Author: Ophelia Benson

Judith Shklar, the American political theorist, wrote a famous
essay entitled “Putting Cruelty First.” The contrast with my
own title will be immediately obvious, but I would insist that
the worldview which proceeds from both is essentially similar.
What Shklar intended was that prior to any question of
positive virtues and utopian ideals—before we throw around
grand ideas about love and brotherhood—we need to achieve the
seemingly simple yet nearly impossible task of protecting
living beings from cruelty and injustice. As for my title,
human rights may sound like a positive ideal, the sort of
sweet nothing that ought to be anterior to the goal of saving
the world from cruelty, but I would say that it is, in
reality, a fairly plain, even negative goal, like that of
Shklar. But that is only one more reason to pursue it with
vigor and conviction.

In a very limited sense, human rights are a positive goal, of
course. They represent something we want to gain, rather than
something of which we want to rid ourselves. Yet human rights
do not promise universal love or complete human happiness,
whereas utopian projects of various kinds, whether religious
or secular, claim just that. The individual will be blessed
with community, fellowship, and endless joy within the Kingdom
of Heaven, where there will be no work, no strife, and no pain.

In a world in which all people are guaranteed human rights,
there will still be work, I must admit. There will still be
pain and heartbreak and discord. Yet human rights do promise
to do away with the grotesque extremes of cruelty in human
society. In that sense, Shklar’s goal is very similar to my
own. In a world with human rights, there will no longer be
mass graves and torture chambers, gang rape and sexual
terrorism, dictatorship and discrimination. Not only that,
but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) also
guarantees positive freedoms, such as education, health care,
food, and shelter, which allow people to live with a certain
amount of dignity and the capacity to pursue ends they have
reason to value.

This vision of the world, in which each individual will be
equal before the law, regardless of sex, race, tribe, or
caste, will not appeal to all people. Admittedly, just about
every government in the world claims to promote “human
rights”: but just about every government fails to do so.
There’s a reason that the UDHR passed with near unanimity—and
there’s also a reason it is not legally binding. Of course,
governments have a great deal to gain from not respecting
human rights, as do patriarchs who benefit from sexist
institutions, clergy who have reason to fear apostasy: and so
forth. These, however, are not arguments which will seem
compelling to the majority of us who are not in such
positions. Those arguments which may sway us are those which
address themselves to more positive ideals than “putting human
rights first.” As humane and decent people will be tempted by
these arguments, is my goal to address them.

Putting human rights first, as I said at the beginning, is
really quite a drab thing to do, and far less exciting than
putting utopia first. But it is really the only thing that
will lead to a better, more livable world. People will be
sorely tempted to put at least one of the following four in
its place, however, and I will deal with each in its turn:
identity, power, political oppression, and love.

FIRST ALTERNATIVE: IDENTITY

Putting human rights first is all well and good, one might
say—but then, no one really thinks in terms of human rights.
It is not in our nature to think of ourselves as autonomous
individuals outside of all time and place. Few subscribers to
Facebook or Myspace announce in their “about me” section that
they are human beings, first and foremost. We like to
differentiate ourselves from other people: that’s part of what
having a private identity means. We could of course identify
as humans as opposed to animals, but given that animals can
suffer and feel cruelty just as humans do, and therefore have
a right to avoid both, the only available self-conception is
that of a pain-accumulating living being, which leaves little
scope for identity.

Christopher Lasch, himself humane in his views and no friend
to injustice, ascribes quite profoundly to this variety of
argument. The liberal concept of the individual is a
political fiction, he claims. People only exist in community,
and any protest against injustice cannot appeal to an abstract
humanity, but to traditional forms of identity, whether
religious, ethnic, or geographic. As evidence, he cites the
Civil Rights movement, which, he claims, was not brought to
fruition thanks to the efforts of the secularists, humanists,
and liberals who support civil rights as a matter of
principle, but rather to the efforts of a traditional, deeply
religious community. It is such community and the virtues of
self-sacrifice, loyalty, and piety it lauds that lead people
to behave justly, not liberal principles of justice.

Of course, the dangers of putting identity first are only too
apparent. It is undoubtedly true that people need some sort
of identity and community to face the cruelties of the world.
But what critics of liberalism and human rights do not
understand is that no liberal wants to do away with identity.
Such a thing is surely impossible. The goal of liberalism is
to allow the individual to create a personal identity, or to
discover a unique identity which suits her. Likewise,
liberals embrace community, but one ought to be in a position
to choose the community one wishes to be a part of, to remain
tolerant of communities beyond one’s own, and so forth.

However, to put community and identity first never seems to
involve this aspect of private choice, because there are so
many traditional, religious communities readily available.
These exert a profound and understandable attraction. There
will always be a temptation to abandon the headache of
critical thinking and independent experiment and to retreat
into a religious community with straightforward answers.
There will always be a temptation to seek refuge in the arms
of those who consider you one of their own simply because of
your ethnicity, religious identity, or nationality. But the
reverse side of the safety one finds in identity is the
horrors that await those outside of the identity or without an
identity to call their own.

