Should one really not...Disparage religious doctrine.  The learned judges seem remarkably ill-informed.

Protestants, especially thinking Protestants, regard transubstantiation as the last word in the impertinence of the monks and the stupidity of the laity. They are unrestrained about this belief, which they call monstrous. They don't even think there can be a single man of intelligence who having thought about it can possibly take it seriously. It is, they say, so absurd, so contrary to all the laws of physics, so self-contradictory, that God himself could not have done it, because it is basically to annul God to suppose that he is contradictory. Not only a god in a loaf, but a god instead of a loaf, a hundred thousand crumbs becoming instantly as many gods, this huge throng of gods being only one god, purity without anything pure, form without anything formed. Wine changed into blood and still tasting of wine, flesh and muscle which taste of bread. All this inspires such horror and contempt in the enemies of the apostolic Roman church that an excess of horror and contempt sometimes becomes rage. Their horror increases when you tell them that you can see daily in Catholic countries priests and monks who fresh from a bed of incest without having washed their hands soiled with impurities make these hundreds of gods, eat and drink their god, shit and piss their god. But when they consider that this superstition a hundred times more absurd and blasphemous than any of those of the Egyptians is worth to an Italian priest 15 to 20 million in revenue and the domination of a country a hundred miles wide and long, they all want to take arms and kick out this priest who has taken over the Palace of the Caesars. I don't know if I'll go on the trip because I'm a peaceful sort, but when they're settled in Rome I'll certainly pay them a visit.
"By M. Guillaume, Protestant Minister"

Perhaps in French:
TRANSUBSTANTATION Les Protestants, et surtout les philosophes Protestans, regardent la Transubstantiation comme le dernier terme de l’impudence des moines, & de l’imbécillité des laïques. Ils ne gardent aucune mesure sur cette croyance qu’ils appellent monstrueuse ; ils ne pensent pas même qu’il y ait un seul homme de bon sens, qui, après y avoir réfléchi, ait pu l’embrasser sérieusement. Elle est, disent-ils, si absurde, si contraire à toutes les loix de la physique, si contradictoire, que Dieu même ne pourrait pas faire cette opération ; parce que c’est en effet anéantir Dieu que de supposer qu’il fait les contradictoires. Non-seulement un Dieu dans un pain ; mais un Dieu à la place du pain ; cent mille miettes de pain, devenues en un instant autant de Dieux ; cette foule innombrable de Dieux, ne faisant qu’un seul Dieu ; de la blancheur, sans un corps blanc, de la rondeur, sans un corps rond ; du vin, changé en sang, & qui a le goût du vin ; du pain, qui est changé en chair & en fibres, & qui a le goût du pain ; tout cela inspire tant d’horreur & de mépris aux ennemis de la religion catholique, apostolique & romaine, que cet excès d’horreur & de mépris, s’est quelquefois changé en fureur. Leur horreur augmente, quand on leur dit qu’on voit tous les jours dans les pays catholiques, des prêtres, des moines qui, sortant d’un lit incestueux, & n’ayant pas encor lavé leurs mains souillées d’impuretés, vont faire des Dieux par centaines ; mangent & boivent leur Dieu ; chient & pissent leur Dieu. Mais quand ils réfléchissent que cette superstition, cent fois plus absurde & plus sacrilège que toutes celles des Égyptiens, a valu à un prêtre italien quinze à vingt millions de rente, & la domination d’un pays de cent milles d’étendue en long & en large, ils voudraient tous aller, à main armée, chasser ce prêtre qui s’est emparé du palais des Césars. Je ne sais si je serai du voyage ; car j’aime la paix ; mais quand ils seront établis à Rome, j’irai sûrement leur rendre visite. (Par M. Guillaume, ministre protestant.)
Dictionnaire philosophique 1762

We are being fed a reduction of Christianity to fascism, the refusal to acknowledge the polarity in the thought of Christian nations between love and power,  the false identification of the enemies of the Church with the enemies of Jesus, the privileging of faith regardless of what that faith entails, contempt for unbelief, regardless of what that unbelief entails. Science and learning are as ever the enemies, for they take us beyond the arbitrary ceilings on thought of dogma to the world of physics and biology, to other readings of Jesus as a Kabbalist, a Sufi, Brahma, . If one does not live in the mental world of the 1st century AD (or indeed the 7th), if one does not submit to such a world, one is flawed and insensitive; if one does, one is blessed, a superior form of life. Just obey.

Paine also wrote: 'My own mind is my own church.'

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

British citizens have gone in the direction of Tom Paine. British politicians are headed off in the opposite direction, courting figures from religious establishments who by definition adhere to a dead orthodoxy, about which no-one besides fellow-dinosaurs gives a damn.

The precise crime of the philosophes was not atheism but thought, pitting one’s puny human reason against revelation, as deliciously expounded in this passage entitled The Master Plan of the Devil
 
For approximately seventeen centuries men acknowledged that authority comes only from God, and temporal rulers sought the approval and the blessing of their bishops who, by divine right, ruled in their dioceses as successors of the Apostles. Then came the Philosophists. As always, the Power of Darkness used pride to achieve his aims, the pride of human reason. As always he called the Light, Darkness and the Darkness, Light (Isaiah 5:20). That is why the Medieval times are now referred to as the "Dark Ages"; (in fact, the Dark Ages were pre-Medieval), and why Philosophism is referred to as "Enlightenment". ...When the first battle had been won, the Devil moved from the religious field into the philosophical field, and conceived Rationalism, which put human reason before Revelation.

In other words, in place of ‘I know that’ and ‘it is good that’ came, ‘you know nothing of the kind’ and ‘it’s a lot of twisted nonsense that’. Thus Voltaire in his article on atheism in the Dictionnaire philosophique:

Men fattened by our wealth shout, "Believe that an ass spoke, believe that a fish swallowed a man and spat him out good as new onto the shore three days later. Do not doubt that the God of the universe commanded a Jewish prophet to eat shit (Ezekiel) and another prophet to buy two sluts and make whores of them (these are the very words they make the God of truth and purity speak), believe a hundred things either evidently repulsive or mathematically impossible. If you don't, the God of mercy will burn you not just for hundreds of thousands of years but for the whole of eternity, whether you have a body or not.

These preposterous imbecilities repel equally the weak-minded and foolhardy and the strong and wise. They say: "Our masters depict God as the most deranged and barbaric of beings, therefore there is no God", but they ought to say, 'Our masters attribute to God their own absurdities and their own rage, therefore God is the opposite of what they say, as wise and good and they say he is mad and bad." Thus speak the wise. But if a fanatic overhears them, he denounces them to the magistrate who puts them to torture, believing he avenges and impersonates the divine majesty he outrages.

(My translation)   Full English text here et en français
 
Plus ça change...

