The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth,

but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but

rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing

perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God

were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and

diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the

process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.

—GOTTHOLD LESSING, ANTI-GOEZE (1778)

“The Messiah Is Not Coming—and He’s Not Even Going to Call!”

—ISRAELI HIT TUNE IN 2001

T he great Lessing put it very mildly in the course of his exchange of polemics with the

fundamentalist preacher Goeze. And his becoming modesty made it seem as if he had, or could

have, a choice in the matter. In point of fact, we do not have the option of “choosing” absolute

truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of

revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive—or to intimidate

others. Of course, it is better and healthier for the mind to “choose” the path of skepticism and

inquiry in any case, because only by continual exercise of these faculties can we hope to achieve

anything. Whereas religions, wittily defined by Simon Blackburn in his study of Plato’s Republic,

are merely “fossilized philosophies,” or philosophy with the questions left out. To “choose”

dogma and faith over doubt and experiment is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach

greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Thomas Aquinas once wrote a document on the Trinity and, modestly regarding it as one of

his more finely polished efforts, laid it on the altar at Notre Dame so that god himself could

scrutinize the work and perhaps favor “the Angelic doctor” with an opinion. (Aquinas here

committed the same mistake as those who made nuns in convents cover their baths with canvas

during ablutions: it was felt that god’s gaze would be deflected from the undraped female

forms by such a modest device, but forgotten that he could supposedly “see” anything,

anywhere, at any time by virtue of his omniscience and omnipresence, and further forgotten

that he could undoubtedly “see” through the walls and ceilings of the nunnery before being

baffled by the canvas shield. One supposes that the nuns were actually being prevented from

peering at their own bodies, or rather at one another’s.)

However that may be, Aquinas later found that god indeed had given his treatise a good

review—he being the only author ever to have claimed this distinction—and was discovered by

awed monks and novices to be blissfully levitating around the interior of the cathedral. Restassured that we have eyewitnesses for this event.

On a certain day in the spring of 2006, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, accompanied by his

cabinet, made a procession to the site of a well between the capital city of Tehran and the holy

city of Qum. This is said to be the cistern where the Twelfth or “occulted” or “hidden” Imam took

refuge in the year 873, at the age of five, never to be seen again until his long-awaited and

beseeched reappearance will astonish and redeem the world. On arrival, Ahmadinejad took a

scroll of paper and thrust it down the aperture, so as to update the occulted one on Iran’s

progress in thermonuclear fission and the enrichment of uranium. One might have thought that

the imam could keep abreast of these developments wherever he was, but it had in some way

to be the well that acted as his dead-letter box. One might add that President Ahmadinejad had

recently returned from the United Nations, where he had given a speech that was much covered

on both radio and television as well as viewed by a large “live” audience. On his return to Iran,

however, he told his supporters that he had been suffused with a clear green light—green being

the preferred color of Islam—all throughout his remarks, and that the emanations of this divine

light had kept everybody in the General Assembly quite silent and still. Private to him as this

phenomenon was—it appears to have been felt by him alone—he took it as a further sign of the

imminent return of the Twelfth Imam, not so say a further endorsement of his ambition to see

the Islamic Republic of Iran, sunk as it was in beggary and repression and stagnation and

corruption, as nonetheless a nuclear power. But like Aquinas, he did not trust the Twelfth or

“hidden” Imam to be able to scan a document unless it was put, as it were, right in front of him.

Having often watched Shia ceremonies and processions, I was not surprised to learn that

they are partly borrowed, in their form and liturgy, from Catholicism. Twelve imams, one of

them now “in occultation” and awaiting reappearance or reawakening. A frenzied cult of

martyrdom, especially over the agonizing death of Hussein, who was forsaken and betrayed on

the arid and bitter plains of Karbala. Processions of flagellants and self-mortifiers, awash in

grief and guilt at the way in which their sacrificed leader had been abandoned. The masochistic

Shia holiday of Ashura bears the strongest resemblances to the sort of Semana Santa, or “Holy

Week,” in which the cowls and crosses and hoods and torches are borne through the streets of

Spain. Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a

hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of

a few nonevents.

