In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is

the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When

daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides.

—HEINRICH HEINE, GEDANKEN UND EINFALLE

I n the fall of 2001 I was in Calcutta with the magnificent photographer Sebastião Salgado, a

Brazilian genius whose studies with the camera have made vivid the lives of migrants, war

victims, and those workers who toil to extract primary products from mines and quarries and

forests. On this occasion, he was acting as an envoy of UNICEF and promoting his cause as a

crusader—in the positive sense of that term—against the scourge of polio. Thanks to the work

of inspired and enlightened scientists like Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk, it is now possible to

immunize children against this ghastly malady for a negligible cost: the few cents or pennies

that it takes to administer two drops of oral vaccine to the mouth of an infant. Advances in

medicine had managed to put the fear of smallpox behind us, and it was confidently expected

that another year would do the same for polio. Humanity itself had seemingly united on this

proposition. In several countries, including El Salvador, warring combatants had proclaimed

cease-fires in order to allow the inoculation teams to move freely. Extremely poor and

backward countries had mustered the resources to get the good news to every village: no more

children need be killed, or made useless and miserable, by this hideous disease. Back home in

Washington, where that year many people were still fearfully staying indoors after the trauma

of 9/11, my youngest daughter was going dauntlessly door to door on Halloween, piping “Trick

or Treat for UNICEF” and healing or saving, with every fistful of small change, children she would

never meet. One had that rare sense of participating in an entirely positive enterprise.

The people of Bengal, and particularly the women, were enthusiastic and inventive. I

remember one committee meeting, where staunch Calcutta hostesses planned without

embarrassment to team up with the city’s prostitutes to spread the word into the farthest

corners of society. Bring your children, no questions asked, and let them swallow the two drops

of fluid. Someone knew of an elephant a few miles out of town that might be hired to lead a

publicity parade. Everything was going well: in one of the poorest cities and states of the world

there was to be a new start. And then we began to hear of a rumor. In some outlying places,

Muslim die-hards were spreading the story that the droplets were a plot. If you took this sinister

Western medicine, you would be stricken by impotence and diarrhea (a forbidding and

depressing combination).

This was a problem, because the drops have to be administered twice—the second time as a

booster and confirmation of immunity—and because it takes only a few uninoculated people to

allow the disease to survive and revive, and to spread back through contact and the watersupply. As with smallpox, eradication must be utter and complete. I wondered as I left Calcutta if

West Bengal would manage to meet the deadline and declare itself polio-free by the end of the

next year. That would leave only pockets of Afghanistan and one or two other inaccessible

regions, already devastated by religious fervor, before we could say that another ancient

tyranny of illness had been decisively overthrown.

In 2005 I learned of one outcome. In northern Nigeria—a country that had previously

checked in as provisionally polio-free—a group of Islamic religious figures issued a ruling, or

fatwa, that declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States (and, amazingly,

the United Nations) against the Muslim faith. The drops were designed, said these mullahs, to

sterilize the true believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow

them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back, and not just in northern

Nigeria. Nigerian travelers and pilgrims had already taken it as far as Mecca, and spread it back

to several other polio-free countries, including three African ones and also faraway Yemen. The

entire boulder would have to be rolled back right up to the top of the mountain.

You may say that this is an “isolated” case, which would be a grimly apt way of putting it. But

you would be mistaken. Would you care to see my video of the advice given by Cardinal Alfonso

Lopez de Trujillo, the vatican’s president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, carefully

warning his audience that all condoms are secretly made with many microscopic holes, through

which the AIDS virus can pass? Close your eyes and try to picture what you might say if you had

the authority to inflict the greatest possible suffering in the least number of words. Consider the

damage that such a dogma has caused: presumably those holes permit the passage of other

things too, which rather destroys the point of a condom in the first place. To make such a

statement in Rome is wicked enough. But translate the message into the language of poor and

stricken countries and see what happens. During carnival season in Brazil, the auxiliary bishop

of Rio de Janeiro, Rafael Llano Cifuentes, told his congregation in a sermon that “the church is

against condom use. Sexual relations between a man and a woman have to be natural. I have

never seen a little dog using a condom during sexual intercourse with another dog.” Senior

clerical figures in several other countries—Cardinal Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua, the

archbishop of Nairobi in Kenya, Cardinal Emmanuel Wamala of Uganda—have all told their

flocks that condoms transmit AIDS. Cardinal Wamala, indeed, has opined that women who die

of AIDS rather than employ latex protection should be considered as martyrs (though

presumably this martyrdom must take place within the confines of marriage).

