On Fundamentalism

I wasn't really sure how to separate these issues in the context of the things I want to talk about, so I hope you'll bear with me. As always, I find that the essays I add to these pages overlap one another quite a bit.

When I was a child, one of the biggest issues of the day - the one regarding which we stared wide-eyed at John Craven's Newsround, held Blue Peter sponsored jumble sales and saved up our pocket money to donate to refugees - was the civil war in Cambodia. At the time I understood little of the real issues involved; I only knew that people were persecuted and starving. Had I understood, I think I would have found it far more terrifying, though perhaps less so then than I do now, because in those far off days I was protected by that exquisitely childish notion: it couldn't happen here.

These days, of course, things are different. I don't just mean the war in former Yugoslavia which has brought home to Europeans how easily violence can take hold on our soil, and how little different we are from those more distant nations which the newsreaders used to patronise as culturally primitive. War is frightening enough in itself, but ultimately, there is something which distresses me still more than the destruction of human life, and that is the destruction of human achievement, of knowledge. In time, we will all die, and without that knowledge we have nothing to pass on; without it, the world has no hope of improvement. Such was the horror of the 'de-Westernising' anti-intellectual crusade which took place in Cambodia. Such was the ugliness of Nazi persecution of noted thinkers in late 'thirties Germany. I cannot help but glimpse that horror again, now, in the movement which is sweeping across much of the culturally Christian and Islamic world, the fundamentalism which would trample all reason in its path. I hope, I really do hope, that I am wrong, that I am jumping at shadows, but I have already seen the damage which this movement has done to individuals, and it can only be a matter of proportion - of time and numbers - that makes a difference between individual persecution and the persecution of large sections of society. We are never more than inches from war. Perhaps it is inevitable in a society which unquestioningly worships democracy; that the tyranny of the majority should lead to the advent of populism above all else, when we all know that people en masse rarely display the same common sense or restraint that they do as individuals.

I want to state firstwant to state first of all, and clearly, that I have nothing against Christianity or Islam, or their followers, in themselves; both have inspired some great contributions to human culture and to the development of civilisation. As always, it is the hijacking of 'religious values' by other movements with more ruthless motivations which is the cause of catastrophe.

As a queer person, I do feel very vulnerable sometimes, directly personally threatened by fundamentalism, when I see what happened to Matthew Shepperd in America and I consider the state sanctioned stonings of lesbians that go on in Iran, etc., etc. - but that isn't actually the angle that worries me the most, because again, it's about people, rather than about civilisation. I am actually far more concerned by some of the less openly aggressive changes being introduced. Kansas State Board of Education's attempt to stamp out the teaching of Evolutionary Theory in its schools appalls me; more so, the fact that it's not an isolated occurrence. The first time I heard about it I actually thought it was a joke. I find it hard to come to terms with the fact of such a thing happening in a so-called modern, civilised country - it harks back to the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo, to the Church's insistence that pi must equal three and that anyone who said otherwise was influenced by the Devil. It is an utterly primitive action which would appear which would appear to have been taken for the most primitive of reasons - to silence by force a more impressive argument; to provide people with an all-encompassing explanation of their environment which will give them smug security and an opportunity to refute the ability of those more intelligent or more educated than themselves - and to consolidate political power in the hands of the loudest debaters rather than the sharpest thinkers.

Bishop Holloway has said that they do a great disservice to the Bible who defend it as bad science rather than as good poetry. I believe that such spiritual inspiration can be of immense value to all of us, but not while it is used as a bludgeoning device by people who will stick their heads in the sand and scream out rhetoric rather that looking at the world as it really is, opening their eyes, and appreciating all the glory of what God really is. Science and religion need not be in conflict; they have a great deal to offer to wholly different aspects of the human experience.

Here in the UK, unlike the US, we have no law separating the state and religion. I personally see no reason why the beliefs of different religions should not be discussed in schools - in fact, I think it's an essential means of promoting understanding in a multicultural society. However, we must surely understand that belief based on handed down lore and personal revelation is just that - belief. It is a thing quite different in nature from the structure of theory and paradigm built up by repeated observation and the collection of empirical evidence which is science. Now, I do not claim that science cannot be subject to error, or that paradigms do not sometimes need to be amended, but that is really the point here - properly applied, scientific theory accepts that no hypothesis can be absolutely proven beyond doubt. Fundamentalist religion, on the other hand, starts with a hypothesis which it is not prepared to amend or discard and then selects or rejects pieces of evidence in accordance not with their individual value but rather with whether or not they fit that hypothesis.

I feel it is vitally important to teach children scientific theories in school not only in order to enlighten them as to current thinking but in order to provide them with a good understanding of the scientific method, and thus of methods they might employ in finding things out for themselves. Science is all about asking questions. Fundamentalism is often about suppressing questions, which I don't think is healthy. Nor do I think that suppression is necessary for the development of faith. I see no reason why faith and science cannot co-exist.

I am aware that there are many different schools of thought within the fundamentalist groupings in Christianity and Islam, and it dond Islam, and it does seem to me that some are more rational and intelligent than others. I cannot, for instance, possibly understand the means of self-justification employed by those people who take each word of the Bible literally, but do so working from a translation! Never mind the fact that many words have quite different connotations (and, in a few cases, wholly different meanings) from those used in Hebrew Biblical texts; added to that must be a consideration of all the politically inspired editing which has gone on over the centuries of Biblical reproduction, which should be obvious to anyone from the distinct differences between different editions of that holy book. This practice seems to me to be the equivalent of taking a tract from, say, Plato, in modernised Greek, running it through Babelfish a couple of times, passing it round a group of local councillors for each to chop bits out of and amend, then expecting it to correspond precisely to the original. It is patently silly.

Of great concern to me at present is the potential of the information offered by the Human Genome Project. Some world leaders have compared this achievement to the moon landings; personally, I think it is of far greater significance, and likely to have a far greater impact on our destinies as individuals and as a species. It is the only thing which could ever provide a certain, absolutely permanent cure for my partner Donald's illness, for my own illness, or for the dangerous illnesses suffered by several of my friends; but that is not my only reason for supporting it. They are fools who decry knowledge as leading to potential evil while failing to observe that evil can thrive in any context; knowledge is a neutral thing, but the more we have, the greater our ability to survive. The always astute Bishop Holloway said that he fears the prospect of human immortality because he thinks that the shortness of our lives, and our need to get things done before they end, is what drives us. Intellectually I agree with him, but emotionally, because I am a part of that system, I cannot altogether do so; it comes down to what Roy Baty said in Bladerunner: "I want more life." More even than that, I want quality of life; I have seen what illness and injury do to people, and I will do all in my power to eradicate such suffering. What I am asking for is an end to torture.

There is a great outcry from certain religious factions: how can we tamper with what God made? Are we playing God? I say that we are simply using the intelligence we were 'made' with, and that this process is entirely a product of nature. When we dwell in the darkness of ignorance we can see and appreciate nothing of what God is about. Let there be light.