Religion isn't nice. It kills

So that's that: no secular thinkers on Thought for the Day. Another bowlful of mental custard, anyone?

Polly Toynbee
Friday September 6, 2002
reposted from The Guardian

The final answer is no. A letter (apparently) from the BBC governors has finally refused the modest request of the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association and 100 other signatories (I was one), that non-religious thinkers should contribute to Thought for the Day on Radio 4's Today programme. No, the governors have decided that creationist fruitcakes have "thoughts" of more depth and resonance than moral philosophers who lack the requisite superstition. Maybe the competition would be too daunting. Woolly homilies from carefully selected moderate pulpits might sound a little weak when challenged by hard thought. Nor might their emotions stand comparison with poets or secular writers. Benjamin Zephaniah versus the Bishop of the Day? No contest.

Does it really matter? After all, these syrupy thoughtlets of consensual religious platitude only take up 2.45 minutes of the programme. If they are thin gruel for either brain or heart, the speakers are not altogether to blame. The terms of reference laid down by the handcuffed BBC require banality. The rules pasteurise out any of the authentic roar of religion by forbidding contributors from "gratuitous criticism of other people's traditions" while forcing them to be "fair and balanced in their treatment of party politics" - a recipe for mental custard. None the less, some speakers still manage to be quite good while no doubt some secular speakers would be awful. But this is about the over-valuation of religion - with the BBC yet again the hapless battleground for national debate.

This is about confronting religion at a time when it threatens global Armageddon. It is there in the born-again Christian fundamentalism demanded of every US politician, turning them all into "crusaders". It drives on the murderous Islamic jihadists. It makes mad the biblical land-grabbing Israeli settlers. It threatens nuclear nemesis between the Hindus and Muslims along the India-Pakistan border. It still hurls pipebombs on the Ulster streets. The Falun Gong are killed for it, extremist Sikhs die for it too. The Pope kills millions through his reckless spreading of Aids. When absolute God-given righteousness beckons, blood flows and women are in chains. Ah, apologists say, religion is only used as a battle flag for other causes - tribalism, nationalism or ancient racial hatreds. Islam is only used (or abused) as the underdogs' banner for all those oppressed by the west. That may be so, but religious certainty is what gives other grievances their murdering edge. True, Stalin and Hitler's secular dogmas mimicked religious fervour horribly, but that only adds to the warning against any absolutist belief.

What has any of this got to do with Thought for the Day, where none of the above "revealed" religions is allowed to proclaim that their unique prophet or God as the only way, truth and life? The danger is that the slot's polite Gods are used to excuse the inexcusable happening all over the world in the name of religion. Undue deference is paid to religious sensibility when militant secularism is what should be spread with, yes, missionary zeal. Thought for the Day takes all this lethal passion and sanitises it into a Disneyfied, love-thy-neighbour, greetings card of niceness. But religion is not nice, it kills: it is toxic in the places where people really believe it. It only becomes civilised when it loses all temporal power in a multicultural, secular society. Only then, as its followers dwindle, does it turn into a gentle talisman of cultural tradition, a mode of meditation with little literal belief in ancient miracles or long dead warlords. True, some of the religious do much community good: in some of the worst inner-city areas the local church is an island of community, the vicar the only professional still living there. But even there the religion tends to act as a barrier not as an asset in drawing local people together: enthusiastic non-religious organisations earn general trust more easily.

Everywhere reason is under threat as a sponginess of thought blurs the line between the real and the fantastical. Psychic stuff, alternative therapies, auras, telepathies, crystals, self-obsessed mysticism is gaining ground, often passing uncriticised by those who know the difference between the proven and nonsense, but fear giving offence. It matters because once people lose sight of how to separate hard fact from wild hypothesis, they get worse at navigating a noisy world of junk information. It matters that people know how to estimate risk, how to strip away panic and calculate odds in the latest scare. They need to know that coincidence is not magic and how to tell probability from extreme improbability. People who put electronic tags in their children need to know the statistical chance of being murdered by a stranger (six a year) versus being killed on the road (3,500 a year). To understand the world, people need built-in lie detectors. That means the most important purveyors of authoritative information must be secular and as rational as they can manage. Schools, the BBC, the NHS, every state function, should avoid ever knowingly fudging the line between science and belief, between faith and fact. Religion belongs in the personal, never in the public sphere.

Writing on this page recently, Giles Fraser, Oxford lecturer and Vicar of Putney, took a swing at the secularists and humanists, and in his first sentence tumbled straight into religion's biggest black hole. What would soulless atheists say about the death of the little Soham girls? Moving answers flowed in from atheists: evil, like good, is terrifyingly human. How could it help to call upon some cruel, all-powerful overseer of such horror? But leave such things to minds that enjoy inventing and then explaining impossibilist conundrums. Consider instead his accusation that secularists live parasitically on religion, defining ourselves negatively by what they are against. The Godless rationalists are spiritually shrivelled, prune-like souls, dead to wonder, awe or marvel. True, some evolutionary psychologists can be dismally over-determinist. But there is nothing lacking in the scope of human consciousness and imagination, in the human capacity for genius, good or evil with its infinite ability to surprise, invent and renew a fate entirely in human hands. Most insulting is the idea that morality comes only from the rulebook of an external God: the Godless are without moral compass. Yet morality is plainly inborn in every child as soon it cries, "Unfair!" It is this presumptuous arrogance that underpins religion's claim to a monopoly on ethics.

It was the same religious arrogance that diverted the secularists' letter to the BBC governors straight to the head of public accountability and BBC secretary to the central religious advisory committee who had the cheek to reply on their behalf refusing a rational Thought for the Day without bothering to ask the governors first.

p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk