Fear, Faith and Fanaticism in the Modern World Bristol, PGS Books. 2007. 320pp, paperback. ISBN 978-0-9556446-0-3 Available from all good bookshops from October 2007, cover price £12.99. 

It has taken me 25 years to complete this book, which started in the early 1980s as a series of ideas attempting to come to terms with my negative reaction to the religious indoctrination I was subjected to as a child. Over the years I worked on it intermittently, the subject matter becoming more and more relevant to contemporary issues as time went on. After 9/11 I revisited the subject once again, and in 2006 was able at last to re-work the text into a complete book.

The book addresses one of the most contentious issues for the religious believer in contemporary society. Even for the non-believer this is an issue that cannot be ignored. Throughout the history of the world there have been religious believers who feel compelled by their beliefs to try to change the world – some by peaceful means, others through fear and violence. But the most important distinction of all is rarely made even in the supposedly superior monotheistic religions of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (which includes, of course, Islam).

The God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent – in other words, He (or She!) has infinite capacities. Religious believers who fail to make the distinction between the reality of God and their conception of God are deceiving themselves that they are capable of conceiving the infinite in its entirety – unless, of course, they wish to claim they have a mind equal to that of God. Even for those who claim Divine Revelation, the infinity of God will always be beyond their comprehension, since God is supposed to be infinite, and our minds are not. If God exists, and has infinite properties, then we will never know everything there is to know about Him (or Her). But without this insight, it is all too easy for extreme, fanatical believers to convince themselves that what they feel driven to do in the Name of God is actually what God wants them to do. I passionately believe that the only way to prevent this dangerous self-deceit is to prohibit the religious indoctrination of children. Instead we should teach them that, if God exists, their conception of such a God will always be inadequate, and therefore caution in belief (and the conduct it inspires) is the only ethical way of approaching the issues.

In Is God a Terrorist? I construct an argument in support of the legal protection for the right of children to have freedom of belief. Adults have this right, but children do not – instead our supposedly enlightened society allows for them to be indoctrinated with all the attitudes, sentiments and prejudices of their parental culture. In a society in which teenage rebellion is almost compulsory, a child who believes that the only alternative to religious conformity is Hell has limited options. So resorting to intolerance, hostility, and even violence, whether in God’s Name or not, should surprise no one. But banning childhood indoctrination will not on its own be enough to banish religious intolerance, hostility, and violence, however, because the education our society provides for children is already tainted with hidden influences that promote one world-view over all others – especially in the teaching of academic subjects like science.

In reality, what we should offer children is guidance in developing their skills at making sense of competing claims to knowledge, truth, and moral righteousness, within the context of a set of cultural values and social ethics that will enable them to develop into mature, well-balanced adults. And this means acknowledging the challenge that faces every thinking, self-aware being: ‘How should I live my life?’ Given that evidence is lacking for many of our most cherished beliefs, the idea that personal faith (that is, belief and trust) should rest on insight into the limitations of the human condition can itself provide a universally acceptable basis for an ethics of belief.

Our failure as a society to rise to this challenge is made all too evident by identifying four moral aphorisms that summarise the conduct of much of personal and institutional life today:

1. ‘What’s in it for me (us)?’
2. ‘Ends justify means.’
3. ‘Right is whatever I (we) can get away with.’
4. ‘Everyone else is doing it – if I (we) don’t, they will.’

In the book I analyse the relevant features of Homeric society and comes up with four equivalents from three thousand years ago, that, allowing for differences in context and idiom, are not much different from those of today:

1. ‘I’m (we’re) the only one(s) who matter.’
2. ‘Honour requires sacrifice.’
3. ‘Might is right.’
4. ‘There is no dishonour in treating a dishonourable person dishonourably.’

These are values and ethics that are part of our genetic inheritance and/or cultural conditioning, and the religious extremist begins to adopt them, unselfconsciously, as the new justification for his or her conduct. The religious terrorist adopts them unequivocally – God is merely an excuse for a tendency to malignant hubris that resides deep in all of us but which finds expression in those individuals in whom the drive for dominance and personal justification is most strong, for whom civilised scruples are insufficiently powerful to inhibit the expression of their malignant hubris.

This propensity to adopt the cultural values and ethics of the archaic warrior-hero needs to be carefully managed if society is to be protected from its destructive effects. In a free and open society the obvious way is through radical cultural self-criticism, on a personal and institutional level, so that the capacity of human beings for deceiving themselves, and others, as to their motives and intentions, can be laid bare for all to see and learn from.

In exploring these issues I draw on my experience as an academic philosopher, and my work in mental health and in business and industry, as well as my own experience of religious indoctrination as a child. My experiences have prompted me to question the basis upon which any individual can lay claim to perfect knowledge of any moral or intellectual truths.

But this is not an anti-religious book, and neither does it advocate any form of moral relativism. Presented in an accessible style the author draws upon contemporary works by Karen Armstrong, Bruce Bawer, Donald Capps, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Mark Juergensmeyer, Alister McGrath, Oliver McTernan, and Alice Miller. I am especially critical of the caricature of religious belief presented by both Dawkins and Harris in their works, and their apparent lack of insight into their own intellectual conceits concerning the hegemony of scientific rationality.

The conclusion of this book is unequivocal: we should recognise that religious terrorism has its origins not in religion itself but in the human propensity for individual and group selfishness, and the failure of organised religions to manage this propensity in their more extreme adherents. In both religious and secular life the result is all too often disguised as the pursuit of some higher ideal, justified in terms of our own capacity to deceive ourselves that we, and/or our culture, deserve to prevail over all competition.

Whether God exists, and whether such a God is a terrorist, are issues that will never go away for the insightful believer – the sort of believer who is prepared to acknowledge that belief alone is insufficient grounds for maiming and killing others. With the increasing prevalence of religious terrorism in recent hears these are issues that the non-believer should also pay careful attention to. For unless all of us come to understand what motivates religious terrorists to kill and maim in the name of their god it is unlikely that, collectively, we will ever be in a position to undermine the threat such people pose to our society and culture.

What is undeniable is that those religious believers who kill and maim innocent victims in the name of their god are undoubtedly operating with a conception of a god that is indeed a terrorist – for they offer no other justification for their deeds.