I am not interested in contempt, and I haven’t called anyone stupid or ignorant (and I’ve said in previous posts that shaming people for ignorance is unhelpful). But no reasonable person could look at what happened here on Friday and somehow imagine that Georgian society – or any society – can get by without questioning the moral authority of religious leaders – and the implications of religious rituals.

Conversation, and satire, and ridicule, and argument, are productive and positive and have the power to make positive changes in the world. I can’t imagine wanting to live in a world in which I had given up on people – in which I had decided that genes are destiny. In many ways that would be even worse than living in a world ruled by mysterious and capricious omnipotent forces beyond human comprehension.

All religions bring with them a code of living, of interpreting the world. People who don’t profess to a religion – like you – also subscribe to some sort of code of living. In many cases (probably most), the codes overlap. What one person might call Jesus as her higher power, another might call Allah, and another, “science.” I’m not going to get myself bogged down in names.

I’m not Muslim (or Christian), but I like to say *Inshallah.* Although the phrase literally refers to God, it also refers to the more generic idea that what I plan this morning may be for naught, as the universe might intervene – and I need always to remember that.

I subscribe to the belief that some of us have the God gene and some of us don’t (and I fall in the latter category). You can rail all you want against so-called stupid people for their so-called ignorant belief in a God (and really, is this part of *your* code of living – to be so contemptuous of others?), but your exercise is as productive as trying to teach a cat to bark.

Firstly, the same time as we as a society have vowed to eliminate injustice in the world for everyone, we encourage free-market rapacity in economics and society. The effects of this are far-ranging and subtly devastating as all can see, but there are no rationally fortified defences against it, because rationalism itself will always favour self-interest over the laying down one’s own autonomy to choose. The way out of this conundrum, as many a great theologian and saint pointed out (i.e., those that were not merely bigots or fools), is that the answer lies precisely in irrational allegiance to values. You can never fight self-interest with purely rational arguments – you will eventually end up either serving self-interested reasoning anyway, or end up paralysed with indecision.

The presence of religion in all this is as a wound upon pure rationalism. It’s allied to irrational forgiveness, patience, conservation, grace and other virtues, almost haphazardly. And this is key. This plays itself out in sometimes highly effective ways, and sometimes not so meaningful ways, within the larger society as a whole.

All the major organized religions of the world essentially fulfil this space in public life. To take but one example familiar to the West, Christians live with the respect for the Word of God because they believe that pride and self-interest will destroy the world, according to any good ‘ol basic Sunday school theologian. And one must live in humility and self-negation for that purpose alone. Pure rationalists seek to deaden that Word. They would flatten all language until there is only one superscript allowed for every deed, thought and action. This is reductionism at its worst, to me, if only because it misses the point of the whole thing in the first place.

Your comments above on tolerance were justified, and eminently well put. I must point out though that in every equation, there is some aspect of society that one consciously or unconsciously marginalizes in order to promote an idealized good. This, as they say, is the way it goes. You have chosen the role of defender of the weak (something the Church did for thousands of years — there is no basis for liberal democracy without the groundwork of Western metaphysics in the medieval ages). All very admirable, but even you admit that someone must bear the brunt of your anger, whether justified or not. We all try to be understanding and kind, perhaps going out of our way to save a beaten dog in a street out of a conviction that pain is wrong, even as we will crush an insect or ten under foot without a second’s thought on our way there to do the helping.

To conclude, there are untold incredible grave injustices going on in the world at this very second – were you only to give up your time for the present few minutes to think upon it. The sheer scale of it might overwhelm you, if you were to let it. So you have to make decisions, rational ones. You decide only some things are worth fighting for now, only those that perhaps don’t force you out of your way too much, ones that kinda gel with your place in life, your views on life, your instincts and so on. The rest of it you don’t have time for. The rest remain the great unanswerables of life. But far far be it for me to contest some of the things the Church has also done, before you.

All will be fine

At a very superficial level, I could just say that religious people are entitled to their beliefs as long as they don’t resort to violence. Certainly, from a legal point of view, that’s true – practicing Christianity is not illegal, but beating up demonstrators is illegal. One could thus say that the constitution of Georgia, which expresses the democratic will of the Georgian people, enshrines this division between beliefs and actions.

But you are right in suggesting that my anger at religious people is not because they broke the law. My anger at religious people is because they are bullies. A priest can call on his flock to attack an LGBT rights rally, but there is no one in society – not even the police – who can be called on to defend that rally. No one will stand up for a minority group of people who are different, and this reminds me of the times in my life when I was bullied because I was different (I was a nerdy kid). All the pain and anger I felt as a child gets focused towards any bully – whether it’s a racist bully, or a homophobic bully, or a sexist bully, or a nationalist bully.

Religions perpetuate themselves by enforcing conformity – usually through bullying – and religious conservatives are right in suggesting that anything that threatens that conformity threatens the religion itself. There is no way for religion to coexist with an open and tolerant society that values reason, empathy, and knowledge. In that situation, either religion loses power in the society or the society becomes less open, less tolerant, less reasonable, less empathetic, and less knowledgeable. Yesterday, I believe, religion lost some power in Georgian society, and the society became more empathetic – and the mechanism was individuals putting themselves in the position of the demonstrators who were victims of violence, rather than taking the side of the Church, and declaring that the violence was unacceptable and shameful.

So here’s a question: when put in those terms, is hatred of bullies equivalent to hatred of tolerance? If we have to pick one or the other – if it’s really a zero-sum game – then what if one side actually is morally superior? What if reason and empathy really are just better than ignorance and violence? Is hatred of what is bad equivalent to hatred of what is good?

I am optimistic, and I believe that religious people are human, and are capable of reason, and are capable of empathy. Religious conservatives believe this too. It is as obvious to them as it is to me that if you give people a genuine choice between reason and ignorance, between empathy and blind hatred, they will choose reason and empathy in ever-increasing numbers. This is the source of the progress of humanity. This is also why religious conservatives hate and fear an open society and why they lash out, violently, against anyone or anything that threatens to give their followers a genuine alternative to living in darkness.

And that is why, even though I feel anger, and rage, and hatred, and pain, I do not act on those emotions or advocate that others should do so. I do not advocate lashing out against religious people, first, because it is wrong, and second, because we do not need to silence religious voices in order to win – we only need for our own voices to be heard.