The Islamic authorities have been no better and sometimes worse. In 1995, the Council of

Ulemas in Indonesia urged that condoms only be made available to married couples, and on

prescription. In Iran, a worker found to be HIV-positive can lose his job, and doctors and

hospitals have the right to refuse treatment to AIDS patients. An official of Pakistan’s AIDS

Control Program told Foreign Policy magazine in 2005 that the problem was smaller in his

country because of “better social and Islamic values.” This, in a state where the law allows a

woman to be sentenced to be gang-raped in order to expiate the “shame” of a crime committed

by her brother. This is the old religious combination of repression and denial: a plague like AIDS

is assumed to be unmentionable because the teachings of the Koran are enough in themselves

to inhibit premarital intercourse, drug use, adultery, and prostitution. Even a very brief visit to,

say, Iran, will demonstrate the opposite. It is the mullahs themselves who profit from hypocrisy

by licensing “temporary marriages,” in which wedding certificates are available for a few hours,

sometimes in specially designated houses, with a divorce declaration ready to hand at the

conclusion of business. You could almost call it prostitution...The last time I was offered such a

bargain it was just outside the ugly shrine to the Ayatollah Khomeini in south Tehran. But veiled

and burqa-clad women, infected by their husbands with the virus, are expected to die in silence.

It is a certainty that millions of other harmless and decent people will die, very miserably andquite needlessly, all over the world as a result of this obscurantism.

The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always

necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even

believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will

always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have often been

fiercely resisted for that reason. What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any

poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or

mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist

turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when school-teachers get hold of elementary

telescopes. Plagues of antiquity were held to be punishment from the gods, which did much to

strengthen the hold of the priesthood and much to encourage the burning of infidels and

heretics who were thought—in an alternative explanation—to be spreading disease by witchcraft

or else poisoning the wells.

We may make allowances for the orgies of stupidity and cruelty that were indulged in before

humanity had a clear concept of the germ theory of disease. Most of the “miracles” of the New

Testament have to do with healing, which was of such great importance in a time when even

minor illness was often the end. (Saint Augustine himself said that he would not have believed in

Christianity if it were not for the miracles.) Scientific critics of religion such as Daniel Dennett

have been generous enough to point out that apparently useless healing rituals may even have

helped people get better, in that we know how important morale can be in aiding the body to

fight injury and infection. But that would be an excuse only available in retrospect. By the time

Dr. Jenner had discovered that a cowpox vaccine could ward off smallpox, this excuse had

become void. Yet Timothy Dwight, a president of Yale University and to this day one of

America’s most respected “divines,” was opposed to the smallpox vaccination because he

regarded it as an interference with god’s design. And this mentality is still heavily present, long

after its pretext and justification in human ignorance has vanished.

It is interesting, and suggestive, that the archbishop of Rio makes his analogy with dogs.

They do not trouble to roll on a condom: who are we to quarrel with their fidelity to “nature”? In

the recent division in the Anglican Church over homosexuality and ordination, several bishops

made the fatuous point that homosexuality is “unnatural” because it does not occur in other

species. Leave aside the fundamental absurdity of this observation: are humans part of

“nature” or not? Or, if they chance to be homosexual, are they created in god’s image or not?

Leave aside the well-attested fact that numberless kinds of birds and mammals and primates

do engage in homosexual play. Who are the clerics to interpret nature? They have shown

themselves quite unable to do so. A condom is, quite simply, a necessary but not a sufficient

condition for avoiding the transmission of AIDS. All qualified authorities, including those who

state that abstinence is even better, are agreed on this. Homosexuality is present in all societies,

and its incidence would appear to be part of human “design.” We must perforce confront these

facts as we find them. We now know that the bubonic plague was spread not by sin or moral

backsliding but by rats and fleas. Archbishop Lancelot Andrewes, during the celebrated “Black

Death” in London in 1665, noticed uneasily that the horror fell upon those who prayed and kept

the faith as well as upon those who did not. He came perilously close to stumbling upon a real

point. As I was writing this chapter, an argument broke out in my hometown of Washington, D.C.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as a sexually transmitted infection that,

at its worst, can cause cervical cancer in women. A vaccine is now available—these days,

vaccines are increasingly swiftly developed—not to cure this malady but to immunize women

against it. But there are forces in the administration who oppose the adoption of this measure

on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer

in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on astone altar and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.