Another way of putting this is to say that, as I write, a version of the Inquisition is about to

lay hands on a nuclear weapon. Under the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and

sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse. Its writers and artists and

intellectuals are mainly in exile or stifled by censorship; its women are chattel and sexual prey;

its young people are mostly half-educated and without employment. After a quarter century of

theocracy, Iran still exports the very things it exported when the theocrats took over—pistachio

nuts and rugs. Modernity and technology have passed it by, save for the one achievement of

nuclearization.

This puts the confrontation between faith and civilization on a whole new footing. Until

relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their

societies would decay, their economies would contract, their best minds would go to waste or

take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had

learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply

rot. Bad enough as this was, it became worse on September 11, 2001, when from Afghanistan the

holy order was given to annex two famous achievements of modernism—the high-rise building

and the jet aircraft—and use them for immolation and human sacrifice. The succeeding stage,

very plainly announced in hysterical sermons, was to be the moment when apocalyptic nihilists

coincided with Armageddon weaponry. Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as usefulor beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of

plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as a negation.

This book has been about the oldest argument in human history, but almost every week that

I was engaged in writing it, I was forced to break off and take part in the argument as it was

actually continuing.

These arguments tended to take ugly forms: I was not so often leaving my desk to go and

debate with some skillful old Jesuit at Georgetown, but rather hurrying out to show solidarity at

the embassy of Denmark, a small democratic country in northern Europe whose other

embassies were going up in smoke because of the appearance of a few caricatures in a

newspaper in Copenhagen. This last confrontation was an especially depressing one. Islamic

mobs were violating diplomatic immunity and issuing death threats against civilians, yet the

response from His Holiness the Pope and the archbishop of Canterbury was to condemn—the

cartoons! In my own profession, there was a rush to see who could capitulate the fastest, by

reporting on the disputed images without actually showing them. And this at a time when the

mass media has become almost exclusively picture-driven. Euphemistic noises were made about

the need to show “respect,” but I know quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for

a certainty that the chief motive for “restraint” was simple fear. In other words, a handful of

religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its

Western heartland. And in the year 2006, at that! To the ignoble motive of fear one must add

the morally lazy practice of relativism: no group of nonreligious people threatening and

practicing violence would have been granted such an easy victory, or had their excuses—not

that they offered any of their own—made for them.

Then again, on another day, one might open the newspaper to read that the largest study of

prayer ever undertaken had discovered yet again that there was no correlation of any kind

between “intercessory” prayer and the recovery of patients. (Well, perhaps some correlation:

patients who knew that prayers were being said for them had more postoperative

complications than those who did not, though I would not argue that this proved anything.)

Elsewhere, a group of dedicated and patient scientists had located, in a remote part of the

Canadian Arctic, several skeletons of a large fish that, 375 million years ago, exhibited the

precursor features of digits, proto-wrists, elbows, and shoulders. The Tiktaalik, named at the

suggestion of the local Nunavut people, joins the Archaeopteryx, a transitional form between

dinosaurs and birds, as one of the long-sought so-called missing links that are helping us to

enlighten ourselves about our true nature. Meanwhile, the hoarse proponents of “intelligent

design” would be laying siege to yet another school board, demanding that tripe be taught to

children. In my mind, these contrasting events began to take on the characteristics of a race: a

tiny step forward by scholarship and reason; a huge menacing lurch forward by the forces of

barbarism—the people who know they are right and who wish to instate, as Robert Lowell once

phrased it in another context, “a reign of piety and iron.”

Religion even boasts a special branch of itself, devoted to the study of the end. It calls itself

“eschatology,” and broods incessantly on the passing away of all earthly things. This death cult

refuses to abate, even though we have every reason to think that “earthly things” are all that

we have, or are ever going to have. Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of

discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person

access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near

miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures.

Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the

blood sacrifice. The late Stephen Jay Gould generously wrote that science and religion belong to

“non-overlapping magisteria.” They most certainly do not overlap, but this does not mean that

they are not antagonistic.Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no

longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total

command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and

retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it

will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and

obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select

the worse of the two. Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving

cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which

constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false

promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of

wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season

fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh

and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit.

Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the

proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not

need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and

exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of

literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it

deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt

and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to

masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and

development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life

and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole

condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first

time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.

However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will

develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our

prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs

and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,”

said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this

project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.