Banning Religion

The BBC website is a constant and reliable source of inspiration for my blog posts, especially when I don’t want to just subject you to more examples of my writing.  Today a story on armed police in London was opened up for comment.  Naturally the usual stream of comments blaming all terrorism, wars, strife, tummy aches and inclement weather on Religion started up, along with calls to reclassify it as a mental disease, or ban it.

Here is a direct quote from the comments on the story linked to above:

“I would personally ban all religion, the world would be a more peaceful and saner place.”

It is this most commonly seen comment that I want to think about.  Now, obviously no sane or reasonable person would actually suggest this as a serious proposition, and I generally assume that it’s just empty hyperbole when it crops up online, but it does get said very often.  I have occasionally responded and asked before how such a thing would work, but no answers have been forthcoming, and so I have decided to indulge in a little futurology, and try to imagine the process that would accomplish the goal of ‘banning religion’.

So then, in the year twenty-something-something, a horrific terrorist attack results in the deaths of hundreds, maybe even thousands of people.  The attackers are part of a religiously-motivated ideological group, which claims responsibility, and provides evidence to support its claim.  Furthermore, reliable witnesses report that the attackers were chanting religious passages and slogans as they carried out their attack.

There is a massive (albeit ill-conceived) backlash against all religion and religions, and in the face of overwhelming public pressure, the government votes to ban religion.  There are marches and protests, serious discussions by earnest-looking people on various television and radio programmes, and much debate regarding rights and responsibilities and security and safety, but ultimately the government get its way.  All churches, mosques, synagogues and temples are closed, religious organisations are dissolved and their assets seized, clergy and other employees are made redundant, schools, hospitals, hospices and orphanages are closed, and the practice and propagation of religion or religious activities is banned in both public and private.  There is no public money to reopen the hospitals, hospices and orphanages, and only some of the schools, and so these remain empty, their services left undone.

The first Sunday comes round, and those people who still stubbornly turn up for church are arrested.  At first they are fined and then released.  Repeated offenses result in higher fines, then longer and longer prison terms.  Church records have been seized, and so the police are sent round to the homes of ‘suspect persons’ to seize Bibles, Korans and other proscribed materials and symbols.

A national database of those with criminal proclivities is assembled, and frequent raids have to be carried out to ensure that these people are not carrying out forbidden practices within their homes.  Children at risk of religious brainwashing and the mental abuse of indoctrination are removed from their families and placed with approved persons.  People on the database are carefully monitored, and any acts of charity scrutinised in case they might have been religiously motivated.

Gatherings of people on the database are strictly forbidden, in case they are religious assembles.  Religion is completely removed from all school curricula.  Owning religious texts is a crime, while ownership with the intent to sell or share is even more harshly punished.  If someone pauses in public with their head bowed, suspicious eyes watch them, trying to see if they might be praying.  Mandatory re-education classes are required for all former religionists to de-indoctrinate them, and they are quizzed thoroughly to ensure that they understand.

Religion has been thoroughly banned.  To ensure that it remains banned, constant surveillance of a large proportion of the population is required.  Vast numbers of people who refused to publically recant or refrain from acts of worship are imprisoned.  Mass arrests spark protests which inevitably turn violent, leading to even more arrests.  To accommodate all these people, prison camps have to be built, staffed and maintained, and additional taxes have to be levied to pay for them, and for the additional police officers required to enforce the new laws.

Even those not on the databases must be monitored in case they start offending.  Borders must be patrolled, and lorries and boats searched to ensure that cargoes of illicit Bibles, Korans and other forbidden materials are not smuggled into the country.  Former clergy must be especially carefully watched to ensure that they don’t commit any acts of religion, and all of their contact with others monitored.  Foreign clergy are banned from entering the country at all, and foreign nationals are interrogated at airports and harbours to ensure that they are not here to propagate religion.  They are also made to understand that they will be prosecuted if they commit any acts of religion, or a religious or spiritual nature whilst on British soil.  As a result visits to the UK from other countries rapidly dwindle, except from a small number of hardline anti-theists who move to the country.  The UN and other international groups condemn the UK’s shocking human rights abuses, and trade becomes restricted, causing a significant shrink in the economy.

Religious hardliners and extremists are made even more so by the new laws, and inevitably turn violent, committing further acts of terror and fuelling a vicious cycle of reprisal and ever tighter laws that lead to more surveillance and stricter policing, leading to more attacks.

