The GOD Delusion Read Online Free PDF Page A

thinks
taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it.
But on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch
on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'.
    Why
should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party
or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of
economics versus that, Macintosh
instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe
began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that's holy? . . . We
are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting
how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets
absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these
things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those
ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have
agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.
    Here's
a particular example of our society's overweening respect for religion,
one that really matters. By far the easiest grounds for gaining
conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a
brilliant moral philosopher with a prizewinning doctoral thesis
expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft
board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you
can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through
like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on
the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.
    At
the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a pusillanimous
reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In Northern
Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and
'Loyalists' respectively. The very word 'religions' is bowdlerized to
'communities', as in 'intercommunity warfare'. Iraq, as a consequence
of the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, degenerated into sectarian
civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Clearly a religious conflict
- yet in the Independent of 20 May 2006 the
front-page headline and first leading article both described it as
'ethnic cleansing'. 'Ethnic' in this context is yet another euphemism.
What we are seeing in Iraq is religious cleansing. The original usage
of 'ethnic cleansing' in the former Yugoslavia is also arguably a
euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic
Croats and Muslim Bosnians. 6
    I
have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in
public discussions of ethics in the media and in government. 7 Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive
morals, you
can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will
be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel
discussions on radio or television. I'm not suggesting that we should
go out of our way to censor the views of these people. But why does our
society beat a path to their door, as though they had some expertise
comparable to that of, say, a moral philosopher, a family lawyer or a
doctor?
    Here's
another weird example of the privileging of religion. On 21 February
2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a church in New Mexico
should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey,
against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. 8 Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal
believe that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which
contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyl-tryptamine. Note that
it is sufficient that they believe that the drug
enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence.
Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea
and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet the
Supreme Court ruled, in 2005, that all patients who use cannabis for
medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the
minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion,
as