On the morning of Tuesday 22 March 2016, Islamic State suicide bombers attacked Brussels airport and a Metro station, killing thirty-two people (in addition to themselves) and injuring more than 300. When the attacks took place, I was on a tram heading into the city: had I left home slightly earlier, I could easily have been among the dead or wounded. That narrow escape brought home to me, very vividly and personally, the dangers of fundamentalism. ….
Religion is a great polarizer. Fanatical faith can polarize whole continents, with terrible consequences. In Europe, five centuries ago, we had the Protestant Reformation, followed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation, leading to savage wars of religion that lasted seventy years.
We need evidence to justify our decisions and beliefs. Some people believe the Loch Ness Monster exists, even though there is little or no evidence for it. Others believe that the earth is flat, despite overwhelming evidence that it is not. I would call such beliefs irrational and unjustified.
In the world’s great monotheistic religions, God is traditionally thought of as the Supreme Being – “above” and “beyond” the universe which he has created (or creates) and thus “supernatural” and “transcendent”. This God is traditionally referred to as “he” and “him”, without implying sexuality or gender in the human sense. In the discussion that follows, I will continue that traditional use of pronouns, simply for convenience.
The world we live in is a puzzling sort of place. From the human point of view, it’s neither perfectly wonderful nor absolutely terrible. Neither heavenly nor hellish, but somewhere in between. … We humans too are a puzzling lot. We are capable of lofty idealism, great generosity, tender kindness, loving devotion and heroic acts of self-sacrifice. But we are also capable of hatred, meanness, cruelty, aggressiveness and incredible selfishness. We create sublime works of art but also terrible weapons of mass destruction. We have the intelligence to invent ever more brilliant technologies, yet we seem at a loss to deal with social injustice, poverty, environmental degradation and climate change. Aliens from another galaxy observing all the above would (if they had any capacity for empathy) feel sorry for poor Planet Earth and exasperated by the human race.
Reading the last couple of chapters, some of you will have been getting impatient. “We don’t need all these arguments!” you may be saying. “We already know God exists, and we know what he’s like because he has revealed himself to us. God has spoken! Hear him and turn away from mere human reasoning!”
Each faith community tends to believe the miracles recorded in its own scriptures and traditions, and regards them as confirming its own religion. By the same token, believers tend to downplay or dispute the miracles reported in the scriptures and traditions of other religions. Our willingness to believe in miracles is culturally and theologically conditioned.
As we saw in chapter 3, some people sometimes have dramatic and unusual experiences that feel like encounters with a reality beyond the physical – something supernatural. They might call it “the Sacred” and call their experiences spiritual, mystical or religious. A person who already has a religious faith will naturally see an experience of this sort as confirming his religious beliefs. Yet spiritual experiences are reported by people of many faiths. What is the open-minded enquirer to make of it all? ….
At the end of this final chapter, I’m going to shut up, stand back and hand over to you. This should not be the end but the beginning of the real conversation, which will be carried on between you and your friends, schoolmates, fellow-students, colleagues, neighbours … Ideally it will be a conversation among people from a wide variety of cultural and religious backgrounds and communities. People who don’t often get together. People who might be suspicious of one another and instinctively hostile to the idea of dialogue and debate, but who you are going to invite, welcome and involve.