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The urge to desecrate comes with religious belief.
I don’t do desecration. I have never defaced a Bible or a Qur’an and I have no desire to do so. I don’t want to see churches demolished or set on fire. The great desecrators are the religious. During the English Civil War a great many churches were desecrated and “idolatrous” images removed by mobs of shorthaired narrow-minded Puritan religious bigots. A fear and hatred of “popery”, religious intolerance fired up by their own extreme religiosity, motivated them. Today the greatest desecrators are Muslims, especially those active in Saudi Arabia who are actively destroying historical Muslim sites as well as those of other religions. In a way I can identify with this urge. I see that it makes perfect sense that if you take religion seriously and you believe that your god hates worshipping idols then you cannot help but imagine him having the screaming heebie-jeebies if he saw Lourdes, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Mecca or Medina. Surely any shrine is by its nature idolatrous, if the only thing worthy of worship is the only god then worship of places decked out in gold and jewels must be offensive to the jealous deity. In contrast if you don’t believe in magic, ghosts, spirits, gods and the supernatural then a jewel encrusted cave is no more offensive than a poodle with a diamond-studded collar or a pimped-out stately home: bad taste, not something you’d want to do yourself but in a way quite refreshing as it gives yourself something to feel superior to. The Taliban in Afghanistan were driven to monstrous barbarity in destroying giant statues. They cared enough to do that because of their religious faith making them zealous and responding to the presumed jealousy of their all-powerful yet also totally impotent god. It is religion that made them do it. Atheists don't do that. Secular governments, companies, universities and other institutions have maintained religious buildings for their cultural value and this has even happened under ruthless dogmatic Communist regimes. Even arch psycho-bastard-in-chief Stalin relented and spared St Basil's Cathedral. What could possibly be gained by destroying such a thing of beauty? Nothing. We don't need any more but let's keep the best of what we already have. It is deeply offensive to my sense of decency to see huge stone buildings covered with gold in the heart of cities where beggars live on the street and most people live crowded into hovels. But what is to be gained by destroying these religious follies? I can’t see any advantage. The important thing is to stop going to those buildings and bowing down to the nothing that they contain. Churches, temples and mosques should be transformed into museums, concert halls and libraries. There are probably too many churches around the world to put to practical use as museums, not enough money would be generated to maintain them in good repair so they should be sold off for conversion into shops, restaurants, houses, hotels, and apartment blocks. But there still might be too many, and so the only solution is likely to be sensitive demolition and selling off useful architectural scrap. Respect for other people’s sacred spaces and places is quite a normal human emotion. I really can’t ever see myself getting pleasure from desecrating a graveyard, church or mosque, knocking over a standing stone, using a bacon bookmark in the Qur’an or setting light to a grove sacred to Baal. It would be no more tempting than the urge to jeer a funeral cortege or tear up somebody’s wedding album. For all the religious people try to claim it atheists are not immoral monsters and when we pose as being amoral scallywags it is just a pose. Morality goes deep, some things are just not done. To really want to desecrate something you have to have a strong belief in something that you want to put in its place. I haven’t got that. I don’t want religion to have a place and I don’t want anything else to take the place of religion. Religion has no place in the world today. We don’t need it and we don’t need anything to take its place either. We can surely expand the rest of the human experience to the point that nobody is aware that there is anything missing. For twenty years I was an atheist without a religion or spirituality or even much of an interest in the subject. For the last nine years I have been involved in debate about atheism online, but that’s it, I haven’t done anything about religion, belief or non-belief at all in my life in the big blue room beyond reading a few books. I haven’t even argued with a Jehovah’s Witness or put a bumper sticker on my car. I think it is a very poor reflection on a supposedly all-powerful god that he cares so much about gods that apparently are not real. Why would an all-powerful god care about non-existent gods? Why would it rankle so much and yet leave him in an impotent rage such that he needs to get his believers to destroy the temples, statues and groves? If God can create the entire universe, flood the Earth, raise the dead, send chariots into heaven, create plagues of frogs, lay waste cities and turn curious anonymous wives into pillars of salt why is making the faces of false gods fall off statues beyond his powers? My explanation is very simple and straightforward, how tortured and involved is yours? |
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