During the French Revolution Notre-Dame de Paris was looted, vandalized and for a time turned into a ‘Temple to Reason’ with a statue of Lady Liberty on the altar.  Of course no-one has ever previously become a little cross with the Church.

Socialism and Religion (1905): Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
No-one in the world has ever kicked clerical ass before, never ever, I'm mad, a freak, trying it on. 

Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the "free" workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are "entitled" only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery. The economic oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders every kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses. The workers may secure a greater or lesser degree of political liberty to fight for their economic emancipation, but no amount of liberty will rid them of poverty, unemployment, and oppression until the power of capital is overthrown. Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man. But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth. Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become absolutely free associations of like-minded citizens, associations independent of the state. Only the complete fulfilment of these demands can put an end to the shameful and accursed past when the church lived in feudal dependence on the state, and Russian citizens lived in feudal dependence on the established church, when medieval, inquisitorial laws (to this day remaining in our criminal codes and on our statute-books) were in existence and were applied, persecuting men for their belief or disbelief, violating men’s consciences, and linking cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established church. Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church. The Russian revolution must put this demand into effect as a necessary component of political freedom. In this respect, the Russian revolution is in a particularly favourable position, since the revolting officialism of the police-ridden feudal autocracy has called forth discontent, unrest and indignation even among the clergy. However abject, however ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the "servants of God". We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private
affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the classconscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you. So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat. If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.[1] But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an "intellectual" question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various "Christians". But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development. Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife—in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in revolutionary struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the proletarian forces, which today manifests itself mainly in Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow conceive some more subtle forms. We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly, consistently and patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the scientific world-outlook—a preaching alien to any stirring up of secondary differences. The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.
Notes [1] See Frederick Engels, "Flüchtlings-Literatur", Volksstaat, Nr, 73 vom 22.6.1874.

Marxist texts are now illegal?  

We are being taken into Never-Never-Land where the most basic facts of political and intellectual history are ignored as though they never were: 'defamation' and derision of religion have been standard form for some 300 years from the Enlightenment through to Marx, Darwin and the counter-culture, and are the root of the free world. ‘They eat and drink, shit and piss their god,’ observed Voltaire (‘chient et pissent leur Dieu’, Dictionnaire philosophique: Transubstantiation, 1769) ‘Spiritual booze‘, ‘mediaeval mildew‘, opined Lenin (Socialism and Religion, 1905). People have not hesitated to say what they think, not what others have instructed them it is permissible to think and so established the foundations of the modern world, of science, of medicine, and of gender equality.
 
The hostility the Enlightenment evokes in certain orthodox religious is due to their loss of power. Instead of the self-appointed representatives of God set on high above us all to dictate what we may think, what we may do, how we may be, we became equal in rights. Power was transferred to the governed who gave power to the governing, who are equals, fellow, fallible human beings  accountable for how they exercise the power given them and can be dislodged and dismissed if they abuse it.

I own me. Who else can? Slavery has been abolished. I decide what I read. I decide what I think about it. I decide what I say or write, as I decide what I wear and with whom I shall make love.


The notion it is given people are in some sense property, tools of a greater purpose, whether God’s will or the demand of the State (in both cases of course what equally fallible fellow-humans have decided is God's will or the demand of the State) appears to be  gospel for something like 95% of the current 'Left'. Soviet Marxism adopted it lock, stock and barrel. To insist on being oneself not a creature of the will of others, thinking only what one’s masters permit, is evil/insanity. The wannabe overlord has a stock vocabulary - wilful, insolent, impudent, rebellious all terms which simply mean resistant to the wilful, insolent and impudent, if not rebellious, attempting to impose its will not only on other people but on reality itself, to define the mental world of all who surround it, to create a false reality and call it Truth.
 
You may wish to have a purpose to your existence, but it is not for others to say what you are for.  Once people are designated a purpose , if they fail to be fit-for-use they are expendable. Thus the Gulag Archipelago.

It is possible theoretically we are in some sense the property of God, but that does not make us the property of God's self-appointed representatives. This is a Protestant country; we sort ourselves out with God, should He, She or It exist.
 
The concept of God is not in itself a problem to anyone. We can argue until the end of the universe about whether God created quarks and it makes no difference to the even tenor of our lives.  The problem is those who insist the universe and its inhabitants are as described many centuries past by people who could not be talking out of the back of their heads because God spoke through them and so cannot be criticized, derided or indeed corrected.
 
The earth is not flat.  Most of us, whether theist or atheist, have moved on. 
 
There are many ‘abominations’ noted in Leviticus - God is not keen  on crustaceans, coneys or many other elements of his supposed creation. God Hates Shrimp is entertaining on this subject.  Clearly rabbit-pie is taboo and indeed swan.  Should someone tell the Queen, who is after all the head of the Church of England? To pick on just one ‘abomination’ and ignore the rest suggests a certain mental strangeness - what happened to ‘scriptural authority’? -
but it was only with the movements to ordain women that the full extent of the strangeness became apparent.  Clerical homophobia is more than some sexually confused old chaps clinging to Scripture to justify their confusion.  It seems sex and gender have cosmic significance., that the cosmos is rocked to its foundations by a female person representing Jesus.  How the sexual arrangements of an ape-descendant on the third rock from the sun comes to define the multiverse is not explained.
 
The stories a society tells itself are a mirror of how it sees itself and this society's block-buster record-breaker stories are not of 'up there' or 'down there' or even 20000 leagues under the sea, and only sometimes of 'over there', lost kingdoms where the hand of man has never set foot, Indiana Jones, for instance; overwhelmingly they are of of 'out there', Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Avatar, Matrix, 2001: a space odyssey, Independence Day, Dr Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the unforgettable Lost in Space.  ET is the highest grossing movie of all time. It supplanted Star Wars, the previous title holder.
 
The ultimate in how puny and insignificant are humans is not persons in church telling God how worthless they are in his sight, is not even having your planet demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, it’s the invisibly small dot constituting Earth on a map of the multiverse and multiverse theory while still theory is real not just Pratchett.
Rethinking the universe: Groundbreaking theory proposed in 1997 suggests a 'multiverse'
New physics complications lend support to multiverse hypothesis
 
This of course poses questions to clerics they may prefer not to answer, as indeed does the universe alone. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it?  What exactly do you mean by world?  Do you think that, if other worlds host sentient life, Jesus appeared there too? Is God just the God of this universe?  Are there equal Gods of other universes?
 
The image below is both the oldest and the youngest picture every taken.  It is the oldest because it has taken the light nearly 14 billion years to reach us. And it is the youngest because it is a snapshot of our newborn universe, long before the first stars and galaxies formed. The bright patterns show clumps of simple matter that will eventually form stars and galaxies. This is as far as we can see into the universe. It is time, not space, which limits our view. Beyond a certain distance, light hasn't had time to reach us yet.
How Big is our Universe
 
To take a trip through the visible universe and there are many excellent ones on the Web is (perhaps) to see the mind of God.  We don’t know.  We haven’t a clue. We make up our own minds.  
 