I see little evidence in history that identifying with a
premodern community ever leads one to cultivate a humane
disposition to those outside of the community in question. In
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the traditional African
village at the heart of the narrative is one Lasch might like
to be a part of. It has its own ritual and religious
community, and the people within it are bound together.
Okonkwo, the strong man and patriarch, is certainly happy with
his privilege, his numerous wives, and his slaves. There is
always someone weaker to beat, some chance to showcase his
strength. Yet his youngest son, Nwoye, is troubled by this
reality in a way many of the other characters are not:
particularly by the brutally casual way in which Okonkwo
executes the family slave, Ikemefune, and by a disturbing
incident he witnesses in which a pair of innocent twins are
left to die in the woods (twins being a bad omen).

There will always be Nwoyes in the world, just as human beings
will always feel pity (even if pity tends to be overwhelmed by
other impulses, such as selfishness or sadism). Nwoye, who no
doubt would be a disciple of Judith Shklar, puts cruelty
first: before community or identity. And for that he is
ostracized and his life is threatened, even by his own father.

These sorts of injustices are nearly universal in traditional,
premodern communities. Christopher Lasch may point to the
small African American communities in the South who made such
a difference to the Civil Rights movement, but he is
overlooking the equally traditional white communities in the
South: those with Klansman’s robes and a hangman’s noose in
every closet. Nearly every traditional community in history
has been intolerant of personal choice. Such communities
discriminate against difference, and it is with shocking
rapidity that discrimination escalates into murder and brutality.

The question, of course, is whether or not people can ever
think of themselves in terms other than readymade,
communitarian identities. To do so, admittedly, is a hard
path to tread. Yet for those persecuted by traditional,
blinkered communities, locked out of religious or ethnic
identities, it is the only option: so one can only hope that
such people will embrace universalist ideals which do not
exclude them, such as human rights.

SECOND ALTERNATIVE: POWER

The second of the four alternatives will appeal less to the
people of good will with whom I am mostly concerned, but it
appeals to such an extraordinarily large number of people of
bad will that I think I ought to address it. Human rights are
of necessity founded upon a principle of human equality, as
everyone knows. But there is always the possibility that
people aren’t equal, don’t want to be equal, and will brook no
equality.

It is indeed possible that power worship is deeply,
intractably rooted in human nature. We all desire power for
obvious reasons: it allows us to satisfy our wants without
experiencing any negative consequences. Leaving aside the
very real human impulses of pity and altruism, the will to
power does exercise a certain appeal. Yet we cannot all be
powerful in this way without trampling over the power and
freedom of our fellow beings. The liberal solution, the
solution of the human rights movement, is to allow each
individual to pursue her desires so long as she does not
threaten the security, freedom, and capabilities of other
people. This is about as satisfactory as we can get unless we
want to live in a world run by the Marquis de Sade– but then
maybe, just maybe, some of us do. This is the seductive
appeal of power worship. If we cannot all be powerful and
Godlike, perhaps we will settle for being subjected to the
cruel designs of the powerful, and live vicariously through
their actions.

Thomas Carlyle noted this tendency and deemed it “hero
worship”: and regarded it as one of the finest paths to human
satisfaction. William Hazlitt also noticed it, yet it filled
him with horror: “Each individual would (were it in his power)
be a king, a God: but as he cannot, the next best thing is to
see this reflex image of his own self-love, the darling
passion of his breast, realized, embodied out of himself in
the first object he can lay his hands on for the purpose. The
slave admires the tyrant, because the last is, what the first
would be.”

It is no coincidence that just as the liberal experiment was
getting underway, those famous Gothic novels and Byronic
protagonists began entering the European literary scene. The
heroes of the Enlightenment are the weak and abused: see
Voltaire’s ingenuous protagonists who are subjected to the
cruelties of an irrational world and an absent God, or
Montesquieu’s seraglio inmates in The Persian Letters. The
heroes of the anti-Enlightenment are the German princes of
Gothic novels and Poe tales, the Childe Harolds of the world.
They exist prior to and outside of any consideration of the
necessary restraints one places on one’s sadism and power
fetish: they use other people freely and fully. The
appearance of the Byronic hero in later literature usually
serves a similar purpose. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of
Paradise might not generally be considered a great examination
of cruelty, yet it is just that. The acts of cruelty
portrayed therein are minor, but instructive. The
protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a model of the will to power,
whose time is consumed in meticulously reported petty
rivalries and power struggles among the ubermenschen of the
Ivy League.

Why do people prefer this sort of hero to the hero of the
Enlightenment? Few among us are Amory Blaines in real life.
We all have very little power, and most of us are, hopefully,
restrained in what we do to further our power by various moral
considerations. Meanwhile, the powerful are not worthy of
respect or deference. Because of their position they are
uniquely placed to do us harm, and our first task should be to
restrain their capacity to do so. If anyone is deserving of
respect and deference, it is the world’s victims and Stoical
sufferers.