We do not know how many people in Africa have died or will die because of the AIDS virus,

which was isolated and became treatable, in a great feat of humane scientific research, very

soon after it made its lethal appearance. On the other hand, we do know that having sex with a

virgin—one of the more popular local “cures”—does not in fact prevent or banish the infection.

And we also know that the use of condoms can at least contribute, as a form of prophylaxis, to

the limitation and containment of the virus. We are not dealing, as early missionaries might

have liked to believe, with witch doctors and savages who resist the boons that the missionaries

bring. We are instead dealing with the Bush administration, which, in a supposedly secular

republic in the twenty-first century, refuses to share its foreign aid budget with charities and

clinics that offer advice on family planning. At least two major and established religions, with

millions of adherents in Africa, believe that the cure is much worse than the disease. They also

harbor the belief that the AIDS plague is in some sense a verdict from heaven upon sexual

deviance—in particular upon homosexuality. A single stroke of Ockham’s potent razor

eviscerates this half-baked savagery: female homosexuals not only do not contract AIDS

(except if they are unlucky with a transfusion or a needle), they are also much freer of all

venereal infection than even heterosexuals. Yet clerical authorities persistently refuse to be

honest about even the existence of the lesbian. In doing so, they further demonstrate that

religion continues to pose an urgent threat to public health.

I pose a hypothetical question. As a man of some fifty-seven years of age, I am discovered

sucking the penis of a baby boy. I ask you to picture your own outrage and revulsion. Ah, but I

have my explanation all ready. I am a mohel: an appointed circumciser and foreskin remover.

My authority comes from an ancient text, which commands me to take a baby boy’s penis in my

hand, cut around the prepuce, and complete the action by taking his penis in my mouth, sucking

off the foreskin, and spitting out the amputated flap along with a mouthful of blood and saliva.

This practice has been abandoned by most Jews, either because of its unhygienic nature or its

disturbing associations, but it still persists among the sort of Hasidic fundamentalists who hope

for the Second Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. To them, the primitive rite of the peri’ah

metsitsah is part of the original and unbreakable covenant with god. In New York City in the

year 2005, the ritual, as performed by a fifty-seven-year-old mohel, was found to have given

genital herpes to several small boys, and to have caused the deaths of at least two of them. In

normal circumstances, the disclosure would have led the public health department to forbid the

practice and the mayor to denounce it. But in the capital of the modern world, in the first

decade of the twenty-first century, such was not the case. Instead, Mayor Bloomberg overrode

the reports by distinguished Jewish physicians who had warned of the danger of the custom,

and told his health care bureaucracy to postpone any verdict. The crucial thing, he said, was to

be sure that the free exercise of religion was not being infringed. In a public debate with Peter

Steinfels, the liberal Catholic “religion editor” of the New York Times, I was told the same thing.

It happened to be election year in New York for the mayor, which often explains a lot. But

this pattern recurs in other denominations and other states and cities, as well as in other

countries. Across a wide swath of animist and Muslim Africa, young girls are subjected to the hell

of circumcision and infibulation, which involves the slicing off of the labia and the clitoris, often

with a sharp stone, and then the stitching up of the vaginal opening with strong twine, not to be

removed until it is broken by male force on the bridal night. Compassion and biology allow for a

small aperture to be left, meanwhile, for the passage of menstrual blood. The resulting stench,

pain, humiliation, and misery exceed anything that can be easily imagined, and inevitably result

in infection, sterility, shame, and the death of many women and babies in childbirth. No society

would tolerate such an insult to its womanhood and therefore to its survival if the foul practice

was not holy and sanctified. But then, no New Yorker would permit atrocities against infants ifnot for the same consideration. Parents professing to believe the nonsensical claims of