Until key religious figures come to terms with the the cosmos, with astrophysics, with quantum theory, until the language of multiverse theory is as familiar to them as New Testament Greek, they are not so to speak on the same planet as the rest of us.
 
The position apparently held almost universally across the so-called Left that one human being must curtail or deny the independent action of his or her heart and mind to accord with the beliefs of another human being on the grounds that the second person believes he expresses the Will of God cannot be sustained; to certain comrades slavery is fine, so long as no-one profits from it, ironic given that one of the few areas in which the record of the Left is unblemished is the fight against physical slavery and human trafficking. 
 
The reality of one’s fellow beings is that they are distinct, independent, starting from somewhere else.  They have their own thoughts and feelings, their own histories, their own lives.  They are not you.  They are not an extension of you.  They are not within your domain.  They are equal in rights.

We are no longer isolated hunter-gatherers in the year dot where any idea unfamiliar or distasteful to the devout is cause for apocalypse. This is England in the C21st. Millions of ideas circulate, not least those which have historically ended or curtailed the political power of religion and every version of every religion from the most blood and thunder to the most mystic.. No-one is going to like all of them.  No-one can like all of them.  People who strongly adhere to one view think people who strongly adhere to its opposite are talking nonsense and pernicious nonsense at that. We all have an equal right to speak. We all have to co-exist. We all have to accept we may come across that we find distasteful. Most of us do.

We are however in the position where the most primitive, psychopathic and sexually diseased of those who do not are a power in the land.  This is entirely due to political evil and the evil cheerfully struts its stuff in the corridors of power, lines its pockets and thinks them frightfully good chaps, believe in order and authority, no need for any of that silly argument or reason, just hit people.  People have to be told what is permitted us.  We continue to fail to live in the mental world of a C9th peasant and preferring watching Prof Cox to going to church (6 million people watched the first episode of Wonders of the Universe).  What this essentially communicates is we are governed by the insane, those totally divorced from the reality of the country they're supposed to be governing.    Or of course merely very well paid.

The political power of the Vatican in England was finally - I trust - ended in 1688 by the Glorious Revolution.  

The Vatican is not the sole custodian of western civilization.  Such civilization as the West possesses comes from Athens and Nazareth, love and mind.  There have been for many centuries and still are many people who doubt the Vatican Jesus’ true representative. Five centuries before the birth of Jesus, if indeed he was historically real, was Classical Athens, flawed of course, but representing the questioning mind, the birth of philosophy, art, literature, mathematics, the beginnings of science, the kernel of democracy.  

Greece in all her aspects is threatening to the men of the Abrahamic faiths who attempt to dominate the political sphere.  Real Greek women certainly led constrained lives but the goddesses did not and represented remarkable potential role-models.  Given that it took most of 2000 years for Christendom to fully accept female possibility (mostly), it is probably not too much to suggest that, had the early Church run off with Athens instead of remaining tied to the Old Testament, a combination of remorseless Greek reason, role-models and insistence on loving one’s neighbour as oneself could have breached that particular citadel somewhat sooner.   

Mediaeval Islamic scholars discovered Greece nearly a thousand years ago.  I think it may be possible to say that the essential difference between the West and the Muslim world is that the West found it impossible to lose Greece and Islam didn't.   

...For if it is difficult or rather impossible for one person to acquaint himself single-handed with all things which it is necessary to know in legal matters, it is still more difficult in the case of philosophical reasoning. And, if before us, somebody has enquired into it, we should derive help from what he has said. It is quite immaterial whether that man is our co-religionist or not; for the instrument by which purification is perfected is not made uncertain in its usefulness by its being in the hands of one of our own party, or of a foreigner, if it possesses the attributes of truth. By these latter we mean those Ancients who investigated these things before the advent of Islam. Now, such is the case. All that is wanted in an enquiry into philosophical reasoning has already been perfectly examined by the Ancients. All that is required of us is that we should go back to their books and see what they have said in this connection. If all that they say be true, we should accept it and if there be something wrong, we should be warned by it. Thus, when we have finished this kind of research we shall have acquired instruments by which we can observe the universe, and consider its general character. For so long as one does not know its general character one cannot know the created, and so long as he does not know the created, he cannot know its nature On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), 1126-1198 CE:  

Islam, like Christianity, is multi-faceted. A quick Google of Islamic art, a visit to the Sufi Cookbook or reading the Sufi poets paints a markedly different picture to that we are being force-fed,.  Islam did not become a world-power by just being a bunch of hectic little men waving swords around   Consequent upon the enthusiastic propagation of frank lies concerning the intellectual and political history of the West, the notion has been left free to flourish that criticism and derision of Islam ‘must be’ racism, that people feel to criticize and deride Islam only because many of its adherents are brown and would not dare similarly criticize and deride Christianity, when reality is rather that, after centuries of being kicked into line, orthodox Christianity is on the whole less ghastly and so less inviting of derision than orthodox Islam, though if you are a gay Catholic or a Greek Orthodox woman who wants to be a priest, you may disagree.  

Of those for whom the earth is flat, a proportion are fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic, perspectives on which this society has turned its back - apparently not if someone’s God dictates otherwise.  Of course people can be fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic without a religious bone in their bodies, but - equally of course - such people are roundly condemned.  We live in interesting times.  

Crushed between Greece and Jesus the Old Testament fought valiantly to survive and lost.  It is sometimes said that the reason the West dislikes Islam is that it's foreign - you know, like Buddha and the Maharishi and for that matter Rumi.  The truth is rather that that good ole time hellfire religion is all too familiar.  The OT has been decisively rejected, not least of course by Jesus: stoning women is not some uniquely Islamic barbarism.  Deuteronomy 22:21 is explicit on the subject..  For certain the only reason Christian zealots have not stoned adulteresses is John 8:1-11  

More broadly, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’ has constrained the rabid in circumstances other than the literal. 

It may reasonably be said of the C21st that we don’t want to know, we don’t want to know about the Vatican’s sexual phobias, we don’t want to know about Allah’s wrath, we don’t want to know about a Jewish creation myth.  We are being put in a position where we are supposed not only to want to know but to treat such drivel with deference.  It should not be necessary to place statues of Liberty on the altars of Westminster Abbey to terminate this.


ESSENTIAL PANTHER
 
JOCASTA: This is a slave's lot thou describest, to refrain from uttering what one thinks.
Euripides – The Phoenician Women
 
All adult human beings are intellectually, emotionally and sexually autonomous. My mind and my body are my property. Keep your mitts off them and we'll get alone fine.
 
We are humans not baboons. We have hearts and minds and our business is to exercise them.

The world does not stop because one human has provided his take on it, whether that human is Mohammed, Gautama, Lao-Tze, Jesus, Moses, Paul, Newton, Crick, Einstein, Marx, or a completely unknown sociology student in Luton. Out of this surfeit of information, people choose what they think. Necessarily therefore people have conflicting views. If you wish to believe the entire world is contained in one book, with which the content of all other books must broadly accord or be forbidden, as do some Muslims, Christians and of course Marxists, that's your affair. You are also clinically insane. That's your affair too. Just kindly keep your madness away from the rest of us.

Religion is a multi-faceted affair. Organized religion is the suppression of a multi-faceted, intricate reality. Organized and political religion is largely the official representatives of those who believe the universe is as defined by a guy or guys a large number of years ago because 'God' told them that was how the universe is. If you do not believe the guys who described the universe and its inhabitants a couple of thousand years ago could not have been wrong and those who believe their version of the universe may not be criticized, corrected or derided., if you do not believe the earth is flat, you are not a 'real' Jew/Christian/Muslim/Hindu/Sikh etc. 
 
Flat-earthism has very obvious basic tenets:

There is an alpha baboon in the sky whose majesty and whose self-appointed representatives must be spoken of with awe and respect Like his human slaves, he requires people on their knees to him saying how wonderful he is, and if they do not said slaves shall imprison, torture and murder them.
Creationism
Women and gays belong to different and inferior species (sually this is held true of those of other races also)
Literal heaven and hell
Frank affirmation of human self-centredness, the assumption the rest of the world revolves around them and is subordinate to them, the unquestioned belief that 'I' is the centre of the universe and they can demand others comply with them, the unquestioned enshrining of pure ego as divine will
Thinking, autonomy, independent judgement of mind and heart. are evil, for the rather obvious actual reason that anyone who thinks regards the  mouthings of the acolytes as ravings and the given reason, which a child of six can see through, or at any rate a child of six not drugged from birth, that it is the evil of self-will, of thinking one knows better than 'God', or in other words them.


That which is not demonstrable is not binding. It is critical to today's intellectual corruption that realities that exist only in people's heads, whether their strange notions of the universe or  their convictions of their own probity or intelligence in the face of the evidence, must be treated as sacrosanct, regarded with awe and 'respect’, considered superior to the findings of fact and reason


If there is anything history teaches, it is the capacity of human beings to proclaim nonsense as immutable fact.  Unless forced by liberty to eyeball reality, some humans successfully see no further than the insides of their skulls, looking at the world and the people in it and see what they think is there, what they want to be there, what they have been taught is there. This is not merely a question of lack of education or intelligence. Confident assertion of the nature and abilities of women kept us out of the universities until uncomfortably recently.  Learned gentlemen, writing their papers on Plato in perfect Attic Greek even as they spluttered, were not in any usual sense of the word stupid yet they refused to let us in, even as an experiment to see how we should do.
 
Inventions of the world may be formalized into doctrines such as Christianity or Islam or of course Marxism. Such doctrines are mental cages leaving out some bits of life, inventing others, to produce an all-encompassing explanation of the world.  Arbitrary ceilings are placed on thought, there is that which you ‘can’t’ doubt, that which is regarded as fact, whether that Mohammed is the Messenger of God or that all history is the history of the class struggle


Every -ism is undermined by and eventually crashes on reality, the reality of the physical universe, the reality of individual humans in all their variety, insistent on being what they are not what they're told to be, the reality of the existence of a multiplicity of other ways of looking at the world. This is what happened to Christianity. This is what happened to Marxism.  This is of course what Islamists wish at all cost to avoid happening to Islam.
 
The key to totalitarianism is the supposed helplessness of individual human beings. There is nothing inside. Either they are helpless without the assistance of whatever version of the divine multi-vitamin in the sky happens to be current or they are individually helpless and only collectively capable, whether as the proletariat or as the Volk. On no account must any individual think he or she is significant or empowered.

Love demands acceptance of the right to be of the most fractured, abject, incomplete, fearful, ludicrous, deluded,, irrational and repulsive of human beings, detachment from their folly. It does not demand submission to it.

‘In a time of the breaking of nations’ all that is fractured, abject, incomplete, fearful, ludicrous, deluded, irrational, repulsive in human beings is to be venerated because of the meme of ‘the sanctity of religion’, in no small part due to the occupancy for ten years of Downing Street by Blair and Booth and governance by their hangers-on.


Lenin and Jesus were both highly intelligent men.  If we imagine that in the after-life Lenin taught Jesus the necessity of reason and Jesus taught Lenin the necessity of love, the resulting synthesis would be broadly PANTHER, with input from Socrates, Artemis, Athena, Gautama, Rumi and Lao-Tze  What PANTHER is not is that seedy neo-fascist monstrosity 'Christian socialism' so beloved of sections of the Labour Party.


The old Marxism has failed.  We must move on.  The total screaming cock-up Marxism has made of putting itself into practice does not invalidate its critiques of both religion and capital.

Liberty is a function of love.  Control is a function of self-will.  You are not self-forgetting by definition if you are forcing others to obey you. Grace is paramountly not forcing oneself on others other than to restrain them from forcing themselves on others. To love one's neighbour as oneself is not to inflict beliefs he or she finds questionable on him or her.
 
It is not necessary to believe in the Christian or any other revelation to have a go at loving one’s neighbour as one’s self, and indeed critical to any civilized society that people be required to make some minimal attempt to do so, which is to say that they do not bash each other's heads in and overcome any conviction they might have that others must do and be what they are told to do and be, others are their property to be murdered or maimed as they desire, a conviction shared between the Ayatollah Khomeini and Fred West.


Democracy is a negative value-judgement on power. Power is suspect. Power must be made accountable, subject to checks and balances. We the people are not done to, the passive recipients of what our masters dole out: we control what is done to us, because we the people are the sole source of power in a democracy. We give them power to do what we want. They have no power over us to ‘transform’ us into anything we do not want to be, they are not set on high to dictate to us, mould us, impose a society based on lies. The behaviour of all public officials must therefore be transparent; we cannot determine if they are doing what we want unless we know what they are doing.

The Left is atheist and feminist or it is not the Left.  The nonsensical alliance between the worst of Islam and the worst of the Left should be abruptly terminated by the sheer derision it should invoke.

The political power of the Roman Catholic Church in England was ended in 1688. We do not wish it back. Nor do we wish an Islamic theocracy instead.

The fascist religious claim ‘the individual is God’ in modern secular society. Their god is incapable of error. The individual makes no such claim. Their god claims to rule the world. The individual claims dominion over only his or her mind and body. It is they who pretend to divinity claiming dominion over all in the name of their hallucination and self-will.

The fascist religious decry moral relativism in secular society but the relativism is theirs: The Good is whatever they say is good. This may observably be what the sane think The Bad.

