Imagine no religion

It’s true that 9/11 was one of those ‘where were you, what were you doing’ moments.

My boss came out of his office and told us that a plane had struck the World Trade Centre. The rest of the day was a bit of a blur and then I went to a football match. It could almost have been yesterday but it was actually 13 years ago.

The TV stations just showed the planes slamming into the buildings over and over again. It was hypnotic. And I just watched them slam in over and over again. I am not sure of the point when I realised that there were real people in the planes and the buildings. Maybe it was the shock, but it took time to take it all in.

And it was certainly a terrible shock. There had been airplane hijackings before but they had usually ended peacefully. Or as peacefully as hijacks can end.

But this was hijacking by suicide murderers, convinced that they were killing hundreds, thousands it turned out, in the name of their god who, in all probability doesn’t exist, like the gods of other religions. These men – I use the word ‘men’ generously – were on a promise and once they had survived their own deaths (and that’s easy to prove, isn’t it?) they would find scores of willing and equally dead virgins, presumably wearing burkhas, and each one minus their clitoris. What a shag that would be. Worth murdering hundreds, don’t you think?

I went to watch Bristol Rovers that night, play out a meaningless Cup game against Birmingham City, underneath the stars. It felt so odd watching a football match when mass murder had been committed, but what do you do? I don’t remember a thing about the game – apparently we lost – but I do remember the stars.

9/11 was the next step in mass murder by islamic fascists and in 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair took us to war in Iraq and made the whole world even worse. Boy, those two have a lot to answer for.

The islamic state fanatics make the 9/11 murderers seem cuddly liberals by comparison, such is their barbarism. The world is near a tipping point.

It seems to me that no one tried to learn many lessons from 9/11. No one thought that the world obsession with religion might be part of the problem, not the solution. In an era when dramatic advances in science teach us so much, there is still a curious adherence to religious superstition. I am not saying that we should ban religion – I have no issue with people worshipping whichever god they choose to believe in, so long as they don’t bother me with it – but we need to question it too. Science provides more questions every single day whereas religion clings to dogmas that existed thousands of years ago and no one questions it. Indeed, in some countries to even question the existence of a supernatural creator invites the death penalty.

9/11 woke me up to question my beliefs, or rather the lack of them.

Perhaps a god will turn up one day, introduce himself and I will become a believer. But for now, he is hard to find and I am reasonable sure he is not there at all. (I am not certain about his absence because I can’t be certain, any more certain than I am about whether there are likely to be fairies at the bottom of my garden.)

I quite like politics and I don’t always mind religion but put them together and you have a powder keg that could destroy the world. And if we are not careful, it will. Look at some of the countries that have ‘The Bomb.’