Impious Europe [Archive.org URL]

Religion is natural to human beings, and is also a means by which they define their social membership. Under the old Christian dispensation, membership and citizenship coincided; that was the purpose of national churches. Under the new dispensation, the two are growing apart, and the native population is beginning to sense its lack of spiritual identity in the face of religious communities that appear to defy its way of life.

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Many religions, including Christianity and Shiism, focus on a re-enacted martyrdom, in a collective ritual that purges believers of their sins. This phenomenon is so widespread that the critic and anthropologist René Girard sees it as the fundamental secret of religion. In Girard’s view, the suffering of a victim is necessary if the accumulated violence of society is to be released and abjured. […] But if we accept Girard’s view, and there is surely a lot to be said for it, we must accept also that the irreligious young are just as subject as the rest of us to the burden of religious guilt.

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…a fear of heresy is beginning to grip the countries of Europe—not heresy as defined by the Christian churches, but heresy as defined by a form of post-Christian political correctness. A remarkable system of semiofficial labels has emerged with which to prevent the expression of dangerous points of view. A point of view is identified as dangerous if it belongs to the old Judaeo-Christian culture and thereby reminds us of what we were when we actually believed something. Those who confess to their Christianity are “Christian fundamentalists,” or even part of the “Christian fundamentalist Right,” and therefore a recognized threat to free opinion. Those who express concern over national identity are “far-right extremists” […] It is as though our society is seeking to define itself as a religious community whose very lack of faith has become a kind of orthodoxy.

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…why philosophy has no place in our culture: It risks arriving at the wrong conclusion, the conclusion that current orthodoxies are not divine revelations but human mistakes.

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…it is sometimes said that we should welcome the fact that rational argument rather than blind superstition now governs the movement of public opinion. The problem is that rationality does not govern public opinion. The social and political movements that are currently most influential in Europe […] are, in their activist components, almost entirely closed to rational argument […] Behind the façade of reasonableness in each of these movements lurks a fortified orthodoxy, ready, if challenged, to punish dissent.