Reports recently submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by the Northern Ireland based child rights advocacy group, The Children's Law Center (CLC) demonstrate how religion continues to poisoning community relations, maintain divisions and hostility and deprive people of basic human rights, in Northern Ireland.
Despite years of progress following the end of the 'troubles' with the 'Good Friday' Belfast Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing executive to administer devolved political power, the major source of intercommunal tension continues to be religion. The single most important barrier to the removal of religion as a source of hostility is the de facto segregation of primary and secondary education because of the insistence by the main Christian churches that they are not only influential in, but have control of education.
Despite a poll in 2012 which showed that 71% of the people of Northern Ireland believe an integrated education system should be the "primary model for the education system" and a 2016 UNCRC recommendation that Northern Ireland "actively promote a fully integrated education system" to facilitate "social integration, 93% of children in the province still attend faith schools while the few fully integrated schools can't meet the demand. In effect, parents have no choice but to send their children to be indoctrinated into one or other of two mutually hostile camps.
In 2016, the UNCRC also recommended ending the legally mandated collective worship in Northern Ireland schools where, unlike in England and Wales, even children over the age of 16 have no right to withdraw themselves from collective worship. Last year the High Court in Northern Ireland agreed that this situation is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although parents can withdraw their children from collective worship, the process is often difficult, and children rarely receive an alternative period of equal educational value. Children are also required to reveal details of their beliefs, in violation of their right to privacy, and often face stigmatisation and prejudice.
As part of their religious education syllabus, faith schools are permitted to include their religion's orthodox teaching on relationships and sex education, leaving LGBTQ+ students feeling that they are the victims of homophobic bullying and demonisation, again in violation of their basic human rights.
There is no requirement for Northern Ireland's schools to teach evolution in science class and, unlike in England, where state-funded schools are forbidden from teaching scientifically discredited superstitions like creationism and intelligent design as science, no such bar exists in Northern Ireland where creationism in its various forms can be presented to children as a valid alternative to the scientific view, and the Christian Bible can be taught as real science and history.
Indeed, the state is complicit in misleading children and depriving them of a sound, evidence-based education, or an objective view of religions, because schools are required to teach RE "based on the holy scriptures", with the syllabus designed by the "four main Christian churches", without non-religious, or non-Christian input. Religions besides Christianity are described as "other religions", illustrating Christianity's privileged position. There is no provision to objectively evaluate the claims of the various religions or make an meaningful comparison between them and the non-religious view of the world.
Despite the diminishing role and influence of religion in both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, religion continues to hold sway in Northern Ireland, and in doing so, continues to foment and encourage intercommunal tension and strife while pretending to be peacemakers. Clearly, the interests of the priests and the churches is paramount and the interests of the people comes way down the list of priorities.
An example here of how religion divides communities through bigotry and intolerance and by reacting to competition in the market place of gullible fools to exploit.
In fact, the latter could be seen as an example of how religions control their victims in order to prevent hybridization with other wackadoodle cults, in the same way genes control diverging gene pools to set up barriers to hybridization and so cause speciation to go to completion. Religions are acting like meme pools in a Darwinian competition, and so tending to cause divisions and barriers to social peace and harmony.
This example is that of Heron Michelle, a purveyor of 'pagan metaphysical' objects such as crystals, jewellery and herbs allegedly with mystical properties, from a shop, The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions, in Uptown Greenville, North Carolina. She and her shop have attracted the hostile attention of the local fundamentalist Christians. Ironically, the trouble came to a head after a festival on the last day of April, ostensibly organized to bring the whole community together following the Covid-19 lockdown.
As part of the festival, Heron set up a table outside her shop and offered to do tarot readings for anyone interested in that sort of thing. Fairly soon though, she had a visit from two young men dressed in identical green t-shirts who wanted to 'share the Gospel of Jesus' with her. She explained that she already knew about Jesus and had been baptised into three different Christian faiths but found none of them 'took'. She now believes she has found the 'love that Jesus was trying to bring to the world' outside of Christianity. She also told them that in her faith, proselytizing was regarded as a cardinal sin.
After patronising her with more preaching, the pair eventually left to re-join their large group who had been moving through the festival talking to other shop keepers and festival-goers, trying to win recruits for their cult. Afraid of what was going to happen next, Heron folded up her table and stopped offering tarot readings.
After the festival was over, things turned ugly and menacing. The entire green t-shirted mob of fundamentalists turned up outside her shop physically blocking the entrance and standing and staring at her through the windows.
This is not the first time that Heron has faced crowds of hostile Christians. When she first opened her shop in 2008, the local church organized a boycott and a crowd of women vandalized her shop by paining crosses on the windows. They then stood outside chanting about demons.
In 2017, Philip Brown, a local street preacher who travels around preaching through a bullhorn and harassing other metaphysical stores, set up outside her shop and began preaching, so she engaged him in a discussion about the Gospels. It was soon obvious that she knew them better than he did. Nevertheless he posted his recording of his 'work for Jesus' on You Tube.
Vandalism, protests, harassment and regular proselytizing are not uncommon for metaphysical shops. In 2010, Rondell Gonzalez, the owner of Pye’Wackets, south of Anchorage, Alaska, found a 7-foot cross attached to her store’s sign. In 2015, someone tossed a gasoline bomb through the storefront window at Shooting for the Moon Spiritual Development Center, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. (It failed to explode, and the attackers were never identified.)
