They Know!

They know! At some level. I’m convinced of it. Religious people – whether followers of the more traditional religions like Judaism or Christianity or newer versions like identity politics, transgenderism or Islamophilia – know at some level that their beliefs are simply wrong. It’s why they get so angry when challenged.

The essence of religion is to believe absolutely and without doubt in ideas that are, at best, impossible to confirm, and, at worst, simply invented. Let’s take one particular belief – that ‘sinners’ go to Hell when they die – and subject it to a little bit of analysis. If Hell was even remotely likely, it would only have to be mildly unpleasant to be a real deterrent to poor behaviour in this life. The fact that Hell is so ridiculously unlikely means that religious people have to make the prospect of Hell completely and utterly over-the-top to make up for its inherent implausibility.

Not only does Hell almost certainly not exist but the concept of Heaven is equally improbable. That does not stop some religious people from claiming to know the fine details of what goes on there. Christians in the Middle Ages claimed there were three hierarchies of angels, further divided into three orders or choirs. How did they know? How could they know? Likewise, modern Islamists claim men who die in their childish jihad will get 72 virgins in the hereafter. Why 72? Why not 71? Or 73? Or even 772? They are simply inventing nonsense for the benefit of morons.

This religious impulse can be seen in the modern secular religions of identity politics and Islamophilia. Those who believe that the most important thing about anyone is their skin colour or their sexuality will invent thoughtcrimes to condemn any deviation from their holy writ. Islamophiles will insist that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, even when the perpetrators quote chapter and verse form the Koran or Hadiths. Anything is offered as an explanation – Western foreign policy, Zionism, unemployment, the price of eggs – to obscure the religious motivations of the terrorists.

Returning to my original point, at some level religious people know that their ideas are false. My evidence for this claim? Look at the way religious people of whatever persuasion overreact whenever there is the slightest challenge to one of their ‘holy’ beliefs. The most obvious examples are the riots that ensue across the Islamic world whenever someone dares to draw a picture of something they don’t like. In 2005, people died when an obscure Danish magazine printed pictures of Muhammad of Mecca that some fundamentalist clerics disliked. The same thing happened in 2015 when Charlie Hebdo did the same. In both cases, real human beings died because someone had put ink on paper. What I am saying is that religious people overreact to the slightest challenge to their beliefs because they realise at some level that these beliefs are false and that any questioning will quickly bring the whole rotten edifice crashing down.

And modern secular religions such as identity politics and Islamophilia are no different. Look at the hounding of Danny Baker for a tweet that was aimed squarely at Royal privilege but which some people believed to be racist. Trial by social media with no hope of redemption – the sinner must be destroyed, must become an unperson.

I hesitate to use the next example but the crazed propaganda around transgenderism has become another religion. People who are genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria need and deserve help, which may include gender realignment surgery paid for by the NHS. But the extremists who have latched onto this issue and who insist ‘transwomen are real women’ are the same sort of people who burnt heretics in the Middle Ages or who murder cartoonists for drawing their ‘prophet.’ I have yet to see any scientific evidence that a person born with XY chromosomes can change their sex with hormones and/or surgery to their secondary sexual characteristics. All the loud-mouthed extremists can offer are pathetic assertions about the difference between sex and gender. Simply screaming ‘transphobe’ is no answer to centuries of science.

I long for the day when religion is consigned to Trotsky’s dustbin. It still astonishes me that 30 years after my first brush with fundamentalism during the Rushdie Affair that religion has regained such a powerful position in the secular West. Perhaps people who demand RESPECT for their beliefs should get some respectable beliefs?