INTRODUCTION:

There appeared in the Daily Mail (a paper I seldom read given that it should be known as the Daily Hatemail) on Saturday July 7th an article by a chap called Peter Lewis which seeks to answer the onslaught against religion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in their best sellers 'The God Delusion' and 'God Is Not Great' respectively.

As a lifelong atheist there are certain things with which I feel I must take issue within this article.

It begins well enough with the author accepting that religion has been responsible for some of the most gut-churning brutalities ever meted out by human hands but then, in paragraph 9, goes straight into the first great theist arguement against atheism: Hitler and Stalin were atheists.

This argument was comprehensively demolished in both Hitchens' and Dawkins' books but it bears repeating here. Hitler and Stalin were both heads of secular state machines that, by dint of being essentially cults of personality, could themselves almost be classed as religions. In this regard they were not so much pious observers of a given faith they were both vain glorious men suffering from a god complex.

And where did they first get exposed to such a notion as the all powerful ruler, blood thirsty and infallable? Stalin in the Russian Orthodox church and Hitler in the Catholic Church respectively. Both men were deeply unstable, megalomaniacal sociopaths who's childhoods, like so many child sex perverts and other violent criminals, brought them into direct contact with "The Good Book". Their  mental states and exposure to the God of the bible at a young age (genocidal blood lust, totalitarianism, xenophobia, racial purity, a legacy of anti-semitism to name but a few of god's traits) are the two greatest clues to the motivation for their later behaviours and not the fact that niether one spent their time in office begging for forgivness to an iron age fairytale.

As Hitchens states, Christianity often says it's history is no worse than that of the Nazis; what a poor character reference for God that is.

DOING GOD'S WORK:

The article goes on to mention the good deeds and private actions of charity done in the name of religion. Why do people need to do these things in the name of religion? Why do they not just do them because it is the right thing to do? They do it in the name of religion because they want to move up the list of God's favourites, it is a very human behaviour to ascribe to God the keeping of a naughty list.

Charities do great things in countries around the world often in the most dangerous of circumstances but they could do these things just as well without any reference to God. They choose to do it under the flag of God because it makes them look better; these are people performing all manner of chritable acts out of both love and fear, fear of failing or upsetting the creator of the universe. Do it because it's right, do it because your fellow human is suffering, do it because we are all the same under the skin. Don't do it out of fear or vain attempts to curry favour with God.

KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO'S THERE?:

Peter asks whether Dawkins believes that any right thinking Christian truly believes in a God like the monster of the old testament in this day and age. It's a fair question but it opens the door the the next logical question: how can a mere mortal get away with RE-DEFINING the nature of God?

The bible either is a collection of God's wisdoms and works (including all the exhortations to murder for petty transgressions) and a comprehensive and accurate biography of the deity itself or it's just not.

If it's not, and God as described is just a figment of human imagination and a product of His social and geo-political times, and people free to re-tool His personality because the fire and brimstone bigotted intolerence God is no longer politically correct then that surely lends overwhelming weight to the argument against God's existence.

Only if God is a man-made concept can he be subjected to fundamental personality changes by His creation as the times and moral attitudes demand.

OF MYTHS AND LEGENDS

To his credit Peter Lewis admits that most of the myths an legends of the old and new testaments are made up or cobbled together by a comittee of 4th century editors, citing the fact that Genisis, Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea and the Garden of Eeden are all myths and part of the human tradition of mythologising that which we do not understand.

He goes on to mention that "thinking Christians would no more take every word of either testament literally than they would offer up burnt offerings or take their moral teachings from deuteronomy and stone adulterers to death" (a practice still widely undertaken in muslim countries where a girl can be gang raped to asuage the crimes of her brother).

What Peter seems to overlook is that most people, let alone the faithful, are completely unaware of the latest thinking in scholarly circles on a vast number of subjects, not just religion. They are blissfully ignorant of the consensi regarding the origins and veracities of books X, Y and Z in the bible and the koran; people are unaware of the etymological mistakes that litter the translations of the holy books, (the biblical 'red sea' is a mistranslation of 'sea of reeds', a likely reference to an inland lake to the east of the nile delta; '72 virgins' is a mistranslation of a word that means 'raisins'; and 'the virgin mary' is a mistranslation of a term that means 'maiden' or 'young woman') and even if they were aware it is human nature to ignore that which upsets the apple cart.

That people are this ignorant of their core beliefs should be no surprise (most people forget everything they learned at school shortly after leaving) as these discussions go on in dry libraries between learned men and women who have no real need or wish to disclose their findings to anyone outside their peers. The papers that do surface are written in language often more dense and inpenetrable than the source texts about which they speak. Most people are too busy working or raising famillies to bother seeking out the latest publications on their faith. It is this complacency in the populace that allows illeducated opinion to underpin a misguided belief in a ridiculous concept.

