Coming off!

Having read 'The God Delusion', 2006, by Richard Dawkins, and, perhaps more powerfully having watched a series of programmes called 'Root of all Evil?', I have decided that I must take a stand against religion, that it would be morally wrong to remain 'sitting on the fence'. Here goes:

Throughout the world, we standardly make certain evidential requirements before we accept the truth of some statement: whether some experiment supports or disproves a scientific hypothesis does not depend on the country where the experiment was performed, and whether I am guilty of some crime or not should be decided regardless of my wealth and views, solely on the basis of the evidence before the court.

But there is one area in which societies usually don't make the same requirements, and that is in the area of people's religious beliefs, where we allow them to hold and express beliefs – and even act on them – that run counter to the best shared evidence we have, or that are at least not supported by generally-accepted evidence. In certain conversations we all step very carefully, don't we, worried we might offend?

It is because we feel we cannot challenge religious beliefs in the same way that we challenge other beliefs, that religion is liable to be exploited for other, political ends, and that it plays a role in much of the violence in the world, and not only large-scale violence – despite the fact that all major religions ostensibly preach peace, (at least when they are presented to outsiders.)

We therefore have to accept that all the 'nice' religious people, by claiming for themselves a certain area where the beliefs they hold are not to be subjected to the usual scrutiny and measured by the same standards of evidence that we, and they too, expect in all other areas of our lives, are giving cover to the 'fundamentalists' and 'extremists'.

It had always felt wrong that the 'nice' religious people so easily disowned violence perpetrated by their fellow-believers, in the name of the same god they believed in. I have now come to think that not only can they not disown it, they are implicated; and not only in the violence of their fellow-believers but in all religiously justified violence, in the name of any god.

This is not me, by the way, but Kai Arste, Atlantic College. (http://www.kahome.co.uk/index.php). However, I could now quite happily write and claim this as my own. I'm coming off the fence.