The essence of the Enlightenment was a transfer of power from being arbitrary and unchallengeable, the carrying out of the supposed Word of God, to being accountable and in the hands of fellow fallible human beings who are required to justify their actions and can be dislodged from office. Instead of the governed having to justify themselves to the self-appointed representatives of an imaginary master in the sky, it became the governing who had to justify themselves to the governed.

We are being taken into Never-Never-Land where the most basic facts of political and intellectual history are ignored as though they never were: 'defamation' and derision of religion have been standard form for some 300 years and are the root of the free world.

Legislation criminalizing such 'defamation' and derision strikes at the heart of the West and forces us back to the C17th, fact and reason subordinate to mad fables. Such legislation also leaves Britain defenceless against Saudi and Vatican interference.

Only in the Sixties when it seemed the back of political religion was finally broken did women and gays finally fly.

Heterosexual males are a minority, about 40% of the population, and are neither divinely nor historically appointed to rule.

Essential to Marxism is the development of consciousness. The average Marxist knows diddly-squat about consciousness, which is probably the primary reason the revolution hasn't happened and isn't going to happen and attempts to make it happen have ended in tears.

Socialism has proved a lethal disease. Much of the Left is in denial about this. PANTHER is not in denial.

The State is not abolished. It withers away.
 
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out.
Engels: Socialism Utopian and Scientific
That is the theory.
 
1. The State cannot wither anywhere unless and until a majority of citizens are self-determining adults not dependent children
2. It is frightfully unnecessary and unkind to massacre tens of millions of people in order to fail to bring about the withered State and infinitely more constructive to start from a non-statist perspective.
 
It is not possible to have a new way of doing things when people have the mind-set of the old one. It is a logical impossibility that the State shrink while people are taught to regard it as mother, father, sister, brother, the source of all sustenance. This is not a new way of doing things but simply the substitution of the State for God the divine multi-vitamin in the sky, the external source of one's being and doing
 
While undoubtedly sundry of its adherents treat Marxism as a religion - undoubtedly there are as many flat-earth Marxists as there are flat-earth Muslims, those to whom the Book has been given unto the world, and deviation from its teachings heresy - it is not a religion but a humanist, rationalist view of the world, or in other words Marx, Lenin and Engels could on occasion have been talking out of their rears.
 
As with any world-view, Marxist-Leninism is rooted in its time and place and it is as ridiculous to claim that every proposition arising from consideration of Europe in 1840 is true for all time as it is to claim that every proposition arising from consideration of Arabia in 600 is true for all time.
 
Many of the things people consider as necessities didn’t exist at the time of the Communist Manifesto, however rich you or your business were.  The humble paperclip didn’t appear until 1899; the ballpoint pen was born in 1938  It is necessary to differentiate between false needs such as designer-label fetishes, and actual needs, that which is required to function, unless one has chosen to be like Diogenes in his barrel, or possibly living off the land in a tent. Broadly the paradigm was the well-off had nice clothes, houses and food and no need to work and the rest had nasty clothes, houses and food and a need to work; thus one might speak of ‘middle-class dress’ or ‘a working-class home’.  I do not think one can speak so readily of ‘a working-class mobile’ or ‘a middle-class hoover’. The range of products generated by capitalism meet real individual need.   I for instance am mobility impaired in a three-floor house.  No matter how big and beautiful the vacuum given me by the Central Praesidium, it would be largely useless to me because I couldn’t lift it.

....
A MIND OF ONE’S OWN
 
The root of the free world is that individuals have minds of their own and the right to use them, that we are not empty vessels with nothing within to be filled with whatever our overlords regard as Truth.
 
Biology came along and denied the existence of mind, the more ridiculous elements calling mind a Christian superstition.  How that which intellectually attacked the Church culminating in the French Revolution, how that which demolishes all fascism, religious or not, comes to be superstition is not explained, but then biologists are rarely educated people.
 
Mind sits anterior to data. Mind sits anterior to data, questioning, synthesizing, comparing, creating and of course checking on the reality quotient.  The upper level of mentation, the capacity to select, order, analyse, question  and synthesize information and that faculty called imagination which breaks down what is into its constituent parts and remakes it as something new in the world,  is denied, such that people do and are deemed to exist in mental cages, the bars of which may be as flimsy as tissue-paper when subject to fact and reason, but which the caged regard as fixed, immutable truth.  The slaves function intellectually, so far as they can be said to function intellectually at all, only within a given frame of reference. They are incapable of handling questioning of the frame of reference. 
 
Mind is evident in the world.  Religious freaks call it the work of the devil and Stalinist freaks call it insanity. 
 
Historically, equally evident, the consequence of its denial is the stake and the gulag.
 
If mind does not exist, democracy is unnecessary.  You cannot choose if you have nothing to choose with, if you are a merely an empty vessel filled with external influences and biochemistry.
 
We have today an unholy alliance between Stalinists who deny the existence of mind and religious fascists who regard its exercise as evil.  Freedom of conscience does not exist in their world, either because there is no conscience to be free or because the workings of that conscience are the spawn of Satan.  People’s evil and satanic views are simply what they have been filled with and they must be reprogrammed with Truth.  People are of course in this world simply property, whether that of the State or that of God, to think and do and be and say only what their masters permit. 
 
The world's ideologies divide into cultures of the outside and cultures of the inside. A culture of the outside holds that the individual is moulded by the external world and so is both victim and slave - to environment, to fellow-humans, to self - is a hollow gourd or empty shell to be filled with the Beloved Leader's version of reality. Where no determined State attempts at brain-washing occur, the hollow gourd is merely a passive recipient of fate, a creature of instinct, to whom responsibility is meaningless. A culture of the inside holds that the individual has a central processing unit (CPU) otherwise known as mind that analyses the external world and forms himself or herself and so his or her own views from the results of this analysis, is capable of choice. Where there is no CPU, nothing inside to form oneself with, the opinions and reactions of others are defining and must therefore be controlled or censored. This underpins Orwell's 'Freedom is Slavery' and Marcuse's 'repressive tolerance'. You have no means of handling words that displease you. They therefore oppress you.
 
As a result of this, a line has been breached with potentially devastating consequences, merely the complete destruction of the free world.   Words are regarded as the same as deeds.  To hear words one does not like is regarded as the equivalent of a physical blow, to be responded to by a physical blow or by the force of corrupt law.   To be frankly feral is now acceptable and in some quarters held as the norm, to be self-obsessed, self-centred to the point of psychosis, consider that the rest of the species revolves around one and one's delusional beliefs, to have no concept of the equality and separateness of others, to regard them as under one's control to be silenced if they offend, to be incapable of either self-control (containing one's feelings) or self-command (changing one's feelings), and so being impotent, incapable of changing the inner world and hitting out at the external source of one’s pain. to have as one's true god only power, wherein reality is whatever those with power say it is, The Good is whatever those with power say it is, questioning, argument alien and condemned, in short fascism.
 