Lewis moves on to question whether or not Hitchens and Dawkins refuse to read books like the Illiad because there is little evidence of Homer's existence. Another feeble example of the faithful trying to make atheists look absurd. While there may be scant historical evidence for either Homer or the siege of Troy no-one is using the Illiad, or any other historically sketchy epic, as a means of banning stem cell research, the HPV vaccine, birth control in third world countries, any potential cure for AIDS, as a basis for preventing abortion and as a justification for a new crusade in the Middle East.

GOD IN THE LAB COAT:

My next beef with this essay is Lewis's reference to science as incomplete and forever unable to answer the "why" questions. He states that the huge questions of life, the universe and everything that plagued our ancestors are still being asked because science, despite great breakthroughs, is still nowhere near providing answers. Well, yes, but whose fault is that?

It has only been in the last two hundred years (out of the several thousand that the various gods and churches have had) that people have been in a position of intellectual freedom where great questions can be asked without fear of death. God, and more specifically his agencies, have spent their entire existence getting in the way of reasoned scientific discovery, dedicating whole armies to the task of burning and stretching and hanging and humiliating and killing anyone who dares to ask "scientific" questions that might provide answers that make the church look like what it is: a collection of like minded, power hungry, sexually repressed/deviant, sado masocistic, terrified, greedy, manipulative, despotic and totalitarian liars and charlatans.

It took the Catholic Church 400 years to pardon Galilleo for pointing out the bloody obvious: we go round the sun, not the other way around. 400 years it took that great body of spiritual learning to catch up to science. That means that the invention of the printing press, the accurate clock, the pin hole camera, the car, explosives, the aeroplane, fridges, tinned food, the internet, the space race, the nuclear arms race all came into being before the catholic church felt they were ready to admit that they were wrong and Gallieo was right.

I doubt very much on this evidence that the Church and the Mosque will be in the vanguard of scientific discovery. It is shame that Islam is such an intellectually repressive religion as a great many thinkers of arabic descent have throughout history given the world some truly revolutionary things; it seems those glory days are over now and it's back to the dark ages they wish to go.

Science does indeed have a long way to go before it can answer questions like why life began as well as how, but the fact that religion has always vigourously opposed such inquiry does not recommend it highly as the leading light of intellectual liberty. It is most amusing and distressing when the Vatican assembles a scientific panel to investigate matters relating to faith: how objective can a hand picked set of scientists working for the church possibly be when trying to get to the bottom of matters like abortion and stem cell research? It's akin to convening a panel of scientists who are all share holders in cigarette companies or oil compaines to assess the relative damages inflicted by their own companies. That could never happen...

Lewis briefly touches upon the arguement from design, stating that the world is so finely balanced a system that it must have the hand of a designer in the background. Again, Hitchens and Dawkins both drop this argument where it stands. The earth is a carefully organised system but it didn't just appear that way, it's taken 4.5 billion years to get this way and it's not finished yet.

He describes the planet as the "one blue planet in trillions that nurtures and protects human life as a result of the fine tuning of forces such as gravity". True, the earth is the only planet we know of capable of supporting human life but we've only been capable of looking for others in any great detail for 50 bloody years! Give astronomy a chance.

The forces of gravity have not been fine tuned to support human life, human life has adapted itself to survive in the gravity in which it evolved. (A baby born and raised on a different planet with different gravity will not be able to survive on earth as they have evolved to suit their environment)

The delicate systems of the Earth are like a glass jar in a lab filled with liquids of different densities: shake it up, go for a coffee and come back and you'll find it has seperated into layers and looks nice and stable. The same is true of the Earth: form a planet, leave to cool then come back and see it look fairly stable.

But the Earth is different in that it is not completely stable; it suffers earthquakes, and floods, impacts from comets and meteors, new islands are being born all the time through vocanic eruptions; the planet is most definitely not entirely favourable to human life (as much as the theists wish to believe) as most of it is too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry to comfortably support human life. If we're going to assess who or what the planet is best designed to suppport it has to be bacteria, that stuff is everywhere and in numbers that would boggle the mind. We humans just happen to be here too.

The world "say the atheists, came about by chance thanks to millions of coincidences, without any god-like creating principle behind them". Yes, we do say that because 4.5 billion years is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, long time during which even the softest of minds to can easily assume that quite a lot of things happened, many of them being incremental evolutionary and geo-physical changes. If you are willing accept evolution over the feeble Genisis explanation, Mr Lewis, then you cannot be dumb enough to ignore the certanity of millions of coincidences occurring over mind-numbing lengths of time.