“Christian Science” have been accused, but not always convicted, of denying urgent medical

care to their offspring. Parents who imagine themselves to be “Jehovah’s Witnesses” have

refused permission for their children to receive blood transfusions. Parents who imagine that a

man named Joseph Smith was led to a set of buried golden tablets have married their under

age “Mormon” daughters to favored uncles and brothers-in-law, who sometimes have older

wives already. The Shia fundamentalists in Iran lowered the age of “consent” to nine, perhaps in

admiring emulation of the age of the youngest “wife” of the “Prophet” Muhammad. Hindu child

brides in India are flogged, and sometimes burned alive, if the pathetic dowry they bring is

judged to be too small. The Vatican, and its vast network of dioceses, has in the past decade

alone been forced to admit complicity in a huge racket of child rape and child torture, mainly

but by no means exclusively homosexual, in which known pederasts and sadists were shielded

from the law and reassigned to parishes where the pickings of the innocent and defenseless

were often richer. In Ireland alone—once an unquestioning disciple of Holy Mother Church—it is

now estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the

minority.

Now, religion professes a special role in the protection and instruction of children. “Woe to

him,” says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “who harms a child.”

The New Testament has Jesus informing us that one so guilty would be better off at the bottom

of the sea, and with a millstone around his neck at that. But both in theory and in practice,

religion uses the innocent and the defenseless for the purposes of experiment. By all means let

an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That

would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or

their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let

Abraham offer to commit filicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he

was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of

medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means—for all I care—let a priest sworn to

celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in

whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she

bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch

breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even

the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin.

I do not set myself up as a moral exemplar, and would be swiftly knocked down if I did, but if

I was suspected of raping a child, or torturing a child, or infecting a child with venereal disease,

or selling a child into sexual or any other kind of slavery, I might consider committing suicide

whether I was guilty or not. If I had actually committed the offense, I would welcome death in

any form that it might take. This revulsion is innate in any healthy person, and does not need to

be taught. Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral

and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at

least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured,

and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are

quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is—because it

claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral. The

ignorant psychopath or brute who mistreats his children must be punished but can be

understood. Those who claim a heavenly warrant for the cruelty have been tainted by evil, and

also constitute far more of a danger.

IN THE CITY OF JERUSALEM, there is a special ward in the mental hospital for those who represent a

special danger to themselves and others. These deluded patients are the sufferers from the

“Jerusalem syndrome.” Police and security officers are trained to recognize them, though theirmania is often concealed behind a mask of deceptively beatific calm. They have come to the

holy city in order to announce themselves as the Messiah or redeemer, or to proclaim the end of

days. The connection between religious faith and mental disorder is, from the viewpoint of the

tolerant and the “multicultural,” both very obvious and highly unmentionable. If someone

murders his children and then says that god ordered him to do it, we might find him not guilty

by reason of insanity but he would be incarcerated nonetheless. If someone lives in a cave and

claims to be seeing visions and experiencing prophetic dreams, we may leave him alone until he

turns out to be planning, in a nonphantasmal way, the joy of suicide bombing. If someone

announces himself to be god’s anointed, and begins stockpiling Kool-Aid and weapons and

helping himself to the wives and daughters of his acolytes, we raise a bit more than a skeptical

eyebrow. But if these things can be preached under the protection of an established religion, we

are expected to take them at face value. All three monotheisms, just to take the most salient

example, praise Abraham for being willing to hear voices and then to take his son Isaac for a

long and rather mad and gloomy walk. And then the caprice by which his murderous hand is

finally stayed is written down as divine mercy.

The relationship between physical health and mental health is now well understood to have a

strong connection to the sexual function, or dysfunction. Can it be a coincidence, then, that all

religions claim the right to legislate in matters of sex? The principal way in which believers inflict

on themselves, on each other, and on nonbelievers, has always been their claim to monopoly in

this sphere. Most religions (with the exception of the few cults that actually permit or encourage

it) do not have to bother much with enforcing the taboo on incest. Like murder and theft, this is

usually found to be abhorrent to humans without any further explanation. But merely to survey

the history of sexual dread and proscription, as codified by religion, is to be met with a very

disturbing connection between extreme prurience and extreme repression. Almost every sexual

impulse has been made the occasion for prohibition, guilt, and shame. Manual sex, oral sex, anal

sex, non–missionary position sex: to name it is to discover a fearsome ban upon it. Even in

modern and hedonistic America, several states legally define “sodomy” as that which is not

directed at face-to-face heterosexual procreation.