In the unlovely symbiosis of fascism, the reward for surrender of autonomy, for accepting the mind-set of another, is supposed rights over others, whether the right to punish the more difficult or rights over some sub-section of the species such as the female.
 
Since nothing can be the responsibility of those with nothing within, they are the simply the product of socio-economic forces, it may be held wrong to deride, criticize, censure, abuse them if they behave like pieces of vomit. 
 
Lenin had this to say:
 
We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to "wither away". We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away.
 
VI Lenin: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State
 
The words ‘sweetly naive’ are not readily associated with Vladimir Ilyich but there is here a statement of the natural goodness of humanity which has set and does set elements on the Left apart from the rest of society when considering violations of the rules of the social intercourse.
 
The problem with ‘bourgeois liberty’ is that its exercise may include telling the innately good they are behaving like and possibly are turd, imposing ‘bourgeois morality’ upon them.  How the workers come to be a separate species who like having their property stolen, their daughters raped, their housing-estates vandalized and covered in graffiti is not explained, though of course in this model the workers have no property.  The chief victims of violations of the those norms of social intercourse by members of the working-class are other members of the working-class and the problem in inner-cities is not bourgeois liberty but its absence.  At what point working-class adults became frightened of their young, too frightened to intervene and make clear which end is up, is a question for historians. It is hard to imagine old-style trade union leaders such as Joe Gormley being scared of kids.
  
Similarly, what some see as intellectual corruption and social engineering is not understood as wrong – it’s only the socio-economic circumstances into which you were born that prevented you excelling academically, everyone is just as bright as everyone else, and having failed five CSEs in no way indicates that you are not just as good as someone who achieved an Honours degree.
 
A world without ‘bourgeois’ morality and ‘bourgeois’ liberty upholding the right to criticize the mad, bad and sad, is not wonderful, it is a sewer such as Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, governed by the psychotic, the cowardly, the thuggish, the criminal
 
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
Marx and Engels:  The Manifesto of the Communist Party
 
Naturally there is an element of truth in this or it wouldn’t have caught on - a starving man hanged for stealing a loaf of bread, while the rich and propertied get away with anything. 
 
Reality is not a bourgeois prejudice.  Reality is the person next to you has an equal right to his or her views. Certainly your views may be more significant than his or hers but your position as say Newtonian Emeritus Professor of Physics does not give you ownership of the mind of someone convinced the earth is flat.
 
‘Bourgeois’ democracy does not favour the bourgeoisie.  On the contrary, it says those with some formal status are wholly accountable.  It says the people underneath have the right to say exactly what they think.  It says the people with power can have that power summarily removed from them.  It says people do not have to be afraid of power.  By making power accountable it makes power vulnerable.  There are no overlords beyond question.
 
It is understandable that looking at the world in 1850 Marx and Engels concluded democracy was a bourgeois plot; Engels said as much in 1877:
The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognised no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions — everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism; everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head; first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on nature and the inalienable rights of man.
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, [21] came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.
Engels: Anti-Duhring, Introduction
 
They were, however, wrong.  The tragedy of Marxism is that true democracy is the most revolutionary concept going and by eliminating it supposed Marxists merely re-created an essentially feudal society.
 
The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.
Marx: The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, 1847
 
‘The social principles of Christianity’ are thus those needed to survive under Stalin.
 
We are all born squawly little hairless chimps.  We are also all born with a mind and a capacity for love.  We are all born with the capacity to over-ride the hard-wiring. 
 
Equal rights derive from our common humanity. I walk down the street unimpeded. You walk down the street unimpeded. I wear what I like. You wear what you like. I say what I like. You say what you like. Human history is a footnote to difficulty with these simple notions.           
 
For some the order of the day is I shall say what I want to say, what I think, what I feel. You will say only what I permit you, what does not offend me, or worse, cause me to think or question. You will speak and write within my frame of reference and in terms acceptable to me. My discomfiture – my self – is of greater importance than another's right to speak. ‘I’ is the centre of the universe, the measure of all things. If ‘I’ finds something offensive, it may not exist. If you think the Bible is a sacred text, I must express myself in terms you consider suitable to discussing a sacred text. Why on earth should I? is a question ill-understood by the hierarchical mind. Why might you not express yourself in the frame of reference set by me? The Thought-Policeman’s ego, the vapid assumption of superiority, the right to tell others how to be, the ‘psychology of the individual’ as Jeeves would have put it, are too little debated, on the grounds they constitute personal attack and that is not intellectually valid. Argument ad hominem attacks the person in order to discredit what he says: if he is shown to have lied in the past, that is supposed to discredit his word on this occasion. It is distinct from attacking the person because what he says shows he is a creep, and an irrational creep at that .
 
Liberty is a human concept and most of our problems with it stem from the primate elements in the brain. The most elementary of these evolutionary hang-ups is the primate pecking order. A larger more powerful ape beats his chest and otherwise suggests his displeasure and the unconscious thinker toes the line. Only might is right. The mental development of individual humans starts where physical evolution ends. Obsession with form, external appearance, is another evolutionary hang-up. As a chimp recoils at the shape of a snake, so racists and sexists respond to colour or gender. Elements on the Left are equally hypnotised by biology. Where individual characteristics such as honesty, integrity, intellect, application - qualities of mind - have been abandoned as 'elitist' or  'relative values', all that remains is the nonsense that the most insignificant of human attributes, gender and race, are defining.
 
Mind is supposed not to exist and recourse to fact and reason is rejected as elitist. The West is therefore supposed to lie defenceless in what is essentially a mind-game: the trick is persuade (by force or otherwise) the majority of people to a mind-set from which mind, fact and reason are absent. In particular they should not allude to the facts of democracy and civil liberties; since mind does not exist, the ability to make up one’s mind cannot exist, let alone the right to do so and, Homo sapiens sapiens being in its raw state a self-centred little beast, cf. any toddler, people cannot be expected to consider another’s point of view and so accept another’s equal right to speak.
 
As Roosevelt said, there is nothing to fear but fear itself.  In too many influential quarters today, having a mind of one’s own is regarded as suspect and probably evil, making people frightened to speak, whether in the political sphere, or against simple violations of the rules of social intercourse witnessed in the streets. 
 