Admittedly, we cannot go through life believing in our
absolute wisdom and refusing to show deference toward anyone.
To expect the individual to approach every situation without
advice and without instruction is far too much of a burden for
anyone to bear. It makes sense to seek role models in one’s
life. However, role models are respected for some
understandable reason, and the individual may reject them if
they fail to provide adequate guidance: the decision to show
deference is one’s own. But power worship is something else
entirely: it is the love of power for its own sake, the need
to defer to something, anything, larger than oneself. This
need is so strong that it has even conjured a superhuman being
out of thin air in the form of God and endowed it with every
conceivable power. This embodiment of arbitrary power is
then, quite literally, worshipped.

This is a disturbing habit of mind, and might conceivably lead
people to put the love of power before the love of their own
most basic human rights. This is a deadly possibility for
those who still hope for human freedom. However, it
ultimately seems unlikely. People worship power when they
themselves are powerless. This is because they see no means
of influencing their fate other than to placate the demands of
those higher up. Yet in a world with human rights, all people
will experience a basic level of dignity and power. And once
their own destiny is firmly within their grasp, they will lose
the desire to trust everything to greater beings. We will
lose the false hope of controlling everything through the
protection of the supernatural, yet we will gain the solid and
very real joy of influencing and personally directing our own
lives.

THIRD ALTERNATIVE: POLITICAL OPPRESSION

Putting political oppression first was a possibility dealt
with by Judith Shklar, and I doubt I can improve on her
discussion in this case. She recalls an incident from a
Nadine Gordimer novel, Burger’s Daughter to be precise, in
which the protagonist Rosa, raised by a communist father in
South Africa and herself thoroughly anti-apartheid, discovers
a poor black man expressing the frustrations of life by
beating a helpless donkey. Rosa decides not to intervene,
simply because she feels that the black man is the true victim
in the scenario: the victim of untold racial injustice and
governmental abuse.

Shklar writes that Rosa has put political oppression before
cruelty in the hierarchy of vices, and indeed she has. This
sort of hierarchy of moral concerns can have a great deal of
appeal, and has led more than a few people into condoning
truly horrendous actions. Pushed far enough, the logic that
the crimes of the victims are not crimes because they were
born of earlier oppression can lead to an extreme nihilism.
Worst of all, many of the people who begin with an opposition
to political oppression are led around to supporting
infinitely worse oppressions in the name of vengeance.
Supporters of the Soviet regime were supposedly motivated by a
hatred of capitalist injustice and cruelty, yet their own
victims were dispatched in far greater numbers and in
infinitely more horrible ways than any of those who suffered
from industrial capitalism. And today, Western universities
are full of postcolonial intellectuals who have decreed that
everyone in the Third World is a victim of imperialism,
including such poor benighted souls as Omar Bashir and
Ayatollah Khamenei. Columbia’s Mahmoud Mamdani, for instance,
has mounted a bizarre defense of the genocide in Darfur on the
grounds that the United States has also killed innumerable
civilians in Iraq. Granted that the war in Iraq is a
perfectly legitimate target for humanitarian criticism, yet it
has nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes of Bashir, the
ruling regime in Iran, or any of the world’s human rights
abusers, a list of which would make any decent person’s hair
stand on end.

To put rights before political oppression is the only
consistent way to approach the world that will yield anything
resembling a moral result. We must intervene on behalf of the
donkey being beaten, because, whatever injustices are faced by
the man doing the beating, the donkey is innocent in all of
them. Granted that Africa and the Middle East have been used
and abused as geopolitical pawns by great powers, yet that
does not mean we should refrain from criticizing the human
rights abuses committed by their governments. This is because
such abuses are always directed toward the innocent, and
toward children most of all.

The urge to put the fight against political oppression ahead
of the fight for human rights may affect a number of decent,
humane people, but it ultimately plays into the notion that
“our” atrocities are better than “their” atrocities, however
us and them happen to be defined. But there is no “us and
them”: an atrocity is simply an atrocity. Putting human
rights first forces us to come to terms with this basic truth.

FOURTH ALTERNATIVE: LOVE

Another counterpoint to my thesis is the Gandhian critique of
liberalism. Refraining from cruelty and respecting other
people within the boundaries of human rights is a tame and
drab human aspiration which will ultimately leave people empty
and colorless. It is far better to treat people with active
love and compassion, to seek them out and take an interest in
their well-being, than to respectfully ignore them while
pursuing one’s own ends.

A great many opponents of injustice and lovers of humanity
have been attracted to this line of thought, and have been led
to put love first: prior, that is, to human rights. In
Tolstoy’s short story Master and Man, we follow a selfish and
cruel master as he plunges into a bitter snowstorm, despite
his serf’s wise objections. Too arrogant to turn back or
admit he made a mistake, the master chooses to jeopardize both
his own life and the life of his servant. Not only that, but
when things get truly precarious and there is a threat of
dangerous wildlife taking an interest in the expedition, he
attempts to abandon his serf and save himself. Yet here too,
he is ineffective, and stumbles back to his “man.” And it is
then that he discovers the joys of altruism and the true
meaning of life: he chooses to freeze to death himself while
protecting his serf from the cold.

