The ideas that initiate warfare and cruelty have always been excuses, but they remain nevertheless potent enough to seduce the disaffected and the greedy, those whose sense of self is shaky enough to seek aggrandisement with the heady fix of allegiance, whose sense of satisfaction with the real world and its compromises is slight enough to fall victim to the seductive religious fantasy of an afterlife. Religion, when it is manipulated by unscrupulous people, becomes the most potent idea of all to inflame people to behave in the most appalling way.

Tribalism has invariably been a feature of our lives, since we were apes, if warring chimpanzee communities are any guide. Nationalism is the natural extension of tribalism, and people are all too willing to kill and to die for a flag, a monarch, a homeland.
However distorted notions of national identity may be, they tend to stick to territorial boundaries. Of course we in Ireland are painfully aware of the wound of a physical border. However, religion features strongly in the split on this island too. Indeed, the idea that monarch and god are separate is a relatively recent concept. Our conflict could be seen as one of the last imperial flare-ups from the last two millennia: the Roman Empire lives. Paisley and his loyalist forebears had a point, after all: Home Rule was Rome Rule. The Reformation was as much a religious schism as it was an old-fashioned territorial war.
As we have been reminded recently, the Vatican still wants to be regarded as a nation state, rather than a spiritual organisation. When the Murphy Commission’s requests to obtain information on the cover-up over the rape and abuse of children by priests were rebuffed and ignored, the reason given was telling. “Diplomatic” channels hadn’t been used. That’s not a complaint about which postal service was employed to deliver the letter. It is an outdated insistence that the Church is accorded all the trappings of the nation-state, to appear far more powerful than it is. The Vatican is, after all, a city state of only 800 people.
I’m reminded of the absurdity of a wonderful old Ealing comedy, Passport To Pimlico, in which an ancient and un-rescinded royal charter is uncovered in post-war blitzed London. The residents of Pimlico declare themselves independent of England, and set up border patrols and customs. It’s a cheerful, absurd romp.
If it were only possible to see the pretensions of the Holy See in a similar vein. It would be hysterically funny, if the Church was not responsible for such appalling immorality — from the cover-up of child abuse, to the powerful political lobbying against equality for gay people, worldwide.
One of the brightest bits of news in the decade came at the very end, when it was announced by the World Health Organization and the United Nations that the AIDS pandemic was in decline, that there has recently been a “steep fall” in the number of new HIV infections, 28 years after the pandemic started.
What we will never know is the number, counted in millions, of people in the world who died because they were not educated in time about the need to use condoms to protect themselves. The Catholic Church led the way in the fight against such campaigns - and still does, despite all the scientific evidence discrediting their stance.
We are not out of the woods yet — there is still a worrying trend in Ireland that points to complacency about HIV, and there has been a recent increase in exposure to the virus among men who have sex with men.
It is not fanciful to suggest that, had the Catholic Church taken a position on homosexuality and condom use that was enlightening and intelligent, as opposed to medieval, confusing and cruel, the general standard of discourse on safer sex might have been much less fraught, and far more effective. Too many younger gay men react to appeals to “play safe” with a knee-jerk defensiveness, hating the fact that the words sound so similar to hypocritical traditional Catholic teachings on homosexuality, that sex is wrong, that passion is sinful.
When such a powerful moral authority in this country demonstrates that it has lost its way completely regarding matters sexual, it wounds not only itself, but an entire generation which needs to be guided on emotional and sexual literacy. Such evidently insane dogma from Rome, combined with the blatant hypocrisy of its priests and bishops, muddies the waters, and ruins it for anyone else attempting to talk sense and “preach” about good sexual behaviour to young people. It makes the appeal of behaving “badly” even more attractive, imbued with a sort of nihilistic adolescent fervour.
There is a yawning gap opening up in our civil society: a need for leadership, a desire for guidance. It has always been present in human nature, and it’s a void that religions have always known how to take advantage of. The awful thing is that most religions, (with perhaps a few exceptions, like L. Ron Hubbard or Reverend Moon) were started by good, kind, thoughtful people. It is when they are dead and gone that the crimes begin to be committed in their name, when the desire to maintain authority and wield power corrupts the original message.
People who believe in a spiritual life, and commit small random acts of kindness in their daily lives because of their beliefs, are not the enemy here. Once a religion becomes established, one that supersedes good human values of common sense, rationality and kindness, and which encourages the exploitation of human vulnerabilities in order to elevate people to positions of power to defend its dogma, then it becomes an enemy to humanity.
It is time to let God die. Too much evil has been done in his name.