Religions is no longer the 'opium of the people'

Andrew Anthony, Guardian News Service, London

Your starter question for 10 points: Who wrote the following words? "Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstances."

No? OK, here's the next line. "It is the opium of the people."

Yes, Karl Marx. Unusually for Marx, the above sentences still resonate with truth, still reflect an identifiable condition of life as it is lived -- at least by some people -- today. Except, that is, the last line, the one we all know.

Religion is no longer the opium of the people. When Marx was writing, in 1843, at the height of a philosophical and industrial revolution (and only a year after Britain had defeated China in the opium wars), religion must have afforded a comforting retreat from the uncertainties of rapid change. But you have only to turn on the news to see that whatever religion offers the world today, it's not the pacific escapism of an opium pipe.

The truth is, no single drug provides a suitable analogy for the contemporary role of religion. However, if we wanted to play a game of theological pharmacology, we could say that Christianity in Europe is now the marijuana of the marginalized: Supposedly harmless, mildly confusing, but not addictive and therefore nothing to get worked up about.

In the United States, where Jesus worship takes a more muscular form, religion is a good deal more pumped up and ready for action. So let's say it's the steroid of the suburbanites.

And what of the fundamentalist strain of Islam, the doctrine that overnight turns previously docile communities into breeding grounds of nihilistic violence and resentment? Oh, that's easy: Crack cocaine.

We could go on, but before anyone puts pen to fatwa, let me strike a note of egalitarian universalism. All religions are at root as stupid as each other. Religion -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism etc, -- is by definition irrational and, more than that, it is an irrationality that lays claim to the complete truth. How dangerous is that?

The fear of offending religious, cultural and even racial sensibilities has grown so pervasive that hardly a word of sense is openly spoken on the matter. A telling example of this tendency is the debate, or controversy, that is beginning to take shape around Mel Gibson's new film, The Passion, the filmstar's directorial interpretation of the gospels.

Although not yet completed, still less screened in multiplexes, the film has come under considerable fire in America. Frank Rich, the liberal New York Times columnist, has written of the movie's potential appeal to anti-semites because it suggests that Jewish leaders were in part responsible for Christ's death. To which Gibson responded: "I want to kill him (Rich). I want his intestines on a stick -- I want to kill his dog."

Isn't there something in the Gospel of St Matthew about turning the other cheek? Anyway, the fact is that there is plenty of ammunition in the New Testament for anti-semites. But only if you ignore the logic, such as there is, of the Bible.

The whole point of the gospels is that Christ died for "our" sins. Thus someone had to finger him -- whether it was the Jews or the Romans -- and whoever did should then surely be congratulated by Christians for arranging the set-piece that gave birth to their religion. Except that God must have arranged his son's death because He arranges everything. Or does He?

Who knows? What we can be sure of is that while it is perfectly acceptable to denounce Gibson's film as anti-semitic, few critics will go so far as to call it anti-sense.

As a consequence, the only people who do bother to draw attention to the contradiction between individual self- determination and God's omnipotent will -- people, for example, such as Richard Dawkins -- risk appearing like strident fanatics themselves.

But as columnist Christopher Hitchens once wrote: "I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator -- that's beyond my conceit."

So when anyone invokes God's will -- be it that His will is for young men to become suicide bombers, or that homosexuality is not part of His design, or even that we all hold hands and love each other -- it is a safe bet that their understanding of this heartless world and its soulless circumstances is on a par with that of the average crack addict.