The story is deeply poignant, and shows the appeal of putting
love first. Had Tolstoy put human rights first, the story
would have been very different. It would have described the
serf throwing off the shackles of the feudal relationship and
striking out on his own. He would exercise and insist upon,
in other words, his right to be a free agent. The master
would remain as selfish as ever and would have remained
unchanged after the encounter, apart from being down one serf
in the final count. Tolstoy, however, chose not to write that
story. He believed in the redemptive power of love over and
above the forceful breaking of unequal and unjust power
relations.

In contrast to this doctrine of active love stands the
doctrine of human rights, which can seem selfish and cold in
comparison. Human rights insist that people be left alone in
several key ways: that they be free to pursue their own goals
in life and that they be given the necessary capabilities to
do so. Human rights must always respect the decision of
Ibsen’s Nora Helmer to leave the home rather than live the
life of dutiful self-sacrifice. This aspect of individual
freedom is essential to human rights and to liberalism: yet it
is not incompatible with active love. In fact, love for other
people entails respect for their choices, tolerance, and a
refusal to practice cruelty, all of which are essential
aspects of the liberal ethos.

Meanwhile, let us examine the results of putting love before
human rights. It seems that many religious movements do just
that, with horrific results. Converts to Islam were no doubt
bound to one another through love, yet if one looks at what
Muhammad and the later caliphs did as a result, one sees that
to the same extent that love and fellowship among the Muslim
warriors increased, the horrors practiced on those outside of
the religious fold increased as well. Muhammad was perfectly
close with those who took power after his death, and was no
doubt loved by those who converted to his banner. Yet
innumerable innocents were killed or enslaved as a result of
his campaigns.

In Christianity, the story is rather similar, as Freud points
out in Civilization and its Discontents. The faith enjoined
its followers to treat one another with absolute love, which
many of them did: yet the cruelties suffered by non-Christians
during the Inquisition, the Crusades, and many other events,
rose in proportion.

Active love is no doubt a wonderful thing, far superior to a
simple refusal to engage in cruelty, yet we must put human
rights first: otherwise, people may feel love and egalitarian
impulses for those within their chosen religion or identity
group, and at the same time feel entitled to murder and
enslave the rest of humanity or the animal kingdom. It is
only once we have ensured that cruelty, enslavement, rape,
murder, and all the other things which seem to accompany
campaigns of love cannot happen that we can begin to go beyond
human rights.

As for the perceived selfishness of liberalism, the doctrine
does indeed allow for the individual pursuit of happiness.
Yet it is also a demanding doctrine to embrace. Human rights
require respect for others, tolerance of free expression, and
a willingness to engage frankly with opposing views. It
requires an acceptance of eccentricity, diversity, and the
private choices of the individual. In fact, human rights are
some of the most difficult things for people anywhere to
practice consistently. In contrast, the religious love of the
Muslim invaders or the Christian crusaders or the Spanish
conquistadors, who combined group solidarity with hideous
violence against outsiders—this sort of ideology is the
easiest in the world to adopt, as it satisfies the will to
dominate and exploit while also giving an illusion of moral
clarity.

Meanwhile, liberalism, with its requirement that one set aside
one’s own absolute ends in the name of peace, tolerance, and
human rights, is a difficult, self-denying, but ultimately
highly rewarding way to live. It is a doctrine that goes
beyond mere political institutions, and grapples profoundly
with the relation of the individual conscience to the outside
world.

It is over 200 years since the Enlightenment offered the dream of freeing the Western world from the dead hand of the God of Abraham (TGOA), yet we still go round in circles debating his existence. “You cannot prove the existence of God.” “You cannot disprove it.” And so on ad nauseam, while the uncommitted and uninterested shrug their shoulders and say the jury is out, so forget it. One or other church still has its hooks into the fabric of most states in the Old and New Worlds, militant Islam has become a rallying point for protest against real or perceived Western imperialism in the Middle East, epitomised by the creation of the state of Israel, itself a permanent source of religious and international tension. Israel is also the focus for the lives of millions of American Zionists and End Timers for whom all issues are irrelevant other than the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and the advance of their own particular flavour of the Christian eschaton, creating a fundamentalist symbiosis with extreme Islam, a spiral of intolerance and violence eclipsing efforts to tackle the real problems of the world. Meanwhile the characteristic misogyny of Abrahamic religion not only continues to blight the lives of millions of women and children but has largely excluded female/maternal/matriarchal balance from the governance of nations and institutions. And monotheistic myopia, arrogance which deems all other religions and their peoples as inferior, still militates against equable engagement with other cultures and justifies ruthless exploitation and genocide.

