Clerical Errors by Bob Rees First published in 2012 by Glasnevin Publishing 16 Griffith Parade, Glasnevin, Dublin 11, Ireland www.glasnevinpublishing.com based in Dublin, UNESCO City of Literature © Bob Rees 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photography, filming, recording, video recording, photocopying, or by information storage and retrieval system and shall not, by any way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Papers used by Glasnevin Publishing are from well managed forests and other responsible sources. ISBN: 978‐1‐9086890‐3‐0 Table of contents Introduction 1 Part I: Setting the scene 6 Chapter 1: One of many biased short histories of Christianity 7 Part II: The harm done in God’s name 18 Chapter 2: Promote ignorance, oppose progress 21 Chapter 3: Sin and morality 36 Chapter 4: Some sample sins 57 Chapter 5: Divisiveness 76 Chapter 6: God is on our side 91 Chapter 7: Suffer, little children ! 112 Part III: Could it all be a con trick? 126 Chapter 8: The shaky foundations of Christianity 133 Chapter 9: How can so many intelligent people be so wrong? 162 Chapter 10: Clinging to belief 178 Chapter 11: Slowly losing faith 188 Part IV: Follow the money 206 Chapter 12: The God business 208 Chapter 13: Political power 220 Part V: What’s to be done? 238 Chapter 14: The lessons 240 Index 262 Introduction An enormous amount of harm is done in God’s name. All around the world, God and his contradictory wishes are blamed for every kind of religious strife, whether in Iran or Israel; in the Netherlands or Northern Ireland. The Christian God in particular is notorious for having promoted division, ignorance and suffering for the best part of two thousand years. Devout Christians, professing dependence on their God’s guidance, have done, and continue to do, some outrageous things – from the butchery of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the calculated genocide of the Holocaust and Rwanda in more recent times – all as part of their professed quest to obey and spread God’s revealed Word. I intend to show that God is innocent! Today, there are said to be three‐and‐a‐half billion monotheists in the world. These people are to varying degrees guided and controlled by elite individuals within each denomination who have assumed positions of power by virtue of their claims to be representatives on Earth of this One True supernatural God. They claim to be privy to His wishes, and enjoy the earthly privileges that this heavenly power brings. These are the men that I call ‘clerics’. They are those executive religious leaders and spokesmen who determine doctrine, and who employ the worker priests, who I see largely as victims. Many clerics use Machiavellian devices to promote their competing brands of snake oil and maximise their own political influence, while vilifying those honest atheists and ethical freethinkers who dare to call their bluff. The circumstantial evidence suggests that at least some of them are ‘… an establishment of con artists who have dedicated their lives to propping up a sense of self‐importance by claiming to talk to an invisible big kahuna’ (biologist PZ Myers in the New Statesman, 25 July 2011). Christian clerics preach a message that is authoritarian, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, intolerant, anti‐socialist, anti‐ intellectual and anti‐democratic. Theirs is a ‘Christianity’ that 1 owes more to fascism than to the Sermon on the Mount. Quite a few of them have so twisted Jesus’ supposed teachings that they now preach war and greed; they worship wealth, and instead of giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, they seek political power and privilege for themselves. My thesis is that those pretenders, the powerful popes, prelates, preachers and presidents who presume to speak on God’s behalf are either victims of their own indoctrination, or else they are artful opportunists, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Either way, they threaten the wellbeing and even the survival of the human race, and they certainly don’t deserve the obsequious respect that is usually accorded to them. These are the men for whom ‘God loves a giver’ means ‘I love a giver’; ‘God told me to invade Iraq’ means ‘I decided to invade Iraq’; and ‘God will punish you if you tell anyone, little boy’ means … well, you know what it means. Increasing numbers of people resent being coerced and frustrated by the political and financial demands of God’s spokesmen: by the shenanigans of the Vatican, the ambitions of the Islamists (i.e the OIC – Organisation of Islamic Co‐operation) and the American Religious Right in world affairs; and by the security constraints caused by the daily fear of some Muslim victim of religious indoctrination seeking eternal glory and seventy‐two virgins. These people are beginning to wonder about the God that Christians and Muslims profess to worship and obey. Nietzsche offered a good alibi: ‘God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist.’ He certainly pretends not to exist, and even devout believers have to accept that the God that men once depended on to heal the sick and ensure a bountiful harvest was clearly illusory – we can see now that disinfectant and fertiliser would have been respectively more effective than prayer and sacrifice. It rather looks as if those ancient clerics were misleading the people about God’s involvement with the world, whether intentionally or innocently. And they still are, for despite the fact that science has shown us some of the exquisite simplicity of the workings of the natural world, such as the concept of evolution by natural selection or the all‐embracing 2 elementary relationship between energy and matter, e = mc2, those who inhabit the supernatural worlds of Christianity and Islam nevertheless claim three‐and‐a‐half billion followers worldwide. These followers presumably acquiesce to the suffering and trouble promoted by their clerics, whether intentionally or innocently, in the name of their particular god (which may or may not exist – and, by definition, only one monotheistic God can be valid). I call myself an agnostic and I reject the anthropomorphic God, the God with human‐like emotions and characteristics that Christians worship, whilst conceding that something that might be referred to as ‘God’ may exist or once have existed. After all, pantheists identify God with the universe, and the universe surely exists. What also exists, if only in men’s minds, is ScapeGod – the God who is blamed for all the religious strife. Some senior clerics may indeed believe all that they preach. They may believe that God guides them and makes them infallible, and that all the suffering that is done in God’s name is the price that must be paid if humankind is to be saved. But, as we will see, there have been some cynical opportunists among them – men who sought power and privilege for themselves by colluding with despots and suppressing the masses of ordinary people. They have put a devout and virtuous face on their actions, and claimed to be acting in God’s name, secure in the knowledge that God wouldn’t contradict them. I confess that I have no answers to the big questions about the purpose and destination of humankind, but I find that the childish ‘explanations’ provided by spokesmen for the main religions are neither probable nor even imaginative. But whether or not God exists is not central to my thesis. My main argument is that the major religions don’t know any more about God than I do, and yet their clerics have arrogantly taken over people’s lives, invented ‘sins’ for which they threaten them with dire punishment for all eternity, demanded political and financial privileges and more, all on the highly dubious basis that they have a self‐proclaimed ‘special relationship’ with God. It is not so much the organised religions per se, as their senior 3 clerics, the men who define and operate the various monotheistic religions in supposed accordance with their God’s wishes, which, they assure us, they alone are privy to. This book is largely about these clerics – the leaders who specify the beliefs of their followers, and who instruct them in what they should think and how they should behave in order to satisfy God’s wishes. These religious leaders enjoy respect, privilege, power and wealth by virtue of their self‐proclaimed positions as God’s confidantes. They are the Ayatollahs, imams and mullahs who interpret and enforce Islamic law and tradition; they are the founders and leaders of the various Protestant denominations and sects; they are the pastorpreneurs and televangelists; they are the popes and the senior hierarchy of Roman Catholicism, and they are the political leaders like George Bush and Tony Blair, in that they all claim to be guided by God. Using God’s name, men such as these have variously caused incredible harm: ignorance, suffering, division, wars, massacres, genocides and hatreds – hatred of freedom, of women, of Jews, of homosexuals, of atheists, of other‐believers …. Let me hasten to add that for the purpose of the present thesis, the term ‘cleric’ does not include ordinary religious workers – priests, nuns, vicars, charity workers and the religious congregations – who I see as the primary victims of clerical indoctrination.