This raises gigantic objections to the argument from “design,” whether we choose to call that

design “intelligent” or not. Clearly, the human species is designed to experiment with sex. No less

clearly, this fact is well-known to the priesthoods. When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the

first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old

ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response

which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up—contains

almost all that needs to be said on this point. Orthodox Jews may not conduct congress by

means of a hole in the sheet, but they do subject their women to ritual baths to cleanse the

stain of menstruation. Muslims subject adulterers to public lashings with a whip. Christians used

to lick their lips while examining women for signs of witchcraft. I need not go on in this vein: any

reader of this book will know of a vivid example, or will simply guess my meaning.

A consistent proof that religion is man-made and anthropomorphic can also be found in the

fact that it is usually “man” made, in the sense of masculine, as well. The holy book in the

longest continuous use—the Talmud—commands the observant one to thank his maker every

day that he was not born a woman. (This raises again the insistent question: who but a slave

thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him?) The

Old Testament, as Christians condescendingly call it, has woman cloned from man for his use

and comfort. The New Testament has Saint Paul expressing both fear and contempt for the

female. Throughout all religious texts, there is a primitive fear that half the human race is

simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also a temptation to sin that is impossible to

resist. Perhaps this explains the hysterical cult of virginity and of a Virgin, and the dread of thefemale form and of female reproductive functions? And there may be someone who can explain

the sexual and other cruelties of the religious without any reference to the obsession with

celibacy, but that someone will not be me. I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless

prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come: it is like

seeing through the “let’s pretend” of a child, but without the indulgence that comes from

watching the innocent at play. The homicidal lunatics—rehearsing to be genocidal lunatics—of

9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate that, like so

many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins. Like monks of old, the fanatics are taken early

from their families, taught to despise their mothers and sisters, and come to adulthood without

ever having had a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman. This is

disease by definition. Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise—indeed it has never

been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all—but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic

and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the

same point in a different way.

ASPECIAL SUBGENRE of modern literature is the memoir of a man or woman who once underwent

a religious education. The modern world is now sufficiently secular for some of these authors to

attempt to be funny about what they underwent, and what they were expected to believe.

However, such books tend necessarily to be written by those with enough fortitude to have

survived the experience. We have no way to quantify the damage done by telling tens of

millions of children that masturbation will make them blind, or that impure thoughts will lead to

an eternity of torment, or that members of other faiths including members of their own families

will burn, or that venereal disease will result from kisses. Nor can we hope to quantify the

damage done by holy instructors who rammed home these lies and accompanied them with

floggings and rapes and public humiliations. Some of those who “rest in unvisited tombs” may

have contributed to the good of the world, but those who preached hatred and fear and guilt

and who ruined innumerable childhoods should have been thankful that the hell they preached

was only one among their wicked falsifications, and that they were not sent to rot there.

VIOLENT, IRRATIONAL, INTOLERANT, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance

and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized

religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. There is one more charge to be added to

the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the

destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it “looks forward” in the purely eschatological

sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur.

Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps

uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never

ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment. This has been a constant trope,

ever since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half

baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant. It stretches from the epistles of Saint Paul,

who clearly thought and hoped that time was running out for humanity, through the deranged

fantasies of the book of Revelation, which were at least memorably written by the alleged Saint

John the Divine on the Greek island of Patmos, to the best-selling pulp-fiction Left Behind series,

which, ostensibly “authored” by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, was apparently generated by

the old expedient of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor:


The blood continued to rise. Millions of birds flocked into the area and feasted on the

remains...and the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the

winepress, up to the horse’s bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.

This is sheer manic relish, larded with half-quotations. More reflectively, but hardly lessregrettably, it can be found in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which dwells on

the same winepress, and in Robert Oppenheimer’s murmur as he watched the first nuclear

detonation at Alamagordo, New Mexico, and heard himself quoting the Hindu epic the Bhagavad

Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One of the very many connections between

religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to

see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught. This tantrum-need is coupled

with two other sorts of “guilty joy,” or, as the Germans say, schadenfreude. First, one’s own

death is canceled—or perhaps repaid or compensated—by the obliteration of all others. Second,

it can always be egotistically hoped that one will be personally spared, gathered contentedly to

the bosom of the mass exterminator, and from a safe place observe the sufferings of those less

fortunate. Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive

account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator

and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless

contemplation of the tortures of the damned. He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the

man-made character of faith.