Unfortunately, apart from reassuring the sceptical reader that they are on the right page, recitations of the evils of religion will do little to change matters. To the faithful they only confirm the hostility and ignorance of “New Atheists”. In the same way that a recitation of faults never changed the neighbour-from-hell, insight is useless when arguing against faith. Believers will fall back on faith and the impossibility of disproving the existence of God (if you rely on logic and scientific method that is, but more of that later). And so the debate goes on, about the existence of this or that flavour of god, and whether science and religion are compatible or overlapping, but little changes, and despite the fact that the Church of England is losing market share, much of it is to more virulent sects, (hardly surprising under a man who believes that religion has something to do with humanity and compassion) and a suspicion looms that all the debates are smoke and mirrors, creating an illusion of business and action while the important things are happening elsewhere.

THE CHRISTIAN AND ISLAMIC AGENDA

If reason and argument in public debate is not the answer where do we start? A clue lies in how Christianity and Islam maintain their influence. Christian and Muslim leaders know their theses are irrational, and they also know that the surest way to ensnare the uninitiated with irrationality, and keep the numbers up, is to get them young. The indoctrination of children produces deep-seated proclivities, permanently setting logic gates in a one-way trip to certainty, while having religion as a legally established part of mainstream education ensures that the maximum number of children are infected for a minimum effort. There is also a by-product, instilling in the minds of the unconverted young an impression that Christianity is so important and ancient that dissent gainsays the voices of the centuries. It is this subliminal indoctrination that allows the privileged position of religion in education and legislation to be accepted as the norm and to go largely unchallenged.

Current educational legislation, with compulsory daily Christian worship, dates no further back than the 1944 Education Act. Despite the rapid decline in public worship since then, this was strengthened by further Acts in 1988 and 1998. The legislation provides for mandatory religious education (RE) which should “reflect the fact that the religious traditions of Great Britain are in the main Christian.” Christianity thus remains an integral part of the background to most children’s’ education, creating an image of the permanence and authority of religion and the church.

Then there is intelligent design and creationism (ID/C) which promotes a manifesto entitled “The Wedge Strategy”. This states “design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” It goes on: “If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree our strategy is intended to function as a ‘wedge’ that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied to its weakest points.” IDC proponents believe that the weakest point in the trunk is Darwinian evolution, and the wedge is intelligent design.

IDC has its centre in the Discovery Institute in Seattle, and it has an offshoot in the UK, an organisation called Truth in Science which in 2006 sent an ID/C information pack to thousands of teachers in UK secondary schools. This organisation is headed by a Professor Andy McIntosh of Leeds University, who is on record in the Evangelical Times in 2004 as saying that he could not accept any other account of the origins of life than the creation recorded in Genesis, and arguing that getting creationism into schools was the best way to convert non-Christians. The Truth in Science website still offers resources for the teaching of ID and also claims that “Nearly three in ten [teachers] said they either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the government’s guidelines on teaching evolution… ” This implies – and was reported in the broadsheet press as – 29% of teachers think intelligent design should be taught in schools. What they do not say is that “nearly 3 in 10” refers to the 29% of those that responded to an e-mail survey, which amounted to 3.3% of those actually canvassed, which was a fraction of the teachers in the UK. Truth in science?

In addition to the subversion of young minds, Christianity and Islam also claim legal privilege against discrimination and defamation, largely through human rights and equality legislation, stretching the meaning of the provisions from protection of the individual to protection for the entire religion. Thus in the United Nations Council for Human Rights the 57 nation members of the Organisation of the Islamic Council have forced through a resolution, fortunately non-binding, equating “Islamophobia” with racism and attempting to outlaw any defamation or criticism of Islam including “hostile glances”. Similarly in the UK, Christian and Islamic lobbying has affected the unified Equality Bill currently before Parliament, in which it is proposed not just that individuals be protected from discrimination on religious grounds, but that religious organisations be given the right to discriminate against individuals for not belonging to a particular religion.

The Vatican also uses its unique status as a sovereign state, which gives its seats in the UN and EU, to promote religiously biased legislation and to impose religious dogma on policy in education, AIDS and human rights. The supremely ironical example of this religious abuse of international institutions came in 2002 at the United Nations Children’s Summit in New York when the US and the Vatican allied with the Sudan, Syria, Iran and Iraq (all US designated sponsors of terrorism) to defeat a raft of proposals including a ban on the execution of children and young people under 18. A wonderful example of the power of religion to bring nations together in peace and harmony.

This brief overview of religious activism in the UK and elsewhere is intended to show that (a) religious recrudescence has little to do with popular religious sentiment and a lot to do with political machinations, (b) the stakes are not philosophical truth and clarity, they are freedom of speech and thought, and democracy itself. Countering today’s religious activity will involve mobilising public opinion sufficiently to influence policy, and for that we need more than philosophical argument.

WHAT’S NEW?

If the dead hand is to be lifted, and the negative impact of TGOA on humanity and the planet mitigated, a different approach is needed. Reason is not the antidote to faith. Argument or confrontation simply increases resistance, entrenches dogma and even creates martyrs. The need however is not to convert the faithful but to convince the uncommitted and those not emotionally invested in faith that Christianity and Islam are antagonistic to their interests. The constituency of the uncommitted is far larger than the religiously active and represents a vast potential for change. The aim here is to show them that TGOA does not act in their interests, and the reason is that he is a fiction, because we now know when, why and by who he was invented, and that the structures built on that fantasy – the Bible, the Qur’an and all their consequences, because of this foundation on falsehood, are not just misleading but toxic to humanity and the planet we live on.

