“Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the

edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving

them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just

one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise

your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the

architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.”

—IVAN TO ALYOSHA IN THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

W hen we consider whether religion has “done more harm than good”—not that this would say

anything at all about its truth or authenticity—we are faced with an imponderably large

question. How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives

irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith? This is almost as hard to determine

as the number of spiritual and religious dreams and visions that came “true,” which in order to

possess even a minimal claim to value would have to be measured against all the unrecorded

and unremembered ones that did not. But we can be sure that religion has always hoped to

practice upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young, and has gone to great lengths

to make sure of this privilege by making alliances with secular powers in the material world.

One of the great instances of moral terrorism in our literature is the sermon preached by

Father Arnall in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This disgusting old priest is

readying Stephen Dedalus and his other young “charges” for a retreat in honor of Saint Francis

Xavier (the man who brought the Inquisition to Asia and whose bones are still revered by those

who choose to revere bones). He decides to impress them with a long and gloating account of

eternal punishment, of the sort which the church used to mandate when it still had the

confidence to do so. It is impossible to quote the entire rant, but two particularly vivid element

—concerning the nature of torture and the nature of time—are of interest. It is easy to see that

the priest’s words are designed precisely to frighten children. In the first place, the images are

themselves childlike. In the torture section, the very devil himself makes a mountain shrivel like

wax. Every frightening malady is summoned, and the childlike worry that this pain might go on

forever is deftly played upon. When it comes to the picture of a unit of time, we see a child on

the beach playing with grains of sand, and then the infantile magnification of units (“Daddy,

what if there were a million million million squillion kittens: would they fill up the whole world?”),

and then, adding further multiplicities, the evocation of nature’s leaves, and the easily conjured

fur and feathers and scales of the family pet. For centuries, grown men have been paid to

frighten children in this way (and to torture and beat and violate them as well, as they also did

in Joyce’s memory and the memory of countless others).

The other man-made stupidities and cruelties of the religious are easy to detect as well. The

idea of torture is as old as the nastiness of mankind, which is the only species with the

imagination to guess what it might feel like when imposed upon another. We cannot blame

religion for this impulse, but we can condemn it for institutionalizing and refining the practice.The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and

devices upon which holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep

someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were

also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

Those who were not lucky enough to be allowed to take part in the auto-da-fé (or “act of faith,”

as a torture session was known) were permitted free rein to fantasize as many lurid nightmares

as they could, and to inflict them verbally in order to keep the ignorant in a state of permanent

fear. In an era where there was little enough by way of public entertainment, a good public

burning or disembowelment or breaking on the wheel was often as much recreation as the

saintly dared to allow. Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the

sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe

heaven—except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought)

continual relish in the torture of others.

Pre-Christian hells were highly unpleasant too, and called upon the same sadistic ingenuity

for their invention. However, some of the early ones we know of—most notably the Hindu—were

limited in time. A sinner, for example, might be sentenced to a given number of years in hell,

where every day counted as 6,400 human years. If he slew a priest, the sentence thus adjusted

would be 149,504,000,000 years. At this point, he was allowed nirvana, which seems to mean

annihilation. It was left to Christians to find a hell from which there was no possible appeal. (And

the idea is easily plagiarized: I once heard Louis Farrakhan, leader of the heretical black-only

“Nation of Islam,” as he drew a hideous roar from a mob in Madison Square Garden. Hurling

spittle at the Jews, he yelled, “And don’t you forget—when it’s God who puts you in the ovens,

it’s FOREVER!”)

The obsession with children, and with rigid control over their upbringing, has been part of

every system of absolute authority. It may have been a Jesuit who was first actually quoted as

saying, “Give me the child until he is ten, and I will give you the man,” but the idea is very much

older than the school of Ignatius Loyola. Indoctrination of the young often has the reverse

effect, as we also know from the fate of many secular ideologies, but it seems that the religious

will run this risk in order to imprint the average boy or girl with enough propaganda. What else

can they hope to do? If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age

of reason, we would be living in a quite different world. Faithful parents are divided over this,

since they naturally hope to share the wonders and delights of Christmas and other fiestas with

their offspring (and can also make good use of god, as well as of lesser figures like Santa Claus,

to help tame the unruly) but mark what happens if the child should stray to another faith, let

alone another cult, even in early adolescence. The parents will tend to proclaim that this is

taking advantage of the innocent. All monotheisms have, or used to have, a very strong

prohibition against apostasy for just this reason. In her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary

McCarthy remembers her shock at learning from a Jesuit preacher that her Protestant

grandfather—her guardian and friend—was doomed to eternal punishment because he had

been baptized in the wrong way. A precociously intelligent child, she would not let the matter

drop until she had made the Mother Superior consult some higher authorities and discover a

loophole in the writings of Bishop Athanasius, who held that heretics were only damned if they

rejected the true church with full awareness of what they were doing. Her grandfather, then,

might be sufficiently unaware of the true church to evade hell. But what an agony to which to

subject an eleven-year-old girl! And only think of the number of less curious children who simply

accepted this evil teaching without questioning it. Those who lie to the young in this way are

wicked in the extreme.