 
RELIGION
 
5. But mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves are), and that they wear man's clothing and have human voice and body. [Zeller, 524, n. 2. Cf Arist. Rhet. ii. 23; 1399 b 6.]
6. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own-horses like horses, cattle like cattle. [Zeller, 525, n. 2. Diog Laer. iii. 16; Cic. de nat. Deor. i. 27.]
Xenophanes c C570-475 BC
The following are evident:
Religion is a potent force for evil
Religion is a potent force for good
Christians argued vigorously for and killed in defence of
slavery and the slave trade
Christians argued vigorously for killed to achieve the abolition of slavery and the slave trade
Christians upheld the  obscenities of the Industrial Revolution (and so killed by hunger and disease)
Christians fought for humane working conditions and decent  wages
Christians built, bolstered and killed for apartheid
Christians worked to tear down apartheid.
Christians supported Hitler.
Some  particularly heroic Christians, including priests, pastors and nuns, actively opposed Hitler.
The majority of good respectable Christians ‘walked by on  the other side’ throughout the whole of Occupied Europe while their  fellow-citizens  (Jewish, gay, gipsy subdivisions thereof) were rounded up and  taken off  to the camps.
Conventional religion teaches mindless obedience and mindless obedience is not a virtue; fear is not a virtue.
Conventionally  religious people are thus prone to have fur between the ears. They will believe  something as intellectually ridiculous as ‘a group of Jews  wanted the death of  Jesus therefore all Jews are responsible for the  death of Jesus’.
Vicious  people have a vicious god, the god of fear. Nice people have a nice god, the god of love.

Both Bible and Qur’an contain flatly contradictory statements,  particularly  on the matter of smiting one’s enemies and putting them to fire  and the  sword. It is impossible, therefore, for anyone to believe every word of either literally. Claim to mindless obedience is therefore fake. Religion does not make people evil. It does not make them good. It  does, however, as routinely justify and motivate evil as it does good. Humans make god in their own image and likeness and religious people cover the same gamut  of human behaviour as  non-religious people.

To say ‘religion’ must be protected is therefore to say that people who may be intellectually and morally on the level of the average concentration-camp guard merit legal protection. It is  also  to say that particular kinds of irrationality and general derangement  must be treated as sanity.

They just didn't like PANTHER at all.  I have spent a considerable amount of time being intelligent about the situation the country finds itself in, including researching original texts.
You really don't like fact and reason at all, do you, which is more than enough to render you unfit for office

​A past golden age in which the whole of England was both devout and observant is itself a myth:
 
The Religious Census of 1851 demonstrated what Christians had long feared, that a large proportion of the population of England were neither Church people nor of any other religion. Although the exact figures must be treated with great caution, it seems clear that at least one-half of the people who might have been expected to go to church or chapel in 1851 did not do so. Most of the non-attenders came from the working classes...'the population having been till recently all but destitute of church ordinances, has relapsed into a state of semi-heathenism', wrote a vicar in a new parish near Oldham.
....
Queen Victoria...cared little for 'extreme views' in religion, and in teaching her children...chose to dwell not on 'the supernatural features of the Christian religion, but rather upon the pure and comprehensive morality which it teaches us as its essential and indestructible element;
Dickens's morality owed nothing to Evangelicalism or Tractarianism. Much religion, he suggested, was a 'vent for bad humours and arrogance' and there was no authority for the Murdstones in the New Testament; David Copperfield's opinion that 'we can all do some good if we will' was far more appealing. Dickens's obituary notes in Fraser's Magazine (July 1870) rightly seized on the point that 'he spent no thought on religious doctrines or religious reforms but regarded the Sermon on the Mount as good teaching, had a regard for the village church and churchyard, and quarrelled with nothing but intolerance'
Asa Briggs: The Age of Improvement
 
The original report of the 1851 Census reads as follows:
The most important fact which this investigation as to attendance brings Most important before us is, unquestionably, the alarming number of the non-attendants. Even fnquirj as to in the least unfavorable aspect of the figures just presented, and assuming (as attendance, no doubt is right) that the 5,288,294 absent every Sunday are not always the same individuals, it must be apparent that a sadly formidable portion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion. Nor is it difficult to indicate to what particular class of the community this portion in the main belongs. The middle classes have augmented rather than diminished that devotional sentiment and strictness of attention to religious services by which, for several centuries, they have so eminently been distinguished. With the upper classes, too, the subject of religion has obtained of late a marked degree of notice, and a regular church-attendance is now ranked amongst the recognized proprieties of life. It is to satisfy the wants of these two classes that the num ber of religious structures has of late years so increased. But while the labouring myriads of our country have been multiplying with our multiplied material prosperity, it cannot, it is feared, be stated that a corresponding increase has occurred in the attendance of this class in our religious edifices. More espe- cially in cities and large towns it is observable how absolutely insignificant a portion of the congregations is composed of artizans. They fill, perhaps, in youth, our National, British, and Sunday Schools, and there receive the elements of a religious education ; but, no sooner do they mingle in the active world of labour than, subjected to the constant action of opposing influences, they soon become as utter strangers to religious ordinances as the people of a heathen country. From whatever cause, in them or in the manner of their treatment by religious bodies, it is sadly certain that this vast, intelligent, and growingly important section of our countrymen is thoroughly estranged from our religious institutions in their present aspect. Probably, indeed, the pre valence of infidelity has been exaggerated, if the word be taken in its popular meaning, as implying some degree of intellectual effort and decision ; but, no doubt, a great extent of negative, inert indifference prevails, the practical effects of which are much the same. There is a sect, originated recently, adherents to a system called " Secularism " ; the principal tenet being that, as the fact of a future life is (in their view) at all events susceptible of some degree of doubt, while the fact and the necessities of a present life are matters of direct sensation, it is therefore prudent to attend exclusively to the concerns of that existence which is certain and immediate — not wasting energies required for present duties by a preparation for remote, and merely possible, contingencies. This is the creed which probably with most exactness indicates the faith which, virtually though not professedly, is entertained by the masses of our working population ; by the skilled and unskilled labourer alike — by hosts of minor shopkeepers and Sunday traders — and by miserable denizens of courts and crowded alleys. They are unconscious Secularists — engrossed by the demands, the trials, or the plea sures of the passing hour, and ignorant or careless of a future. These are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations ; and the melancholy fact is thus impressed upon our notice that the classes Which are most in need of the restraints and consolations of religion are the classes which are most without them.
Census of Great Britain, 1851
 
If this is what New Labour hoped to rectify, they were about 150 years too late.

Tom Paine in The Age of Reason (1794) described Jesus as ‘a virtuous and amiable man’ who preached ‘most excellent morality…It is upon this plain narrative of facts…that the Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian church, have erected their fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not to be exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.’

Many people of all faiths and none have engaged with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In the words of Jesus Christ Superstar, ’he’s a man, he’s just a man’, and engagement with him does not mean that we have the slightest interest in the notion that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it.

I am really not prepared to be treated like a disobedient servant-girl who has been soundly whipped for her sins, and will bear the scars for the rest of my life, bearing in mind of course that I do have both the background and the education, though most certainly not the disposition, to lead the Labour Party, other than intellectually.  I am sure Black, Booth, Abbott, May, Rimington, Manningham-Butler can explain in a spirit of feminist solidarity.  

