WAR ON RELIGION - "Let them all die"!

A Scotsman.com columnist faces off against anti-religionists ...

Keeping faith in a force for good
by KATIE GRANT

As the Iraqi elections got underway, the gloves were off at dinner parties. Far from people avoiding politics and religion, that is all people wanted to talk about, and as atrocities carried out in the name of religion fill our screens, I found myself, as a regular church-goer, increasingly the object of much exasperation.

Religion, I am told, has been the bane of human kind. In an echo of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s declaration of war on democracy, people announce that it is high time religion was abolished. It has, they say, been responsible for everything bad, and any good it has done could have been effected by other means.

From east to west, organised religion is nothing more than a wicked social construct, a form of institutionalised bullying using superstition to lock people into a certain mindset so that others can takeadvantage. How else do you explain the clerical child abuser or the suicide bomber? The arguments get personal. How, I am asked, can I be so gullible and - this question the most pointed of all - should I really be imposing organised religion on my children, thus keeping the whole nonsense going?

It is hard to counter such questions because, on the face of it, the world’s religions have brought the world to a pretty pass. If God is love, why do we kill in His name? Since collective worship seems to generate nothing but hate, would we not be better off getting rid it in favour of bland New Ageism, which hurts nobody. (sic)

Read more on Ms. Grant's counterpoint here ...