Two instances—one of immoral teaching and the other of immoral practice—may be

adduced. The immoral teaching concerns abortion. As a materialist, I think it has beendemonstrated that an embryo is a separate body and entity, and not merely (as some really did

used to argue) a growth on or in the female body. There used to be feminists who would say

that it was more like an appendix or even—this was seriously maintained—a tumor. That

nonsense seems to have stopped. Of the considerations that have stopped it, one is the

fascinating and moving view provided by the sonogram, and another is the survival of

“premature” babies of featherlike weight, who have achieved “viability” outside the womb. This

is yet another way in which science can make common cause with humanism. Just as no human

being of average moral capacity could be indifferent to the sight of a woman being kicked in

the stomach, so nobody could fail to be far more outraged if the woman in question were

pregnant. Embryology confirms morality. The words “unborn child,” even when used in a

politicized manner, describe a material reality.

However, this only opens the argument rather than closes it. There may be many

circumstances in which it is not desirable to carry a fetus to full term. Either nature or god

appears to appreciate this, since a very large number of pregnancies are “aborted,” so to

speak, because of malformations, and are politely known as “miscarriages.” Sad though this is,

it is probably less miserable an outcome than the vast number of deformed or idiot children

who would otherwise have been born, or stillborn, or whose brief lives would have been a

torment to themselves and others. As with evolution in general, therefore, in utero we see a

microcosm of nature and evolution itself. In the first place we begin as tiny forms that are

amphibian, before gradually developing lungs and brains (and growing and shedding that now

useless coat of fur) and then struggling out and breathing fresh air after a somewhat difficult

transition. Likewise, the system is fairly pitiless in eliminating those who never had a very good

chance of surviving in the first place: our ancestors on the savannah were not going to survive

in their turn if they had a clutch of sickly and lolling infants to protect against predators. Here

the analogy of evolution might not be to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (a term that I have

always distrusted) so much as to Joseph Schumpeter’s model of “creative destruction,” whereby

we accustom ourselves to a certain amount of natural failure, taking into account the

pitilessness of nature and extending back to the remote prototypes of our species.

Thus, not all conceptions are, or ever were, going to lead to births. And ever since the mere

struggle for existence began to abate, it has been an ambition of the human intelligence to gain

control over the rate of reproduction. Families who are at the mercy of mere nature, with its

inevitable demand for profusion, will be tied to a cycle that is not much better than animal. The

best way of achieving a measure of control is by prophylaxis, which has been restlessly sought

since records were kept and which has in our own time become relatively foolproof and painless.

The second-best fallback solution, which may sometimes be desirable for other reasons, is

termination of pregnancy: an expedient which is regretted by many even when it has been

undertaken in dire need. All thinking people recognize a painful conflict of rights and interests in

this question, and strive to achieve a balance. The only proposition that is completely useless,

either morally or practically, is the wild statement that sperms and eggs are all potential lives

which must not be prevented from fusing and that, when united however briefly, have souls and

must be protected by law. On this basis, an intrauterine device that prevents the attachment of

the egg to the wall of the uterus is a murder weapon, and an ectopic pregnancy (the disastrous

accident that causes the egg to begin growing inside the Fallopian tube) is a human life instead

of an already doomed egg that is also an urgent threat to the life of the mother.

Every single step toward the clarification of this argument has been opposed root and

branch by the clergy. The attempt even to educate people in the possibility of “family planning”

was anathematized from the first, and its early advocates and teachers were arrested (like

John Stuart Mill) or put in jail or thrown out of their jobs. Only a few years ago, Mother Teresa

denounced contraception as the moral equivalent of abortion, which “logically” meant (sinceshe regarded abortion as murder) that a sheath or a pill was a murder weapon also. She was a

little more fanatical even than her church, but here again we can see that the strenuous and

dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good. It demands that we believe the impossible, and

practice the unfeasible. The whole case for extending protection to the unborn, and to

expressing a bias in favor of life, has been wrecked by those who use unborn children, as well as

born ones, as mere manipulable objects of their doctrine.