A WORLD WITHOUT GOD:

"So atheism is a belief in pointlessness". This sweeping and grossly ignorant sentence is the conclusion of Peter Lewis's interpretation of atheism's relationship with science. He is big enough to accept that Darwin was right, that the universe is more magnificent than anything the iron age minds of the biblical autors could concieve, that black holes are beyond the understanding of mere mortals from bygone ages but he believes, as most theists do, that atheists regard all of this with disdain and view it as irrelevant.

That there is no greater point to life on Earth is to me not in question. I am not arrogant or insecure enough to believe that the universe was created 14 billion years ago just for me. I have no trouble sleeping at night with the thought that when I die, I am gone forever (it'll be quite nice to get away from it all to be honest); that in the course of the earth's growth 95% of all life has been destroyed just to make way for me. I don't have that level of self delusion.

Peter's assertion that atheism is to believe in pointlessness is the short sighted thinking of the theist who believes that without God there is no point. This is patently false. Life can have a myriad points without any recourse to ancient sky god cults; one can spend a lifetime travelling and seeing the wonders of the planet without God; one can dedicate one's life to charitable works without need of God; one can produce great works of art, music and literature without needing to bow and scrape before God; one can raise a familly to be decent, honest and kind people; one can make sure that one's own life and the lives of others in their immediate circle are the best they can be; these are all lives lived with purpose.

The non-presence of god or the spiritual does not equate with moral bankruptcy, it is a call to a moral imperative of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is a moral imperative not because the abject fear of God commands it but because it is just the right thing to do for the good of all humanity.

Atheism is not a belief in pointlessness, it is an acceptence of the finality and insignificance of our existence and a resolve to make this life, the only we get on the only planet we've got, count for something more than the theistic approach to life of "it'll all be better when jesus takes me for a sunbeam". It is this attitude among the faithful that allows people to blow themselves and others to pieces, to launch violent crusades over a barren tract of desert, to treat women with utter contempt and to poison the minds of children with books that are far and away more psycholgically destructive than watching horror movies could ever be (the bible and the koran should come with 18 certificates).

It would be an interesting experiment to see how long religion and God would survive if teaching religion to children was made illegal. It is fairly safe to assume that, after a generation or two, if a child wasn't exposed to religion until they reached adulthood they would find the whole idea of grown ups down the ages, believing that the creator of the universe who can't be seen is watching over us from a place that can't be seen and knows when you've been naughty and nice, has a special bad place for you if you step out of line and a wonderful place for you if you behave, a little bit retarded as they no longer believe in the toothfairy or santa claus which are just as childish a set of notions.

God is a human construction born of fear and control so to live an atheist life without the crushing weight of original sin and all the other guilts and taboos imposed by the organised religions of the world is to embrace a life of pursuing psychological and physical happiness in all it's various forms with direct reference to our inate (not God given) sense of right and wrong.

AND SO TO FAITH ITSELF:

Here Lewis answers his own point:

Q "Atheists have to face the conundrum: why do so many people believe in god when there is no god to believe in?"

A "They are all deluded wishful thinkers who invent a God because they are scared of dying and want to imagine life after death".

I would go further than this in my assessment of peoples need for God. There have always been those who lead and those who follow and these two groups can be divided into two smaller groups: of the leader types there are those who lead because they have to (job, circumstance etc) and those who lead because they want/need to for personal gain (company bosses, cult leaders, politicians etc); of the followers there are those who follow because they are sheep and it makes their life easier to go with the flow and there are those who follow because they lack something in their lives and they need to follow.

This is one of the oldest symbiotic relationships in all of human history. People follow men like Hitler and Stalin because they tell the people exactly what they wanted to hear and they tell them in a way they need to hear it.

There is no difference in terms of public speaking between Hitler's Nuremberg rally and the evangelical affrontery that goes on in the US day after day. These speakers have the ability to whip a crowd up into an almost hypnotic and euphoric state that renders them suceptible to suggestion, more credulous than they would be in their normal lives. An understanding of the group or herd mentality and crowd dynamics play a major role in the level force with which an ideology is taken forward.

Leaders who lead for gain will exploit the inate weaknesses and insecurities of their audience, play on their fears and promise them that with a little faith (and often most of their money and possessions too) their problems will be solved. This is a lie and it is the lie that religion and politics have been propagating from day one. Leaders who lead because they have to, for example a soldier in the heat of battle, will lay down thier lives for those in their charge while a leader who leads for personal gain will always send others to die in the delivery of their message, Imams preaching militant Islam for example, and never themselves as they feel they are more important alive than dead. It is the selfless versus the selfish and that is the criteria by which the strength of a leader should be measured.

Humans have always feared being alone and unloved. The world, and the greater universe is a harsh and unforgiving place with dangers all around. It is also a majestic and awe inspiring place that the childlike minds of our fore-fathers could not hope to understand. As a result, fanciful creation myths grew up; floods, fires, and earthquakes (mainly local events as their knowledge of wider global geography didn't really extend much beyond the next ridge) were all gods in need of appeasing and this is where the leader who leads for gain is in his element.

