The One True Faith

We have been hearing in the news today about Gillian Gibbons, a middle-aged English woman living and working in the Sudan as a teacher, who has been arrested by the authorities for allowing her young charges to name a teddy bear Mohamed. This, according to Islam, is blasphemy.

For me this brings to mind all of the many objections that I have against religion, which when I boil them down amount to this. I believe that all religions are invented by men and are constantly altered by them, in order to suit the society around them, and that religions are nothing but an alternative seat of power; to the government, the monarch, or the tribal leader.

There are so many ways that you can legitimately and logically attack religions that it is hard to know where to begin, but the simplest thing to point out is that they are different to one another and this must make most of them wrong.

Consider some differences:
Christianity believes in one true god.
Islam believes that Jesus was not the son of god.
Hinduism believes in multiple deities.
Buddhism believes in re-incarnation.
And so on…

According to the last census, there are 135 different faiths in Great Britain (if we count Jedi). Most of these will be one of the major faiths, or a variation of them, others will be cults and sects, put together on the basis of somebody’s personal philosophies. Still others will be mumbo-jumbo, brought into being for the purpose of personal profit, or mischief.

Few of these belief systems seem to lack dedicated and ardent followers. In fact, some of these followers would be happy to blow you (and themselves) up if your behaviour does not accord with their own values. Values which, incidentally, the majority will have inherited as part of their cultural upbringing, as opposed to any personal journey to enlightment.

I would always defend the individual's right to believe in and worship whatever they want and discuss those beliefs openly, provided they do no harm to others in the process.

However, I don’t have to respect the things that people believe in and when I hear of another piece of lunacy transacted in the name of religion I always come back to the inescapable fact that of the 135 faiths currently practised in the UK, simple logic tells me that at least 134 of them must be wrong, inaccurate, misinformed, or misguided. Only one, or none at all, can be the one true faith.

And of those two bets you know where my money is.