Churches and gun clubs

It was great to see cousin Alison again on one of her rare visits to New Zealand.



Alison got a first in philosophy at Canterbury University and after a brief flirtation with library training joined the Community of St Clare's Australian branch. This was a very tough life. The sisters literally builttheir own monastery from mud bricks they made themselves. Eventually Alison moved to the mother hosue in Oxford, UK, where among other things she researches Hebrew texts - in Hebrew.

Alison and I have an irregular correspondence about the behaviour of chooks and the state of the world. In one of mine to her I proposed that in balance, religion was responsible for creating more misery than it alleviated. Alison countered that it was not religion that created misery but people's use of it.

I've pondered this for a long time but I'm not convinced. The argument troubles me greatly me for it is so like the US gun lobby's claim that it is not guns that kill people but people and so banning guns is not unjustified.

Perhaps religion, by providing an intellectual and spiritual focus for what seems to be man's (and woman's) universal propensity for fearing/hating/eliminating anyone who is different, plays the same role as the guns in leading to misery?

I am sure that if all the children born in Eire in a year were seized at birth and transported to Kirwee and raised in a community set up for the purpose, their parents' mutual mistrust of Catholic and Protestant would be gone forever. But if they were divided into two groups, raised with different religious beliefs and then brought together again, they would soon be at each other's throats in a generation.

This is not to say that religion is evil, but it is to suggest that religion can be very bad for us and that without it the world might be a happier (albeit even more overpopulated) place. Perhaps, like guns in civilised countries, religious books should be locked up in secure cabinets, well away from children Even adults would be allowed to read them only in heavily circumscribed conditions with experts present to prevent them coming to harm. In other words, licence churches of whatever denomination or religion in the same way as gun clubs.