The Spectator

Spectator letters: The trouble with religion, alternatives to HS2, and whisky-drinking dogs

A history of persecution

Sir: Colin Brown (Letters, 7 June) ignores some good reasons for keeping religion out of society. Small groups of believers are fine, but not totalitarian dictatorships. The early Christians were treated as heretics until 313 ad, when Constantine made what became the Roman Catholic Church the official religion of the Roman Empire. The church promptly started persecuting all other religious groups. In the Middle Ages the Church let loose the Inquisition and decimated civilised communities such as the Albigensians.

As for his statement that ‘all religions have provided society with ethical and moral rules’, how ethical were the laws and morals that subjugated women and slaves and persecuted anyone who questioned the authority and dogma of the Church? In fact, it was the humanitarian and moral rules of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the Enlightenment and the 18th-century Age of Reason that gave us ‘the fundamentals of a civilised society’.

Communism was a new totalitarian society taking its revenge on an old one. Now we have an even newer religious tyranny, as described in Tom Stacey’s piece (‘Witness to a stoning’, 7 June), where women are publicly stoned for daring to think for themselves.
Joshua Fox
Uckfield, East Sussex

Islam’s dissenters

Sir: It is hard to maintain, as Tom Stacey does, that debate is forbidden in Islam, and has been for centuries. There are four schools of traditional Sunnite Islam (Hanifite, Malikite, Shafiite and Hanbalite), and it requires no imagination to realise that four schools breed controversy.

One could add that, in 1717, before the rise of Wahhabiism (the version of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, travelling in Ottoman Turkey, was informed by her courteous guide that Islam was ‘plain deism’.

In the 19th century, the reformers al-Afghani and Abduh created a considerable impact, but they were discouraged by foreign representatives, who saw them as fomenting political radicalism.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in