and loyalty to the state.

This all worked fine for a long time because almost everyone back then worshiped a pantheon, a group of gods rather than a single omnipotent deity.  To that way of thinking, encompassing a new god or thinking of it as another aspect of one you already believed in was not a problem, and the Romans made a point of being very tolerant of other religions in order to keep the people of their new territories happy.  Where they started to run into trouble was with Judaism and then - even more so - with early Christianity.  Here was a religion different to every other they had encountered in that it acknowledged only one deity, and in fact condemned Roman society and culture for tolerating multiple gods and goddesses.  Some Jews and many early Christians refused to participate in worship to the Roman gods, and many became martyrs to their cause. Early Christianity, through being unfamiliar and alien to Roman culture and religion, was able to at once exploit religious tolerance and condemn those who extended it.  Here too, for the first time, was a religion that claimed reward in exchange for simple faith, not for good actions, and which therefore actively promoted the mindset according to which blind faith becomes a virtue and analytical thought consequently becomes undesirable, even dangerous.

I haven't finished the book yet and I think I'll have to read it twice to fully grasp all the nuances and implications, but this to me demonstrates an alarming parallel to what has happened in Europe over the last few decades.  In Europe, even those nations like the UK that have a state religion are governed largely by secular values of fairness and equality for all (although no one would deny for a moment that we sometimes fall short of these values).  We have experienced centuries of warfare caused directly by intolerance of opposing religions, and as a result we have learned that it is better, safer and more humane to live and let live with people whose beliefs are different than our own.  In recent decades, however, we have experienced an influx from the Middle East, which has included a large number of Muslims... and Islam as a religion, by any objective terms, is several centuries behind the moderate and considered religious mores most European Christians hold dear.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam are very similar in fundamental principles - they worship the same deity, although few devout believers would be keen to accept that. However, for most Christians and Jews (not all by any means, but most) religious mores have taken a backseat to secular values, whether the believer appreciates that consciously or not.  Ephesians 5:22, for example, states "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord" but even among relatively devout Christians in the UK few would try to claim that women are not equal to men, or do not deserve equal freedoms and rights (the segregation in the Jewish temple is an interesting aspect, but again has become - in most cases, the more orthodox Jews provide exceptions - more symbolic than anything else, as both genders are given equal rights under law). Leviticus 20:10 condemns people who cheat on their spouses to death, and we're all aware of the laws against working on the sabbath and fancying people of your own gender.  The point is that almost all Europeans, however strongly they believe in Jahweh and/or Yeshua, are accustomed to the idea that religious law must fit within the secular laws hammered out over centuries largely to protect people against the dogma of others.

Islam, in this respect, has come as quite a shock to Europe.  Any woman living in a British city will be familiar with that small number of Muslim men who stare at our bare heads and unhidden figures with a curious mixture of lust and contempt.  We ourselves are unnerved and baffled by women in ninja suits, and covertly discuss the implications of this dress; I myself think people should be able to wear whatever they like without endangering the safety of others (so in circumstances under which a balaclava or motorcycle helmet would not be allowed, neither should a face-covering hijab), but I struggle with the definition of "voluntary" in such conditions - can a woman trained from birth to believe herself inherently shameful and inferior ever be considered as "choosing" to cover her entire body? We have been introduced to honour killings, child brides, the sort of sexism we have not seen in centuries, and terror threats on a level we have never encountered before.

And because we have learned through hard experience that everyone's better off if we can all respect one another's values, we've done our best to accommodate all this, to legitimise in the name of "multiculturalism" what we would not accept for any reason other than a basis in religion.  We have instituted sharia courts, insisting that they are only there as mediators where people prefer them to conventional law, while failing entirely to consider the fact that under sharia law a man's word is equal to that of two women, and that it will be the man who decides which court a woman is subjected to.  We tread on eggshells to avoid offending Muslims, to the extent that we stifle our own hard-earned and vital freedom of expression (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/01/18/london-atheist-group-accused-of-bullying-after-posting-a-harmless-image-of-muhammad/), and every time someone in the Islamic world kicks off and blows something up or executes a journalist or mutilates a woman we are told - effectively - not to judge Islam by what its adherents do. When a group of Muslim men were prosecuted for grooming and raping large numbers of underage British girls, a peer in the House of Lords tried to tell us their crimes were attributable to Western women, who through showing insufficient voluntary interest in these animals forced them to drug and rape children.

