Страница 14 из 69
A SPECIAL SUBGENRE of modern literature is the memoir of a man or woman who once underwent a religious education. The modern world is now sufficiently secular for some of these authors to attempt to be fu
VIOLENT, IRRATIONAL, INTOLERANT, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it «looks forward» in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment. This has been a constant trope, ever since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half-baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant. It stretches from the epistles of Saint Paul, who clearly thought and hoped that time was ru
The blood continued to rise. Millions of birds flocked into the area and feasted on the remains… and the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horse’s bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.
This is sheer manic relish, larded with half-quotations. More reflectively, but hardly less regrettably, it can be found in Julia Ward Howe’s «Battle Hymn of the Republic», which dwells on the same winepress, and in Robert Oppenheimer’s murmur as he watched the first nuclear detonation at Alamagordo, New Mexico, and heard himself quoting the Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita: «I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds». One of the very many co
As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly. The history of the cosmos begins, if we use the word «time» to mean anything at all, about twelve billion years ago. (If we use the word «time» wrongly, we shall end up with the infantile computation of the celebrated Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, who calculated that the earth — «the earth» alone, mind you, not the cosmos — had its birthday on Saturday, October 22, in 4004 BC, at six in the afternoon. This dating was endorsed by William Je
With what contempt and suspicion, then, must one regard those who are not willing to wait, and who beguile themselves and terrify others — especially the children, as usual — with horrific visions of apocalypse, to be followed by stern judgment from the one who supposedly placed us in this inescapable dilemma to begin with. We may laugh now at the foam-flecked hell-and-damnation preachers who loved to shrivel young souls with pornographic depictions of eternal torture, but this phenomenon has reappeared in a more troubling form with the holy alliance between the believers and what they can borrow or steal from the world of science. Here is Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, a distinguished professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at the University of Islamabad in Pakistan, writing about the frightening mentality which prevails in his country — one of the world’s first states to define its very nationality by religion:
In a public debate on the eve of the Pakistani nuclear tests, the former chief of the Pakistani army General Mirza Aslam Beg said: «We can make a first strike and a second and even a third». The prospect of nuclear war left him unmoved. «You can die crossing the street,» he said, «or you could die in a nuclear war. You’ve got to die someday, anyway». … India and Pakistan are largely traditional societies, where the fundamental belief structure demands disempowerment and surrender to larger forces. A fatalistic Hindu belief that the stars above determine our destiny, or the equivalent Muslim belief in kismet certainly account for part of the problem.
I shall not disagree with the very brave Professor Hoodbhoy, who helped alert us to the fact that there were several secret bin Laden supporters among the bureaucrats of the Pakistani nuclear program, and who also exposed the wild fanatics within that system who hoped to harness the power of the mythical dji