Phantasms and Fantasy

‘Religion is the opium of the people’. So said Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto, observing religion to be a parasitical influence, one that feeds on human ignorance and imagination. In millennia past, no feasible means existed to explain gravity and so the world was deemed flat and without atmosphere; the rising sun was a chariot-led fireball and the earth was the centre of the universe. So why is it, in a world where every instrument to logically explore our surrounding environment exists, do we still cling to fable? Surely, in the 21st Century, religion is a redundant and irrelevant force?


Religion, specifically the ‘creation’ story, has been a feature, indeed, an obsession, of every functioning human society throughout our known history. We have always sought to ‘understand’ as a species but what makes us unique is that in absence of fact, we are quite content to fabricate.

In the last 300 years, there has been a steady development of uninhibited science. Until the 18th century, the Church in Europe and North America was the dominant entity, politically and socially, and was free to suppress any and all who disputed or contradicted religious doctrine.

The Age of Enlightenment, however, changed everything.

This was a period when the absolution of reason was not just respected but fundamentally acknowledged by western philosophers and academics – when only reason could be said to legitimise authority.

The resulting achievement of the movement was the separation of church and state and the filtering of superstition from politics. The reduction of the Church as a meddlesome entity allowed scientists and philosophers unparalleled freedom to pursue previously untapped avenues outwith scripture. This led to an explosion of discoveries, particularly in pathology (previously reviled, but not criminally punishable, as necromancy), physics and mathematics. The single most important development of the 19th century, the theory of evolution, was a direct result of the Enlightenment.

The removal of ecclesiastical criticism and interfering allowed in society growth without fear and truth without taint.

But even after the 18th century, when the Enlightenment had reached its zenith, religion persisted in being an active, and very considerable, factor in general life.

Perhaps this was because of, until recently, endemic poverty and lack of accessibility to education in the western world. In Britain alone, education of all children up to the age of 12 was not made compulsory until 1870 and what little educational establishments existed were largely under control of religious authorities.

In Britain today, a third of all educational establishments are under control of religious institutions. Whilst this is comparatively less than, say, 50 years ago, it’s an alarming statistic nonetheless. Youthful minds are magnificent and impressionable and if young people are having doctrine force-fed to them at an early age, one would imagine it to be very hard for them to consider other possibilities or philosophies in the world.

The sheer fact, however, that mass schooling is now a feature of every western democracy and that we are free as individuals not only to question theology but to analyse our obsession with it, contributes to the peripheral nature of religion as a credible social entity.

Religion, for the most part, relies on shroud and mystery to maintain its authority; the favourite line of its propagators being ‘God works in mysterious ways’. The reason behind the power of religion, and the Church specifically, in history was the unquestionable nature it propagandised and its ready will to persecute those it considered heretics, those who dared to entertain ideas outwith scripture. The perfect example for this was the Spanish Inquisition – the paranoid movement of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in the 15th Century, on authority of Pope Sixtus IV, which inspired the remorseless and chaotic orgy of witch-hunts, live cremating, hanging, castrating and general torture and execution of non-Catholics, homosexuals, academics and other minorities.

Religion is rarely assimilated into an individual’s life by personal discovery. Its continued existence depends wholly on perceived figures of authority – parents, religious clerics or even, in exceptional cases, the media – drilling doctrine into the next generation. Where there exists a lack of secular education or alternative thinking to the conventional, there tends to be extreme poverty and it is the coalescence of these two factors that breeds unfounded superstition. Africa is the only continent in the world where religion continues to experience growth but, fundamentally, it is the only continent in the world that has gone backwards, its development receding rather than progressing. Is this mere coincidence?

Probably not.

Where the is a formidable religious presence, it could be argued that it is because it thrives on the inherent poverty of the region. Poor people, generally speaking, have limited access to education and in place of that education, we often find myth and mistruth.

Two years ago, BBC Worldwide conducted a poll to research the religiosity levels of each nation – those that it was practical to do so in, at least – and the results were telling. Those nations with the lowest religiosity levels (eg Sweden, 80 percent of whose population claim to be atheist) enjoyed the lowest poverty, the best access to education and, most importantly, the greatest respect for human rights. Their religious counterparts (eg Saudi Arabia, almost all of whom claim to be religious), however, tended to be impoverished and often war-torn, disregarding human rights for gays and woman and advocating capital punishment. These results, above all others, surely provide the most profound indicator to the redundancy of religion as an ethical concept.

And yet leaders of all faiths continue, often unchallenged, to maintain the idea that it is religion that views the world always from the moral high ground.

Morality, of course, is what most faiths claim their doctrine to be based on. The guiding principal that permeates almost every religion is ‘there is only one truth – and that is our truth’. For there to be morality, however, and therefore a credible basis for religion, the idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ would have to be solid fundamentals – something questioned by modern philosophy.

Right and wrong, and, to an extent, veracity and falsity, are an illusion, yet another presumption of the human imagination. If God tells you one thing is wrong but the law of the land says it’s fine, which do you obey? Both are manmade. In Britain, murder is a criminal act and yet on the other side of the world in, say, the Brazilian slums, it may be a necessity of life, to survive.

It was said by Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher, that ‘men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it with religious conviction.’ It was under the influence of religious conviction that nineteen Muslims ploughed two planes into the Twin Towers in New York, killing 2,993 people and injuring over 6,000 more. It was with religious conviction that Adolph Hitler committed genocide against six million Jews, gays, Communists, ethnic and disabled people, claiming that ‘my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.’

How can the religious reconcile their apparent ‘morals’ with the fact that millions of gay people around the world are persecuted, murdered or sentenced to lives of silent misery? Or that so many women are subjugated and convinced they are talentless, second-rate pieces of furniture?

The simple fact is they can’t.

I agree with many aspects of several of the largest religions - not murdering, not stealing, but too often their manipulated by the devices of the unscrupulous. If the Bible were the word of some omnipotent creator, why then is it so flimsily malleable?

For the first time in human history, albeit largely in the western world, we are at liberty not only to question what Stephen Fry called the ‘cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand’ of religion, but are able to actively oppose its negative influences and choose whether we accept it or not. 80 percent of people in Britain refute creationism in favour of evolution as the probable explanation for the diversity of life.

What is a God without absolutism? In the 21st Century, we know that our origins stretch back further than 2,000 years and that women evolved from the same bacterium as men, rather than a rib. We know the Earth is a globe rather than a disc and that it was created, our most evidence-based theories suggest, by the catalyst of gases reacting to one another and developed over billions of years rather than a week-long binge. We’re more compassionate and understanding than what the Bible or the Qu’ran would have us be; we’re educated and willing to consult our own senses before the often heartless and disconnected opinions of archaic scripture.

Perhaps religion is a cruel necessity to allow us, as a species, to understand better the fragile magnificence of tolerance and reason – or maybe it is just testament to a world still plagued by ignorance and fear of the unknown.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, a Victorian explorer, once said that ‘the more I study religions, the more I am convinced man never worshipped anything but himself.’