The UK is left poor, disgraced and oppressed, with the government watching the people and the people watching each other, thousands in ‘work camps’ paid for by exorbitant taxation.  I won’t even speculate on how soon it will be before someone suggests forced conversion of inmates through physical and/or psychological torture, or goes further and asks whether such incurable cases would not be better off euthanised to reduce the drain on an already stretched public purse.

Is this an extreme and overly-pessimistic view of the future?  Possibly, but it’s the only one I can envisage if certain ignorant anti-theists were to actually get their way.  I cannot imagine the many UK citizens who follow one religion or another happily shrugging off their long-held beliefs to build a secular humanist utopia, and even if we did, it would be a world of cold scientific logic and government-issued relativistic morality, without any objective basis.

Nor though can I imagine the above scenario ever actually taking place.  Enough people recognise that freedom of belief and conscience is a vital component of modern society, even if occasionally it seems like some people's rights routinely trump others'.  There would never be enough public support in the first place, and if it were set in motion, there would be enough public outcry to stop it ever being completed.  Probably.  It is amazing, though, what populations can be persuaded is necessary in the name of security or prosperity.  The very fact that we now have heavily armed, armoured policemen routinely patrolling the streets of London  shows that very well indeed.

Religion might have been, and still is in many places, a source of oppression, but it would be a horrible mistake to assume that forcibly removing it would make things better.  As I’ve shown, I think it would actually make things far, far worse.

The Right to be Wrong Part 2: Stuck in the Middle With You

It would be easy to get the impression from this blog that I get all my news from the BBC.  Well, that’s pretty much the case, except when I go on Russia Today to get the opposite side of the story, and become slightly frightened.  This week the BBC website had a story about atheists in the United States, and the fact that (according to the story) they are effectively an oppressed minority in some parts.

A couple of posts ago, I was defending the right of more traditional Christians to hold and act on their beliefs in the face of secular society.  This time, I will be upholding the right of atheists to hold and act on their lack of belief in the face of religious society.  It is the problem (and, in some ways I suppose the privilege) of being a wishy-washy medium-liberal moderate.  I sit in the middle, arguing the cause of one end to the other and vice-versa, with “why can’t we all just get along?” as my plaintive refrain.

In the increasingly secular (and increasingly vocally so) UK, the concept that atheists might be oppressed for their lack of belief might seem strange, at least outside of certain Middle Eastern or African fundamentalist Muslim countries.  Although officially religion and politics are mixed here, with bishops in the House of Lords and an Established Church, in reality they very rarely come into contact.  “We don’t do God” is the famous quote from the Blair administration (which is ironic seeing as he’s quite a staunch Catholic nowadays).  Recently Mr. Cameron said a few things about faith, and having confidence in being Christian and, while they were appreciated, caused quite a lot of uncomfortable shuffling even amongst many Christians.  Similarly, British patriotism tends to be of a quiet and understated sort, except for the Last Night of the Proms, which is the only socially acceptable occasion in which one is allowed to get noisy and enthusiastic about it.  In this country, being overly enthusiastic about religion, especially for a politician is simply not done.

Our colonial cousins on the other hands expect their politicians to be openly and vocally religious.  According to the story linked to above, there is not a single openly atheist politician in the US.  This seems bizarre to me, since in the UK, while I assume that most politicians are atheist, or at best agnostic, very few of them are openly Christian (except, one might hope, for the Bishops who are only politicians, at least public politicians, part time).  In our increasingly secular society, the idea of ‘coming out’ and admitting your atheism seems strange, since it (or perhaps a vague unconscious agnosticism) is generally seen as the default position unless otherwise stated.  It is a bigger step to ‘admit’ to people that you’re religious.  The fact that by stating their unbelief, people in (parts, at least, of) America face ostracism or outright abuse seems incredible.

It need not be said that I think that atheists are mistaken, and I would like to be able to convince them of that if I were capable, but as I have said in that earlier post, what is far more important than being right is the right to be wrong.  It can be easy sometimes to forget that the vast majority of atheists are not of the loud, aggressive and mocking Dawkinsian school, and that indeed most are of the quiet, live-and-let-live type, who simply want to be able to believe what they want, and get on with their lives.

If I go through that article and replace the word ‘atheist’ with ‘Christian’, it immediately becomes even more offensive to me, although of course it shouldn’t.  Ultimately, if I want the right to believe what I want and not be ashamed of it, the right to be able to say what I want and have no-one try and shut me up, then I need to be equally rigorous in upholding that right in others; those whose beliefs are opposed to my own, those whose beliefs are offensive to me, and even those who believe that I should not have the rights that I will fight for them to enjoy.

Ultimately, as Someone once said, “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”  And, perhaps even more pertinently, “Love those who hate you, bless those who curse you.”