Railing against the Gods (or at least their religions).

• Author: Grayling, A.C.
• Position: Religion

RELIGIOUS FAITH has many manifestations. There are people of sincere piety for whom the religious life is a source of deep and powerful meaning. For them and others, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that can bind one human heart to another, feels as natural and necessary as breathing. Some of the art and music that has been inspired by faith counts among the loveliest and most-moving expressions of human creativity. It indeed is impossible to understand either history or art without an understanding of what people believed, feared, and hoped through their religions conceptions of the world and human destiny. Religion is a pervasive fact of history, and has to be addressed as such.

In others of its manifestations, religious faith is neither so kind nor so attractive. History attests to the weight of suffering that religious tyranny and conflict together have generated, from individuals struggling with feelings of sinfulness because of perfectly natural desires to nations and civilizations engulfed in war and atrocity by interreligious hatreds.

Religions often have been cruel in their effects, and remain so today: homosexuals are hanged in Iran; adulterous women are beheaded in Afghanistan and stoned to death in Sandi Arabia; "witches" are murdered in Africa; women and children are subordinated in fundamentalist households in the Bible Belt of the U.S. and in many parts of the Islamic world. Throughout history, the religion-inspired suppression of women has robbed humanity of at least half its potential creativity and genius.

Whereas the consolations of religion mainly are personal, the burdens are social and political as well as personal. This is one argument for greater secularism, a main form of which asks religion to keep itself in the private sphere, and not to obtrude into matters of general public concern. Committed followers of religion oppose this on the grounds that, because they possess the truth about things and, in particular, about what their deity wants everyone in the world to think and do, they have a duty to lead everyone in that direction. For the zealous among them, this is a matter of urgency, for, in their chosen direction--so they believe--lies salvation, truth, and eternal life. Those who disagree with them see this as just one more attempt by one group to impose its views and its authority on everyone else. As history shows, the competition that arises between different religious outlooks when any one of them tries to dominate readily leads to trouble.

Yet, the case against religion goes deeper than an argument for secularism. It is that religion's claims and beliefs do not stand up to examination. Briefly put, critical examination of religion's claims places it in the same class as astrology and magic. Like these systems of thought, religion dates from mankind's less educated and knowledgeable early...