When a powerful thing is losing control, it usually acts out of character, like the Soviet Union. Or it gets more aggressive, like the National Union of Mineworkers under Mrs Thatcher. Or it simply looks out of place, like the Conservative Party of the late nineties. Religion seems to be all these at the moment.
For a start, many of its teachings are obsolete in the 21st Century, like eating pork. It was well known that the consumption of pork was a bad thing two or three thousand years ago because it carried a bacterium which gave humans ringworm, tapeworm or other nasty viruses. These days pork is safer than lamb, chicken or beef (which of the four farm animals mentioned has had least scandal-hit headlines recently?) but that doesn't seem to matter to some. They blindly carry on avoiding pork because it was written millennia ago by someone who did a good impression of being hotlined to the Almighty.
But considering we are living in realistic times where we have enough evidence to disprove all theories of "intelligent design", certain areas of the world insist on their theory being the only true fact. Consider for a moment that we were put here by an intelligent deity. Where did the deity come from? Who created the deity? The chicken and the egg question comes racing to mind. If we look at the facts as they stand, we live in a world where we can still marvel at the natural beauty around us. But how did it get there is the fundamental question we are still trying to answer. We have done well. In 60 years, we have gone from warmongering, argumentative politics through an unprecedented age of discovery and invention, to a position now where we can take a look at the flower pots in our garden from satellite photos on the Internet.
Throughout our history, technology was developed due to wars, but in the last 20 years we have left that behind and moved to a higher plane. We no longer need to advance our bellicose ambitions and research and development is carried out mainly by anoraks, geeks and techies in offices, labs and garages, in the hope a new vaccine, a new piece of software, or a new gadget can take the world by storm. A total change from the days of Von Braun and Einstein. But some have missed the point. We have unfortunately got rid of our own wars for them to be replaced by oppressive fear of attack from the disaffected fringes of one of the principle religions of history. And it is a shame because we should be living side-by-side. Instead we have allowed certain members of the human race to think we are against them and their religion.
On the opposite side of this, we have the wacky world of fundamental christianity. A recent article in the press reported that an edited version of the film "The Queen" was made specifically for airlines because three passengers complained about the use of the phrase "God bless you", which in their opinion was blasphemy. In Poland, some schools and universities are being singled out for not being catholic enough, because they haven't downgraded Darwin in favour of the Creation.
No wonder many young and dynamic Poles are packing up and moving to Germany, Britain or Ireland. Religion is trying to be noticed because it realises it is losing the debate. But it is doing it in the wrong way, from the contraception debate to abortion to exploding bombs to the censuring of innocent film scripts. Religion has played a part in keeping us controlled over the years, from retaining Latin as the sole language of the Church, to the Spanish Inquisition, to propaganda about contraception in developing countries.
We have trod a very rocky path to keep these religious people happy. We have bent over backwards to encourage them to play an active part in our society, but it seems that they prefer to stick with their own kind, they think they are the only ones who can be right and they take offence at being told others might just have a point. And that goes for conflicts the world over too, from Northern Ireland to Iraq to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Palestine/Israel: most wars are about ideology. It doesn't matter what ideology you have, but about winning. That's why technology used to favour religion, until the secular society took it off their hands in the late twentieth century.
If we look carefully at the facts though, we will see that even in the Bible Belt churches, young people there have a better sense of duty, a better mental state and a more stable life environment than ordinary non-believers. So we do need to weigh up the facts. The only thing people of religion need to remember is that the Abrahamic religions worship the same God, but their ideology is different. They need to take a step back from their urges to enforce hegemony and say with one voice, "I might not agree with you, but I will die with my boots on to protect your right to believe that."
They won't though, because they all think they're right!
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