AS TO IMMORAL PRACTICE, it is hard to imagine anything more grotesque than the mutilation of

infant genitalia. Nor is it easy to imagine anything more incompatible with the argument from

design. We must assume that a designer god would pay especial attention to the reproductive

organs of his creatures, which are so essential for the continuation of the species. But religious

ritual since the dawn of time has insisted on snatching children from the cradle and taking sharp

stones or knives to their pudenda. In some animist and Muslim societies, it is the female babies

who suffer the worst, with the excision of the labia and the clitoris. This practice is sometimes

postponed to adolescence and, as earlier described, accompanied by infibulation, or the sewing

up of the vagina with only a small aperture for the passage of blood and urine. The aim is clea

—to kill or dull the girl’s sexual instinct and destroy the temptation to experiment with any man

save the one to whom she will be given (and who will have the privilege of rending those threads

on the dreaded nuptial night). Meanwhile, she will be taught that her monthly visitation of blood

is a curse (all religions have expressed a horror of it, and many still prohibit menstruating

women from attending service) and that she is an unclean vessel.

In other cultures, notably the “Judeo-Christian,” it is the sexual mutilation of small boys that

is insisted upon. (For some reason, little girls can be Jewish without genital alteration: it is

useless to look for consistency in the covenants that people believe they have made with god.)

Here, the original motives appear to be twofold. The shedding of blood—which is insisted upon

at circumcision ceremonies—is most probably a symbolic survival from the animal and human

sacrifices which were such a feature of the gore-soaked landscape of the Old Testament. By

adhering to the practice, parents could offer to sacrifice a part of the child as a stand-in for the

whole. Objections to interference with something that god must have designed with care—the

human penis—were overcome by the invented dogma that Adam was born circumcised and in

the image of god. Indeed, it is argued by some rabbis that Moses, too, was born circumcised,

though this claim may result from the fact that his own circumcision is nowhere mentioned in the

Pentateuch.

The second purpose—very unambivalently stated by Maimonides—was the same as for girls:

the destruction as far as possible of the pleasurable side of sexual intercourse. Here is what the

sage tells us in his Guide to the Perplexed:

With regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring

about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that

this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. It has been

thought that circumcision perfects what is defective congenitally.... How can natural things

be defective so that they need to be perfected from outside, all the more because we know

how useful the foreskin is for that member? In fact this commandment has not been

prescribed with a view to perfecting what is defective congenitally, but to perfecting what

is defective morally. The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of

circumcision.... The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and

sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has

been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be

weakened.

Maimonides did not seem particularly impressed by the promise (made to Abraham in

Genesis 17) that circumcision would lead to his having a vast progeny at the age of ninety-nine.Abraham’s decision to circumcise his slaves as well as his male household was a side issue or

perhaps an effect of enthusiasm, since these non-Jews were not part of the covenant. But he

did circumcise his son Ishmael, who was then thirteen. (Ishmael only had to part with his

foreskin: his younger brother Isaac—oddly described as Abraham’s “only” son in Genesis 22

was circumcised when he was eight days old but later offered as a sacrifice in his whole person.)

Maimonides also argued that circumcision would be a means of reinforcing ethnic solidarity,

and he laid particular stress on the need to perform the operation on babies rather than on

those who had reached the age of reason:

The first [argument] is that if the child were let alone until he grew up, he would sometimes

not perform it. The second is that a child does not suffer as much pain as a grown-up man

because his membrane is still soft and his imagination weak; for a grown-up man would

regard the thing, which he would imagine before it occurred, as terrible and hard. The third

is that the parents of a child that is just born take lightly matters concerning it, for up to

that time the imaginative form that compels the parents to love it is not yet consolidated....

Consequently if it were left uncircumcised for two or three years, this would necessitate the

abandonment of circumcision because of the father’s love and affection for it. At the time

of its birth, on the other hand, this imaginative form is very weak, especially as far as

concerns the father upon whom this commandment is imposed.

In ordinary words, Maimonides is perfectly aware that, if not supposedly mandated by god, this

hideous procedure would, even in the most devout parent—he stipulates only a father—create a

natural revulsion in favor of the child. But he represses this insight in favor of “divine” law.