The trouble with this, of course, is that the principle of "respecting others" only works if both sides agree to it - which Islam openly and proudly does not. The more exemptions we grant Islam under our laws, the more they demand.

This is exactly the mistake the Romans made; they extended liberality and tolerance to a group of people who had no problem with exploiting the freedom while sneering at those offering it. There are signs that we are beginning to identify and resist this two-faced abuse of our values - the pigs buried on the proposed site of a mosque in Seville, Draw Mohammad Day etc. etc. - but I don't think it's enough, I think we need more people more willing to stand up and say "no, this is wrong and it's not racist, intolerant or "Islamophobic" to say so".  Islam is quite open about its intention of taking over the Western world... last time that happened, Europe sank into the Dark Ages and we lost knowledge and values we have only recently - centuries later - started to regain.

A bid to reclaim the word "tolerance".

I've been hearing a lot recently about atheists wanting "tolerance" from believers, both from the atheists who're requesting it and from believers who are granting or denying it.

Now, this pisses me off.  "Tolerance" in this sense may be defined in loose terms as "the ability and/or willingness to endure and/or accept something unpleasant or disliked". So let's look at this more closely. What precisely is there about atheism that warrants or requires "tolerance"? What is it about atheists that is so unpleasant or disagreeable that we ourselves are effectively saying mea culpa by respectfully asking people to put up with us, unlovely and nasty as we are?!

This misuse of the word "tolerance" in relation to atheists is by no means unique to us; long before the rise of the New Atheists (go team!) we were being told that we should "tolerate" - among others - black people and gay people. Now, I find the term just as offensive towards black people and gay people as it is to me as an atheist; what the hell is there about being black or being gay that requires "tolerance" from anyone?!  What aspect of being black is so offensive that we must exercise "tolerance" towards black people?! And how precisely do the private activities of two consenting adults (of any damn gender!) affect you in such a way that you must flare your nostrils, fold your arms and benevolently agree not to be offended by them?!  It's the most condescending attitude imaginable!  Someone being black does not affect you in any way. Someone being gay does not affect you in any way. And my being an atheist does not affect you in any way... except, apparently, that you don't like me being different from you. Well you know what?  I'm doing absolutely nothing wrong by being an atheist - in fact there are many sound arguments for my being morally better than you as a believer - and I'm not going to be grateful to you for putting up with my existence.

There are many instances in which the use of the word "tolerance" IS appropriate - for example:

We tolerate Islam despite the fact that some Muslims blow up buildings, mutilate women and commit genocide in the name of Islam, because most Muslims are good people.

We tolerate Christianity despite the fact that some Christians shoot doctors, persecute gay people, and actively promote the spread of HIV/Aids in the world's poorest countries, because most Christians are good people.

We tolerate atheism despite the fact that some atheists...

... well, what? Talk about it? Publish books and blogs? Gather to form humanist groups? Take the piss out of believers? Again, what precisely is it that we do that needs to be "tolerated"?

I would like to see the word "tolerance" dropped in relation to atheism, because it's an admission of guilt or wrong-doing that simply isn't there.

The most important anniversary of my generation.

Tomorrow, the world will remember the events of September 11th 2001.

It's possible that my age at the time - I was seventeen, on the cusp of adulthood - accentuates the effect, but for me the terror attacks of 9/11 are vivid in my memory almost as much for how much the world changed in the space of a few hours as for the horror of the death and destruction itself. By seventeen, I had been an atheist for many years but had always maintained that I did not have the right to show disrespect for faith in other people; it took a while to crystallise, but 9/11 was the start of a change in my thinking just as it was the start of shattering changes in the zeitgeist of the Western world.

On 9/11, I was at my sixth form college and the first I heard of it was on the way out of my last lesson for the day (I had an early finish), when the college was alive with incredulous and excited whispers that there'd been an accident in New York, that someone had crashed a plane into the World Trade Centre.  At that stage, of course, the world still thought there had been a terrible accident.

I lived a little way from my college, and as it was a lovely day in early Autumn I was in no rush to get home. As I approached my house, though, I gradually realised that everything was a lot quieter than it would usually have been. There were very few cars on the roads, no people pottering in their gardens; even the pubs I passed were near-silent.  I didn't associate any of this with the "accident" I'd heard about at college, but when I got home and turned on the TV (I had the house to myself for a couple of hours) I quickly realised what was going on.