Oh what is my problem?  I gave you a way out of all this, a path to sanity, and you rejected it. You preferred evil. You only listen to mad filth.  It really can't surprise you to learn I conclude you are mad filth.  You only understand other mad filth.  Since the mad filth who hold your attention seem primarily to consist of an Argentinian who had virtually never been in the free world, let alone England, before his elevation, and the House of Saud, it's not surprising they have strange views of England, appearing to think us all docile peasants to be commanded and who will fall on our faces at the fnord [[[[RELIGION]]]]  You, however, are supposed to know something about England.  To know that no-one gives a fuck about them and their mad drivel.  Some people want to wave their arses at the empty sky five times a day, some people want to wave at the sun at the solstice.  Fine.  Just don't bother anyone else, but they can't have that, the stinking psycho filth demanding 'respect' for a load of mad crap.  

{FNORD!}  {FNORD!}  {FNORD!}  
Oh, RTFM. 
No, tards, not fjords, those are what Slartibartfast was so good at designing.  Just remember he was very proud of Norway.  You might learn something thereby if you were capable of learning, but of course you are not. 

The word, says Wikipedia drily, lacks clear definition, but one such is that which shuts down rational processes, one such being undoubtedly the capacity to analyse new information. 

A fnord is a propaganda word conditioned in the masses from a very young age to respond to, usually with fear, anxiety, or uneasiness, but unable to be seen by the general populace, says the Urban Dictionary. 

However, I cannot discuss an invisible word, so let me stick with conditioned responses to particular words, or indeed explore the concept of fnord more closely  Perhaps a fnord is rather a word that makes invisible the real word for something. 

Thus devout or doctor may replace the real word thug or psychopath. 
Religion is a particularly good fnord.  It Is Religion.  No, this person is not a feral psycho animal.  He Is Religious.  Ah, then, says anyone sane, his religion demands he be a feral psycho animal.  Who gives a fuck about such a religion. 
After all, ‘fnord’ is shorter than ‘whited sepulchre’. 
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.  Matthew 23:27 

Left {fnord!} is an exquisite fnord.      We are the Left.  We are by definition good.  That most of us currently conduct ourselves and think like mentally defective psychotic fascists cannot be bad because we are the Left and we are good and so any who oppose us must be the Right and bad. 

Indeed fnords® abound: The Holy Bible; The Holy Qu’ran.  On no account analyse what is and what is not holy about either.  Oh, but it is the Word of God, so it must be holy.  You believe it is the Word of God.  That is not to say it is the Word of God.  In the first instance anyone who cannot differentiate between what he or she believes to be true and what is demonstrable has stewed ape-shit between the ears. 
Why does that mean it must be holy?  Why should the God whose Word it is supposed to be not be a complete shit?  Oh, I see: holy means complete shit. 

So congratulations to the assembled company.  All you have proved is that you are filth, mad animal filth impervious to all fact, reason and morality, wholly intellectually and morally corrupt.  I know it surprises you but truly you do not impress me with total intellectual and moral corruption, you do not impress me with wordless mindless assault, psychosis, criminality, treason, with the imposition of filth in the courts, filth in the universities, the imposition of monstrous evil lies, the gross falsification of history by those vile evil perverts in Rome who know better than anyone that the Enlightenment overthrew their fascist psycho monkey-vomit, the rule of filth and evil and desecration, the destruction of all reason, all learning, all decency, all freedom and democracy.  You just do not fucking impress me.  

You absolutely refused to consider the most basic facts of history.  You just go right on smashing everything in your lust to please your masters.  Treason must pay awfully well.  You let the monster into this country and you fawned on it, the monster of obedience and submission and fascism, and you crawled and grovelled and held its coat and begged to please and smashed everything, mustn't have learning, mustn't have literacy, mustn't have reason, mustn't have freedom, mustn't have the rule of law, of course master can do what he pleases with an educated  Englishwoman, cripple me, wreck the rest of my life, of course, not a problem, jeer at me, mock me, snigger, ignore me.  How do you fucking dare?  Animals lower than vermin left untouched, apes who jeer at disability, subhuman bags of pus and filth and disease, smirking obscene animal-women prized beyond rubies, protected and upheld, and that's how you want it to be. You repel me.  You noticed, huh?  

So here's to the annual hypocrisy fest.  It's called Remembrance Sunday and the polly cock-sucker fascist traitor vermin will all pretend they mourn those who gave their lives for the free world, when they hate the free world and spend their dirty evil monkey lives engineering its destruction.  Just assume, don't you, you filthy psycho freaks, assume you can dictate to people what we may think, what we may say, what we may be, dirty pervert sickos.  Think you can make me into a stupid little woman, an obedient slave-girl, sucking your filthy cocks and in awe of you by bestial assault, because you're fucking animals, vermin, filth.  Think you can unmake me, make me forget I have a mind, forget everything in it and I will understand I must never ever even think anything unacceptable to my master.  It's my mind, fucktard dirt filth apes, and it's a rather good one, considerably better than yours, and I decide what it does.  Because when you've finished strutting around in your jackboots issuing your orders, you are stupid, ignorant, ineducable cunt-for-brains twats, mad, evil, stupid, ignorant, ineducable cunt-for-brains twats who dismiss the most basic facts as rubbish.  All my meticulous concern for fact, meticulous research dismissed out of hand by slobbering evil animals called doctors and nurses.  Insolent stupid vermin.  Lower than lower than vermin.   Dirt, absolute filth, universally accepted, the scum of the fucking earth.  

Oh how the dribbling slobber-monkeys of Rome hate intelligence.  It brought them down once and now they've convinced fucking politicians that intelligence is evil, we've all got to run at the level of the dirty disgusting animals they spawn, cunt-for-brains mindless deadheads, fat vicious smelly animal-women, retarded monkeys with joke degrees.  Can't be better than a nurse, dear.  There is something so morally repugnant about those women it turns my stomach even now.  

So I did all this and nobody paid the slightest attention.  They just sniggered and treated me like a disobedient slave-girl and crippled me and watched me getting more and disabled and older and older and more and more desperate, but I'm still an Honours graduate of the University of London and they are still vermin and their precious bloody nurses are still vicious ignorant tards, so they haven't actually changed anything by their bestiality. 

Once upon a time I was very very naïve.  I thought what British politics needed right now was a student of the Enlightenment with the facts at my fingertips.  Now I know British politics is committed to the destruction of the Enlightenment and bringing in total dark.  What is any of this garbage?  Faced with a liaison given as being that of a pre-pubescent child and a man in his 50s, no negative comment is permitted, just because it's normal in fucking Saudi Arabia and a bunch of fascists think the guy holy?  Why are people who hate the free world not simply invited to remove themselves from it? Why are fascists valued citizens?
To whom are they important?  To whose bank balances?

 
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