Followers who follow because they are sheep will always be the docile, live and let live types that make up the vast majority of the religious moderates in the world (it is no accident that most religions, particulrly Christianity, refer to their congregations as the flock as long ago they recognised the relationship between the vulnerable in need of guidance and the sheep in the fields); they pay lip service to the ritual, go to services and try to be a good person out of routine more than anything else. There's also the social side of things, religion is a networking tool that brings people together.

Those followers who TRULY believe are the dangerous ones. These are the people that the leaders for gain prey on, they surround themselves with "the faithful" because they know that they can get these followers to do anything they want by just threatening to excommunicate them or putting in a bad word with God.

Men and women like these have been manipulated by devious and powerful men throughout history, used as tools of someone elses political ambitions. The need to believe is a fundamental element of human psychology, it is what allows us to take imaginative leaps of faith (like imagining god in our own petty, vindictive, genocidal, factional image) but it is also the most easily exploited mental means by which a person can be convinced to blow up a bus full of women and children on the promise of divine bounty and not see that it is immoral beyond measure.

Yes it is painful to think that when your parents die that they're gone for ever but it's mentally much safer than thinking they're still around and that some charlatan can "reach" them for you for a consideration. Yes it is stark to contemplate that when you die there will be nothing afterwards but it is in equal measure liberating, it frees you to enjoy what time you have here and now.

People need faith as it a comfort blanket for the mind, it sits between the faithful and reality blocking out the harshness and cloaking the world in a warm and fuzzy numbness. Who wouldn't want to feel like this? It is in our make up to seek out happiness and avoid the harsh but face the harsh we must as a species because the fuzzy blanket of religion has done nothing but bring death, suffering, disease, genocide, war, suicide bombings, terrorism, the crusades, the spanish inquisition, the devastation of the new world, the retardation of intellectual enquiry, torture, lies, delusion, sanctioned child abuse, physical and mental torment and genral misery to more people than should have ever suffered at the hands of the so called "God the father" and "Allah the Merciful".

A CURIOUS ABSCENCE OF PROTEST:

The God of the gaps is running out of hiding places and that is why there has been no concerted effort on the part of the great religions to rebutt the works of atheists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. There are no solid arguements for the existence of God, there is only the fingers crossed approach left. (Also there's the "you can't prove it's not true so it must be true" argument. This is like two children in a playground saying, "you live in a house with a red door so you smell. So there!")

There was a time when God was in all things, His fingerprints were everywhere and if you disagreed you were impaled on spikes, burned alive, torn apart or killed in some other grizzly and inventive manner by the same priest who preached the message of God's boundless love and forgiveness. Fortunately times have changed and the church can't do that sort of thing anymore (Islam has no problem with meating out brutalities on people for herecies, but they are chronologically in the same sort period of religious time that the holy roman church were when they invented the inquistion so, in another 500 years or so they might have grown up and stopped blowing themselves up. Here's hoping future people...)

Modern clerics in the moderate camp don't wish to shout too loudly about God anymore, they fear being percieved as bible thumping loons in the vein of the US where the louder you shout about God the more likely you are to get elected to high office. Faith has become a private thing and priests would rather have a coffee morning and a couple of sandwiches with little old people who really need thier help cos they're going to die soon.

This fear of public condemnation is not so prevalent among our Muslim friends who'll shout about Allah until they pass out. It seems that one cannot even fart near a mosque without someone breaking out the effigies and having a good old fashioned jihad.

It has always puzzled me, and I would hope most people, how religion and the religious can be so intolerent of the rest of us. It is human nature to try and share a good idea with others but if someone doesn't agree or shows no interest, leave them alone, be smug that you're right and they're wrong. You don't have to kill everyone until they say they believe, this is the same mentality as torture, people in pain at the hands of others will say exactly what you want them to say so you'll stop hurting them.

"Believe in Allah and I'll stop slicing open the soles of your feet!". When you put it like that, who wouldn't convert? Does it mean people have actually converted? No, they just don't want to die for nothing so they say ok, I'll convert. Just leave us infidels and apostates alone, if we're all going to burn in hell and it's our choice to do so then leave us alone and you go off and worship your silly sky gods in a state of personal smugness.

It is a sad reality that there are any number of greatly learned men and women around the world who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of answering the unanswerable by looking in places where the answer will never be found so I ask, why not stop pissing about with 3000 year old myths and spend your time more constructively working to make this world (as it is demonstrably the only one we've got and we're screwing it up) a better place for all life and IF there is a god and IF there is a heaven the fact that you lived a good life without all the factionalised fighting and "my god's better than your god" cock measuring contests will surely count in your favour and it might mean we could all get in! 

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