In between my leaving college and getting home, the second plane had hit; we knew, now, that this was not an accident but a deliberate and premeditated act of evil on a scale that was just incomprehensible at the time.

I live in the UK, and grew up in an era when the threat of terrorism and violence was much reduced from the seventies but nevertheless still present. My own father had two near escapes from bombings by the IRA, in Birmingham ten years before I was born and again in Manchester when I was in primary school. What I'm getting at is that Britain had grown used to a level of tension; the attacks of the seventies were still very much in the nation's consciousness, and the nineties saw another elevation in tensions - as a small child I didn't know the details, but just grew up aware that there were some people who wanted to kill innocent people to make a political point. But although one cannot possibly justify one act of terrorism by comparing it to another, there was still nothing in our experience tthat could have prepared us for the scale of the destruction that was wreaked on the 11th of September 2001.

Again, this may be related to my age at the time and my ignorance of world politics, but to me the attacks on the World Trade Centre came completely out of the blue.  I was used to the idea that because of the situation in Ireland - which was attributable in part to a conflict in religious beliefs - there were many people who wanted to make changes and a small minority who would use violence to create pressure for those changes. And again, I'm not saying that an act of terrorism can be justified in relation to another act of terrorism, but this idea that there was a group of people who were not remotely interested in discussion, compromise or negotiation, and whose simple aim was to kill as many Westerners as possible and to destroy our culture because their religion conditioned them to see us as subhuman... again, there was just nothing in my experience that could provide any frame of reference for this idea.

9/11 ushered in a new age of fear, and gave rise both to a terrifying increase in religious extremism - particularly in the USA - and to what is now being termed the "New Atheists", which latter is a group to which I am proud to say I belong. Since the events of that day, everything has felt... I don't know, brittle, fragile, balanced on a knife edge. We have become accustomed to the notion that there is a large and powerful religious group in our world whose medieval values make them ideologically opposed to everything about Western society and culture, people who have no interest whatsoever in sharing our planet amicably and who repay our societies' liberal attitudes by at once enjoying the freedoms we offer and hating us for offering it.

Below is a piece I wrote some time ago in a forum dealing with fundamentalist religion, in which most contributors were religious people lamenting the actions carried out in the name of the religion they personally interpret to be loving and benevolent. What shocked me was that several people in the group - far from denouncing fundamentalist atrocities for their simple evil - were outraged at the fundamentalists for exposing their religion to negative press.  The below is my own opinion on the matter, and in a world where fundamentalist christianity has been on the rise just as rapidly as fundamentalist islam and has contributed to many more times more deaths than the event which gave rise to it (George Dubya's ability to inextricably tangle religiosity, patriotism and national loyalty in the minds of the voters is one of very few achievements that led me to think he might not have been a complete moron after all), I stand by my assertion that the only way to counter fundamentalism is to counter religion; and the only way to do that is to drop this ridiculous notion that fundamentalists are somehow less representative of their religion than do-gooders.

"I get sick to the back teeth, every time the world tries to object to a religiously-motivated crime or atrocity, of people saying "don't judge a religion by its extremists".  After the 7/7 bombings in London, muslims were vehemently assuring us that those actions did not represent ordinary muslims, that they were repellent, misguided, blah blah blah. When that doctor was murdered by a fundamentalist christian in the States, the god-squad were wringing their hands, saying isn't it awful, of COURSE he's not a typical christian, it's not fair to judge us all by him...

Total codswallop, and it makes me livid that we seem to accept such a transparently stupid argument.

Where did that murderer LEARN to be a christian?! Where did those bombers LEARN to be muslims?! Did they develop their superstitions spontaneously?! NO - THEY LEARNED THEM FROM THOSE SAME HAND-WRINGING, APOLOGIST CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS WHO ARE TRYING TO DENY ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS!

If I bring up a child to believe homosexuality is wrong and disgusting, it is MY FAULT if that child grows up to think it's OK to murder gay people.  If I bring up a child to believe abortion is wrong and sinful, it is MY FAULT if that child grows up to murder a doctor because he provided abortions. If I bring up a child to believe implicitly in the qur'an, it is MY FAULT if that child grows up to obey that bit of the qur'an instructing him to murder non-muslims.

So the only way to do away with religious fundamentalists? STOP affording religious belief this ridiculous, exalted position of being above question, above reproach, inherently worthy of respect.  It is a superstition, nothing more; we KNOW who is responsible for religious fundamentalism, and we need to stop letting them off the hook for it."