![]() Christian fundamentalist pastors are paid to identify the «possessed» kids and exorcise them, sometimes by pressing a clothes iron on their naked bodies. In Angola and Congo, thousands of so-called child-witches are tortured or abandoned for bringing bad luck to their families. Christian conservatives in the US – a large chunk of the Republican base – are campaigning for the teaching of intelligent design (thinly disguised creationism) in public schools (in Europe, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe recently condemned efforts to teach creationism). The Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms and used to tell people in countries with high HIV rates not to use them because they have tiny holes that allow the virus through. Pat Robertson and other religious conservatives said the floods were God’s punishment for homosexuality. Eighty percent of the Katrina hurricane survivors said that the disaster reinforced their belief in God (paradoxically, disaster appears to strengthen faith). The world’s most powerful state is led by a born-again Christian. Assertiveness is growing in Christendom too. Cruelty that we are expected to accept as a cultural choice. The outcome is inevitably cruelty: headscarves, forced weddings, genital mutilation, death for apostasy. a collection of rules and habits derived from ambiguous texts written and rewritten hundreds of years ago by different people supposedly under the guidance of God), the Hadith (oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the prophet) and fatwas (rulings issued by Islamic scholars). Its source is, at best, arbitrary: The Koran (the holy book, i.e. And how could it be otherwise? Sharia law governs all aspects of a Muslim’s life and body: food, attire, prayer and sex. Even self-styled moderates have to recognize that Islam is, at least, blind to the West’s much-cherished public/private distinction. At least that’s some progress in the light of earlier comments by his president who asserted there are no homosexuals in Iran. An Iranian minister visiting the UK last week said homosexuals should be tortured and executed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born feminist and politician who wrote the screenplay, also received death threats and, like her fellow apostate Salman Rushdie, lives now in the US under police protection. In the legendary tolerant Netherlands, a filmmaker was murdered by a Muslim youth for making a movie about the abuse of women in Islamic families. In Denmark, the publication of cartoons depicting the image of the prophet Muhammad triggered violent protests. Particularly the growing number of Muslims living in Western democracies. Needless to say, not everyone feels comfortable with such secular habits. So lightly, that to many Europeans it has become acceptable to even lampoon God. People can pursue their metaphysical ends at home or in church, but in public such beliefs are to be worn lightly. As a result, secular liberal democracy, the enlightenment’s political reincarnation, has left ample room for religious practice, though mindfully confining it to a near-invisible private space. The most they could do was keep it at bay. Despite their emphasis on reason, enlightenment thinkers knew they could not do away with metaphysical faith altogether. ![]() But it’s a clear call for a new enlightenment against the superstitious and bigoted musings of religions. The God of the Old Testament, he writes in «The God Delusion,» «is the most unpleasant character in all fiction… a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.» Sam Harris, author of «Letter to a Christian Nation,» argues that the damage done by religion, which he discards as malign nonsense, «is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity.» The message comes in a sharp-edged, perhaps artless formulation. They certainly sound in good voice: «Religion poisons everything» is the slogan that recurs throughout controversial essayist and pundit Christopher Hitchens’s latest diatribe against the Almighty and his followers, «God is not Great.» Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, is no less irreverent. The once-silent atheists have been forced to emerge from their secular bubble and reach for the megaphones. And then came the September 11 terrorist blitz, unleashing a wave of religious fanaticism that swept the globe. The Economist went as far as to publish an obituary of God. In the 1990s most Western pundits thought history was inexorably moving toward its end – a cozy, secular end.
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