“You never ask questions when God’s on your side”

When Bob Dylan penned these words in 1963, we were in the midst of the cold war, now forty years on we are told that we are engaged in another war, the “war on terror”. Bush and Blair have characterised “our” opponents as evil, a word heavy with religious connotation. They have both claimed guidance from the “almighty”, an unfortunate irony as so do “our” opponents, the suicide bombers and beheaders.

We all know the origins of 9/11; it is the US support of Israel. When the PLO instigated their terror campaign against Israel in the 1970’s, there we no references to “jihad” or even to Islam. They saw themselves as freedom fighters struggling against political oppression, just as the Israelis did in their earlier conflict with the British.

The Islamification of the conflict can be directly paralleled with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the USA. The unfortunate use of the word Crusade by George Bush at the beginning of the conflict reinforced the notion held by Moslems that they are under threat from Christian/Western domination.

Religion always puts faith at the top of the list for true believers and faith is incompatible with reason. Faith is impervious to the notion that all human acts should be subjected to rational scrutiny in order to assess their validity.

In the UK even the timid Anglicans are becoming emboldened by demonstrations of their co-religionists Islamic and Sikh muscle. The UK population has always had a healthy scepticism, particularly of politicians, our problem is that the creeping desecularisation of our society may proceed unnoticed and unchallenged; the spread of faith schools is just one example.

In the US the problem is far worse. A majority of the population profess to be Christian, for a politician to acknowledge their atheism it is tantamount to an admission of eating babies, so even those “social” Christian politicians are loath to oppose the religiously motivated policies for fear of being outed. There are signs of a modest intellectual backlash but what is really needed is a respected public figure to declare their atheism and kick start a debate. Previously held prejudices can sometimes be overturned, as attitudes towards blacks, women and gays demonstrate.

Dylan got it about right, though I doubt that even he could have foreseen where we are now, forty years on