Belfast Telegraph

Dear Sir/Madam,

The terrorist outrage in the USA on September 11 has now been followed by bombings in Afghanistan in which more innocent people have been killed. Already the death toll in both countries far exceeds the thousands killed in all our years of petty, bloody squabble here in N. Ireland.

It is easy to denounce the fanaticism of Bin Laden and his supporters, the Taliban. There are accusations that Islam condones jihad, the holy war, and condemns all non-Muslims as infidels. But such denunciations tend to rebound on the accusers, given that Christianity has produced irrational divisions in our own society and is implicated in all the sectarianism which those divisions have created. Let us not forget: many of the people who have been slaughtered here in the course of the Troubles were killed simply because they belonged to ‘the other side’.

The real heart of darkness, both here and in Afghanistan, is the irrationality of religious beliefs and the relentless inculcation of those obsolete beliefs in the young. Children here are taught to revere the rantings of Moses in just the same way that children in Islamic schools are. The only difference is that Islamic extremists like the Taliban still perform the brutal punishments laid down in Mosaic law. Our children are no more taught to question religious authority than the children of the Taliban. Why else would they revere ancient Arabic authors with their unsubstantiated tales of supernatural stunts, alleged deities and favoured peoples?

Voltaire said: "Those who believe in absurdities will commit atrocities". It is time that we stopped frog-marching children into unquestioning, conventional belief in the traditional absurdities.

We live on a crowded, polluted planet. We are exploiting its resources ruthlessly and we are driving other species to extinction. These are major problems to contend with. Religions merely make matters worse by clouding our vision with obsolete ideas, creating artificial divisions between people and demanding uncritical faith in the traditional absurdities.

Les Reid

Secretary

Belfast Humanist Group