The key to change lies in the fruits of modern archaeology and historical studies which have demonstrated emphatically that TGOA, the God of Judah and Israel, inherited, acknowledged and adopted by both Christianity and Islam, and the source of all monotheism in the world today, is a fiction, and a politically inspired fiction at that. The argument has been some 200 years in the making, but this is the case in short. There were two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, which emerged in the eastern highlands of Palestine/Canaan at the beginning of the first millennium BC. Their peoples were, and always had been, Canaanites, and their religion was originally Canaanite polytheism, This became henotheism (the worship of one God as supreme among many) when the god YHWH (later to become Yahweh or Jehovah to Christians; unpronounceable in Judaism and rendered as Adonai) was adopted by a nationalist political faction in Israel in the eighth century BC. The political ambitions of the YHWH faction unfortunately brought about the obliteration of their young kingdom by the Assyrian emperor, Shalmanesar V, in 724 BC.

Many Israelites took refuge in the neighbouring kingdom of Judah and the YHWH faction continued their nationalist activities there, nurturing a dream of re-creating Israel. YHWH became the focus of the Israel faction, and eventually having achieved power in Judah, they repeated their forebears’ mistake of trying to punch above their weight in the imperial struggles of the eastern Mediterranean. (Palestine/Canaan was a nexus of trade routes between three continents and was coveted by every empire from the ancient Egyptian to the British.) The result of this political ambition was a reprise of the fate of Israel. Judah was crushed by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, and a large part of its population taken into slavery, the Babylonian Captivity, which however ended when the Persian Emperor Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BC. Amongst the spoils he found the Judahites, who he returned to their homeland, now a small province, Yehud to the Persians, some 60 by 40 miles square, in the fifth satrapy of the Persian empire.

The Judahites had taken their worship of YHWH with them into bondage, and as their fortunes waned his stature had waxed. From being the only God for a true Israelite/Judahite to worship, he had become the Only God. And the Yehudim, as the Persians now referred to them, set about rearranging and rewriting the story of their people and their God to explain to themselves how they had come to be where they were, and why they and their God deserved better. And that self-justifying propaganda rewritten as history is what we know today as the Old Testament.

The process of revealing that the Old Testament is not just fiction but political fiction, written by a set of big-time losers to persuade themselves that it wasn’t their fault, has taken 200 years. It started with the 19th century textual and philological work that showed that Moses and the prophets could not have written the Old Testament as was claimed by the church, and continued with 20th century archaeology and historical studies that asked why such outstanding events as the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt, the Exodus, and the setting up of the kingdom of David, stretching from Damascus to the Red Sea, are never mentioned in the history and records of the contemporary civilisations and empires . The process culminated with a revolution in late 20th century and 21st century archaeology and scholarship, when the archaeologists stopped digging to find the Bible and started interpreting their findings free from religious filters and agendas. The result was the revelation of the brief rise and fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the making of their creator god. The fall of Israel and Judah and the rise of their pseudo-god is well documented in, amongst others, The Bible Unearthed, Finkelstein and Silberman, (Simon & Schuster 2002). This was made into a BBC Television series of the same name, but even today the significance of its revelations has not sunk into the general consciousness.

Christianity and Islam base all their claims on the existence and the authority of TGOA. Take away that god and that authority, as these findings do, and you are left with two ideologies which seek power by proselytising, propaganda, violence and interference in government. In other words political ideologies – but ideologies not intended or designed for the benefit of humans in this world, and therefore parasitic or cancerous, soaking up energy and resources to no end other than their own survival and growth.

TOXIC FAITH

But does it matter if faith is based on falsehood if the ends are good? In adopting TGOA as their own creator deity, Christianity and Islam have created a fantasy world, the supernatural or transcendent, and set it up to rule this world, and in doing so have created a labyrinth of supernaturally inspired rules, commandments, assumptions and beliefs about this world and its ordering, directed towards a supposed need for divine approval. These are not only misguided but are by their very nature toxic to human beings and the world itself. It is this connection between the tenets of Christianity and Islam and their toxic outcomes that must be made clear in raising awareness amongst the inactive majority about the real impact of faith in TGOA. The following are a few examples out of many possible of the consequences of drawing logical conclusions from the great falsehood.

Because TGOA created the universe he is assumed to have had a purpose, and that purpose creates the linear view of existence, bringing into play the eschaton, the end of all things when the purpose is fulfilled, a concept not generally found in non-Abrahamic religions which tend to have a cyclic view of existence and are not timebound. Thus today we have the cults of End Timers and Rapture believers as a feature of American Christianity asserting that there is no need to worry about, or even care for, the environment because of the imminent second coming of the Messiah and the end of the world, to hasten which other American citizens are pouring millions of dollars into support for hard-line Israeli Zionists in an effort to bring about the conflict of the risen Christ and the Antichrist in the battle of Armageddon, the Millennium and the Day of Judgement.