In Minnesota in 2016, metaphysical shop owner Bonnie Gurney filed a cease-and-desist order to stop a local woman from posting protests on her store’s social media page, publicly burning store fliers, blocking the shop entrance and harassing patrons, telling them to “repent.” In 2019, a newly opened metaphysical shop in Staunton, Virginia, was shut down, reportedly after the property owner belatedly realized his renter was a metaphysical shop.
Clearly, fundamentalists who go to these lengths to suppress any alternative superstitions, have something to fear from them. Their own faith in the truth of their beliefs must be on shaky ground for them to fear alternative views. It's not just Atheists whom they fear but anyone who might put them in danger of wondering if they could be wrong.
This was found, in a piece of research by Cory L Cook, Florette Cohen and Sheldon Solomon, published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, entitled What If They’re Right About the Afterlife? Evidence of the Role of Existential Threat on Anti-Atheist Prejudice. Human knowledge of death gives ris to:
...potentially paralyzing terror that is assuaged by embracing cultural worldviews that provide a sense that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe.
Anything which might cause a believer in one of these worldviews carries the risk that their terror will reassert itself, so hostility to other religions is a simple matter of terror management in response to an existential threat. In their research, which focussed on the relationship between believers and Atheists, the authors found that thinking about death made the believers more hostile to Atheism and thinking about Atheism made them more aware of the issue of death. It seems that any other set of ideas that don't include some sort of hope of survival after death, is an existential threat to fundamentalist Christians and evokes the same terror management response.
As these attacks on alternative metaphysical beliefs show, it's not just Atheists who attract the hostile attention of fundamentalist Christians. The worst thing you can do to a fundamentalist is make them wonder if they could be wrong and the response is often aggression. This is why they have developed all manner of mental gymnastics for rejecting any evidence, or logical reasoning you can offer them that might cause them to have self-doubt, and why they are so susceptible to frauds and charlatans who sell them cosy platitudes and disinformation intended to reinforce their cosy certainties and comforting freedom from their terror of death.
This tendency, in Christianity especially, to build barriers to shut out alternative ideas and to divide society up into mutually hostile camps, each distrusting the others, has resulted in over 30,000 different Christian churches in the USA alone.
Truly a house built on sand and a faith standing on the shaky ground of absent evidence and a book full of internal inconsistences and contradictions. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians are also gun nuts, opposed to any restrictions on their right to carry weapons of mass destruction. And no wonder the USA with its very large evangelical Christian population is also the most violent, divided and intolerant of all developed economies, in contrast to the countries of Europe with their large and growing populations of non-believers and rapidly falling numbers of believers.
In Darwinian terms, what these cultural memeplexes are doing is ensuring their survival in the human meme pool by rigorously excluding any potential rivals for the human resource they all depend on and preventing any dilution of their dogmas with which they recruit and retain members who are themselves looking for a means to manage their potentially paralyzing fear of death.
Dec 11, 2019. Orthodox Jewish men pass New York City police guarding a Brooklyn synagogue prior to a funeral for Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was killed in a shooting at a market in Jersey City, N.J.
Concerned by the rising tide of inter-faith tension and hate resulting in violent attacks on members of one faith by members of another, a group of New York's faith organizations have got together to try to solve the problem faiths are causing.
On April 16, clergy from 20 New York congregations, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Christians, met as the Interfaith Security Council held its first meeting to talk about how to share expertise and improve relations with law enforcement.
This was prompted by, amongst other incidents, the mass shooting in Pittsburg, PA, in October 2018, when a gunman attacked worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, killing 11 people, vandalism at four synagogues in the Riverdale neighbourhood of Bronx, NY, last week, and the killing of Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn in Jersey City, N.J. on Dec 11, 2019. Armed police had to be deployed at the Brooklyn synagogue where his funeral took place.
The Interfaith Security Council is an umbrella organisation bringing together several other religious security organizations, one of which is 67th Precinct Clergy Council of Brooklyn, which supports mostly churches in the borough’s East Flatbush area. It's president, Pastor Gilford Monrose, of Mt. Zion Church of God 7th Day, blamed white supremacists for the escalating level of inter-faith violence with:
In its American Perspective Survey, The Survey Center on American Life has revealed a post-Trump America deeply divided and with a large number of people, especially evangelical white Christians, ready to resort to violence to achieve their political ambitions.
But even as pride in America has taken a battering because of the antics of Trump and his supporters, the belief in American exceptionalism, that many of us non-Americans find so arrogant and worryingly nationalistic, still remains strong.
Although Trump retains considerable support, especially amongst the Republican rank and file, most Americas expressed relief that he had finally gone. There is also broad support for investigating the possible wrongdoings by his administration.
In the finest traditions of evangelical Christianity, evangelist author Michael Brown is lying to his supporters again - and of course bearing false witness against others. He claims those who took part in the riot and failed insurrection on 6th January were not real Christians and, by implication that those who did take part were other than real Christians. Brown evidently takes Matthew 7:20, "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them", at face value - ironically, since it is in the context of false prophets, not the actions of self-confessed Christians.
In his rush to distance himself and dissociate himself and his faith from the disgraceful events that should have every decent Christian now questioning what it is about their core beliefs that can provoke people to do such things, Brown delivered what can only be described as one of the best examples of the 'No True Scotsmen' fallacy seen for a long time. Only Michael Brown and his friends are real Christians; all the others, no matter how passionate they are in their beliefs, aren't.