In more recent times, some pseudosecular arguments have been adduced for male

circumcision. It has been argued that the process is more hygienic for the male and thus more

healthy for females in helping them avoid, for example, cervical cancer. Medicine has exploded

these claims, or else revealed them as problems which can just as easily be solved by a

“loosening” of the foreskin. Full excision, originally ordered by god as the blood price for the

promised future massacre of the Canaanites, is now exposed for what it is—a mutilation of a

powerless infant with the aim of ruining its future sex life. The connection between religious

barbarism and sexual repression could not be plainer than when it is “marked in the flesh.” Who

can count the number of lives that have been made miserable in this way, especially since

Christian doctors began to adopt ancient Jewish folklore in their hospitals? And who can bear to

read the medical textbooks and histories which calmly record the number of boy babies who

died from infection after their eighth day, or who suffered gross and unbearable dysfunction

and disfigurement? The record of syphilitic and other infection, from rotting rabbinical teeth or

other rabbinical indiscretions, or of clumsy slitting of the urethra and sometimes a vein, is simply

dreadful. And it is permitted in New York in 2006! If religion and its arrogance were not involved,

no healthy society would permit this primitive amputation, or allow any surgery to be practiced

on the genitalia without the full and informed consent of the person concerned.

Religion is also to be blamed for the hideous consequences of the masturbation taboo

(which also furnished yet another excuse for circumcision among the Victorians). For decades,

millions of young men and boys were terrified in adolescence by supposedly “medical” advice

that warned them of blindness, nervous collapse, and descent into insanity if they resorted to

self-gratification. Stern lectures from clergymen, replete with nonsense about semen as an

irreplaceable and finite energy source, dominated the upbringing of generations. Robert Baden

Powell composed an entire obsessive treatise on the subject, which he used to reinforce the

muscular Christianity of his Boy Scout movement. To this day, the madness persists on Islamic

Web sites purporting to offer counsel to the young. Indeed, it seems that the mullahs have been

poring over the same discredited texts, by Samuel Tissot and others, which used to be wielded

by their Christian predecessors to such dire effect. The identical weird and dirty-mindedmisinformation is on offer, especially from Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, the late grand mufti of Saudi

Arabia, whose warnings against onanism are repeated on many Muslim sites. The habit will

disrupt the digestive system, he warns, damage the eyesight, inflame the testicles, erode the

spinal cord (“the place from which sperm originates”!), and lead to tremors and shakes. Nor are

the “cerebral glands” unaffected, with concomitant decline in IQ and eventual insanity. Last of

all, and still tormenting millions of healthy youngsters with guilt and worry, the mufti tells them

that their semen will grow thin and insipid and prevent them from becoming fathers later on.

The Inter-Islam and Islamic Voice sites recycle this tripe, as if there were not already enough

repression and ignorance among young males in the Muslim world, who are often kept apart

from all female company, taught in effect to despise their mothers and sisters, and subjected to

stultifying rote recitation of the Koran. Having met some of the products of this “education”

system, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, I can only reiterate that their problem is not so much that

they desire virgins as that they are virgins: their emotional and psychic growth irremediably

stunted in the name of god, and the safety of many others menaced as a consequence of this

alienation and deformation.

Sexual innocence, which can be charming in the young if it is not needlessly protracted, is

positively corrosive and repulsive in the mature adult. Again, how shall we reckon the harm done

by dirty old men and hysterical spinsters, appointed as clerical guardians to supervise the

innocent in orphanages and schools? The Roman Catholic Church in particular is having to

answer this question in the most painful of ways, by calculating the monetary value of child

abuse in terms of compensation. Billions of dollars have already been awarded, but there is no

price to be put on the generations of boys and girls who were introduced to sex in the most

alarming and disgusting ways by those whom they and their parents trusted. “Child abuse” is

really a silly and pathetic euphemism for what has been going on: we are talking about the

systematic rape and torture of children, positively aided and abetted by a hierarchy which

knowingly moved the grossest offenders to parishes where they would be safer. Given what has

come to light in modern cities in recent times, one can only shudder to think what was

happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism. But what did people expect

would happen when the vulnerable were controlled by those who, misfits and inverts

themselves, were required to affirm hypocritical celibacy? And who were taught to state grimly,

as an article of belief, that children were “imps of” or “limbs of” Satan? Sometimes the resulting

frustration expressed itself in horrible excesses of corporal punishment, which is bad enough in

itself. But when the artificial inhibitions really collapse, as we have seen them do, they result in

behavior which no average masturbating, fornicating sinner could even begin to contemplate

without horror. This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome

of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual

instinct and even of the sexual organs. It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful

childhood of our species. Alyosha’s answer to Ivan’s question about the sacred torture of a child

was to say (“softly”)—“No, I do not agree.” Our reply, to the repellent original offer of the

defenseless boy Isaac on the pyre, right up to the current abuses and repressions, must be the

same, only not delivered so softly.