Why is TGOA male? Because he was originally one of a family of Canaanite gods with human characteristics. But that remnant of his Canaanite divinity translated into a monotheistic ideology has been an unmitigated disaster. In this worldview TGOA created man in his own image and woman was an afterthought, and that story still dominates the worldview of more than 2 billion people today. Pope John Paul II wrote in 2004, in his Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, referring to the first three chapters of Genesis, “In it the revealed truth concerning the human person as ‘the image and likeness’ of God constitutes the immutable basis of all Christian anthropology.” This document, signed by the Pope, was drafted by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Apart from condemning women to the status of inferior beings, the authority of scripture subordinates all human relationships to the relationship between man and God, a true misogynists’ charter. (For a detailed exposition of the outcomes of this mindset see Does God Hate Women?, Benson and Stangroom, Continuum 2009.)

Another corollary to creating an all-powerful creator God is the worldview mandated through sacred texts. The chief characteristic of Abrahamic worldview is dualism – the idea that there are two dimensions of existence, the natural and supernatural. The latter is the one inhabited by TGOA and the demons and hangers-on invented over the centuries by overheated imaginations. The supernatural is also the final destination of the supernatural part of the human being – the soul. It will surprise many to hear that the immortal soul and its supernatural home are virtually unique to Abrahamic religion. Even in Buddhism, which features reincarnation, there is no soul, and in fact attachment to the idea of an inherently existing self which exists after death is classed as one of the defilements of mind which must be erased if the devotee is to achieve nirvana. However this idea of duality is embedded throughout Western and middle eastern cultures. Even unbelievers will accept the idea of an eternal soul, and there are psychologists who assert that the desire and search for the transcendent or supernatural is an innate human characteristic, or who define religion in terms of belief in the supernatural and supernatural entities.

These are only a few examples out of many of the toxic outcomes of Abrahamic faith and their impact on the world we know. So how can its effects be mitigated?

WAYS AND MEANS

The first priority in tackling the power of priests and imams is to stop the rot in education. The objectives being (a) to protect young people from religious propaganda, indoctrination, proselytising, misinformation and coercion in schools and (b) to provide an effective and objective education about religion as a prerequisite for learning in both schools and universities. The significant difference will be that instead of arguing from the point of view of a secularist/humanist minority, as The National Secular Society and of the British Humanist Association currently have to do, in future, arguments can be based on the right to protect children from religious propaganda touting demonstrable falsehoods, and with the ultimate aim of having Christian and Islamic organisations barred from the educational arena as parasitic political ideologies.

The current position of religious education in schools (RE) is highly anomalous in that while mandatory it is not part of the national curriculum, with control of the syllabus in the hands of local authority Standing Advisory Committees on Religious Education (SACRE) and Agreed Syllabus Conferences (ASC), quasi-political bodies from which, for instance, Humanist representatives are excluded. The 1988 Education Reform Act also requires that the RE syllabus should “reflect the fact that the religious traditions of Great Britain are in the main Christian.” Thus, while RE is not permitted to proselytise or promote any particular faith, its provision is largely partisan and uninformed.

Knowledge of religion and religious systems is essential to the understanding of virtually all arts or humanities and to many of the “soft” sciences, as well as to ridding science classrooms of ID/C. But religion cannot be studied in a vacuum – many religions are culturally specific and cannot be understood outwith that culture. You would not for instance expect to hear of many Jains or Shintoists who had not been born into Jain or Shinto communities or who had converted to those religions. Any objective study of religion needs to consider religion and culture together. In the circumstances RE cannot be allowed to remain as an “amateur” subject under the direction of local god-botherers. The whole subject needs to be redefined, included in the national curriculum, non-partisan syllabuses worked out and standards and qualifications for teachers set up, which would include degree courses. The problem of course is getting any political party to sign up to such radical reform, which is why mobilising uncommitted opinion against the current situation is so important.

The next step in that mobilisation is promoting general awareness of the disingenuousness and toxic nature of Abrahamic religion. But it is not a simple question of dramatic revelation and instant change. We need to appreciate the extent to which monotheistic/Abrahamic concepts are embedded in our lives, and throughout Old and New World cultures. There are atheists today who still think that life in general must have a conscious purpose, or that belief in the transcendent is innate in the human psyche, not realising that these concepts are virtually unique to Abrahamic religion (and their derivatives such as Baha’i or Rastafarianism). As anyone working with addiction will attest, the first step in changing behaviour is to get acknowledgement that there is a problem. This involves bringing to the forefront of the consciousness things that people are normally aware of only as background, much of which will have been around since childhood, enabling people to see them in the cold light of day, together with their antecedents and consequences.

Some examples have already been given – the linear view of existence deluding millions of people about the purpose of life, endangering the environment and dangerously exacerbating international tension, while the accidental gender of TGOA blights the lives of millions of women and children, and the Abrahamic worldview gives the dark robed ones unbelievable levels of control over the minds of the faithful, and even undermines Western psychology.

These are only a few amongst many, the full exposition of the toxic effects of Christianity and Islam will have to wait for another day and place, but you can start working on your own examples by taking the four pillars of Abrahamic religion and working out their logical corollaries. The pillars are (a) asserting the existence of the single supernatural and omnipotent god, (b) asserting the truth of sacred texts which support that existence, (c) a class of hierophants who act as guardians and interpreters of the sacred texts, (d) a worldview derived from the texts and mandated by the priestly class.

Some of the corollaries are the unconscious consequences of this model, e.g. the claimed authority of sacred texts breeds “the joy of being right”, one of the most dangerous emotions known to mankind, and one which naturally leads to confrontation, conflict and violence, becoming particularly destructive when allied to clerical preference for identifying with and reinforcing the will and power of the state. Others are logical structures that the dark robed ones build on the original assumptions, e.g. sin and punishment and rewards in the afterlife, and having to invent Limbo, in which the souls of unbaptised children have to wait until the day of judgement (necessary because the idea of unbaptised souls going straight to heaven would undermine the necessity for church and clergy, the ultimate abomination).

The exercise of working out the consequences of Abrahamic assumptions can become quite depressing, and it is not much helped when you begin to realise that any unpleasant aspect of monotheistic religion can generally be traced back to origins in this model, while the positive aspects can usually be attributed to the natural social characteristics and creative talent of human nature. It becomes even more interesting to realise that very similar models to the four pillars can be found in totalitarian political ideologies – communism or fascism – which begin to look like post-enlightenment imitations of Christianity with a human Big Cheese – Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot etc – instead of TGOA, the Bible substituted by Das Kapital, The Little Red Book, Mein Kampf etc and The Party or the SS acting as the hierophantic guardians. They also tend to have their own unique worldviews to impose on the masses – historical dialectic, eugenics and lebensraum for the master race etc. All of which begs the question, are totalitarian ideologies godless religions, or are Christianity and Islam totalitarian ideologies masquerading as religions?

THE POLITICAL FRONT

Alongside drives for education and awareness their needs to be a political agenda. The NSS and BHA have been working for years against religious privilege in the political arena, on behalf of non-believers of the UK. Unfortunately they are limited to campaigning as minority interest groups. That effort needs to be enhanced and supported by assertion, on a wide front, of the prima facie case that Abrahamic religion is based on demonstrable fictions and that (a) children should not be exposed to Abrahamic indoctrination outside the home and family environment and (b) Abrahamic religions should be treated as special interest groups with no status or privilege not attaching to any other such group. The ultimate objective would be the disestablishment of the national churches and the identification under law of Abrahamic religious organisations as political movements.

It would be futile to expect any of the major parties to adopt such policies in the near future, but this still has to be a long-term goal, creating a level of public awareness and opinion that eventually forces one or more of the parties to realise that they stand to lose more votes by protecting organised religion than by stripping it of its privileged status. A useful comparison is to think of how long the struggle against tobacco has been going – over 50 years ago. With change of this magnitude it is not unreasonable to think in terms of generations, but if change can be achieved in the educational arena, future generations will include more people aware of, and wary of, the illusion and deceit intrinsic in Christianity and Islam.

This has been mainly about English-speaking people, typically in the UK. There is another plane on which the works of TGOA can be seen, that of major world issues – armed conflict, degradation of the environment, suppression of human rights, AIDS, poverty and gender equality, and a similar process of raising awareness of the impact of Abrahamic religion as a contributory cause or as an obstacle to mitigation in these fields is called for. This is a far larger canvas, on a global scale, in which the suffering of the victims dwarfs our concerns for freedom of speech and democracy in the UK. The scale of injustice and suffering can numb the mind, but it is all part of the same problem, needing witness and exposure to mobilise popular opinion behind those already at work.

ENDWORDS

It must be stressed that nothing here is intended to impinge in any way on any individual’s freedom of religion. This is aimed solely at limiting the political power and influence of Christianity and Islam. Any campaigning needs to include measures to engage with and reassure individuals that their rights are not being targeted and that there is no question of confrontation or threat. There is no reason why people should not carry on practising their preferred religion if they accept that it brings no rights or status that do not attach to any other special interest group, just as multitudes of Christians and Muslims already do today. Amongst Christianity for example the Friends (or Quakers) have a way of life and practices that are unexceptionable to all but the most bigoted. It would come as no surprise to find that many people, who perhaps take their inspiration from the Sermon on the Mount rather than Leviticus, might find Jesus sufficient to their needs without burdening themselves with TGOA and all that he brings with him.

This has been a polemic against organised Abrahamic religion with no axe to grind with any other religion, which also implies, correctly, that I do not see atheism as the necessary alternative to Abrahamic religion. There are a myriad alternative ways of leading a happy, fulfilled and spiritually rich life, either with or without committing to a belief or system or shutting yourself off from the world, and it cannot be said too strongly that taking away the fiction that is TGOA does not make human beings in any way less spiritual. And is atheist such a useful label? It means defining oneself in terms of a construct in someone else’s imagination. That is too much like fighting a battle on ground of the enemy’s choosing.