As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the

godly. The history of the cosmos begins, if we use the word “time” to mean anything at all,

about twelve billion years ago. (If we use the word “time” wrongly, we shall end up with the

infantile computation of the celebrated Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, who calculated

that the earth—“the earth” alone, mind you, not the cosmos—had its birthday on Saturday,

October 22, in 4004 BC, at six in the afternoon. This dating was endorsed by William Jennings

Bryan, a former American secretary of state and two-time Democratic presidential nominee, in

courtroom testimony in the third decade of the twentieth century.) The true age of the sun and

its orbiting planets—one of them destined to harbor life and all the others doomed to

lifelessness—is perhaps four and a half billion years and subject to revision. This particular

microscopic solar system most probably has at least that long again to run its fiery course: the

life expectancy of our sun is a solid five billion more years. However, mark your calendar. At

around that point, it will emulate millions of other suns and explosively mutate into a swollen

“red giant,” causing the earth’s oceans to boil and extinguishing all possibility of life in any form.

No description by any prophet or visionary has even begun to picture the awful intensity and

irrevocability of that moment. One has at least some pitiful self-centered reason not to fear

undergoing it: on current projections the biosphere will very probably have been destroyed by

different and slower sorts of warming and heating in the meantime. As a species on earth,

according to many sanguine experts, we do not have many more eons ahead of us.

With what contempt and suspicion, then, must one regard those who are not willing to wait,

and who beguile themselves and terrify others—especially the children, as usual—with horrific

visions of apocalypse, to be followed by stern judgment from the one who supposedly placed us

in this inescapable dilemma to begin with. We may laugh now at the foam-flecked hell-and

damnation preachers who loved to shrivel young souls with pornographic depictions of eternal

torture, but this phenomenon has reappeared in a more troubling form with the holy alliance

between the believers and what they can borrow or steal from the world of science. Here is

Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, a distinguished professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at

the University of Islamabad in Pakistan, writing about the frightening mentality which prevails in

his country—one of the world’s first states to define its very nationality by religion:

In a public debate on the eve of the Pakistani nuclear tests, the former chief of the

Pakistani army General Mirza Aslam Beg said: “We can make a first strike and a second

and even a third.” The prospect of nuclear war left him unmoved. “You can die crossing the

street,” he said, “or you could die in a nuclear war. You’ve got to die someday, anyway.”

India and Pakistan are largely traditional societies, where the fundamental belief structuredemands disempowerment and surrender to larger forces. A fatalistic Hindu belief that the

stars above determine our destiny, or the equivalent Muslim belief in kismet certainly

account for part of the problem.

I shall not disagree with the very brave Professor Hoodbhoy, who helped alert us to the fact

that there were several secret bin Laden supporters among the bureaucrats of the Pakistani

nuclear program, and who also exposed the wild fanatics within that system who hoped to

harness the power of the mythical djinns, or desert devils, for military purposes. In his world, the

enemies are mainly Muslims and Hindus. But within the “Judeo-Christian” world also, there are

those who like to fantasize about a final conflict and embellish the vision with mushroom

shaped clouds. It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and

the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated

products to their sick dreams.

The death wish, or something not unlike it, may be secretly present in all of us. At the turn of

the year 1999 into 2000, many educated people talked and published infinite nonsense about a

series of possible calamities and dramas. This was no better than primitive numerology: in fact it

was slightly worse in that 2000 was only a number on Christian calendars and even the stoutest

defenders of the Bible story now admit that if Jesus was ever born it certainly wasn’t at

Christmas in the year dot. The occasion was nothing more than an odometer for idiots, who

sought the cheap thrill of impending doom. But religion makes such impulses legitimate, and

claims the right to officiate at the end of life, just as it hopes to monopolize children at life’s

beginning. There can be no doubt that the cult of death and the insistence upon portents of the

end proceed from a surreptitious desire to see it happen, and to put an end to the anxiety and

doubt that always threaten the hold of faith. When the earthquake hits, or the tsunami

inundates, or the twin towers ignite, you can see and hear the secret satisfaction of the faithful.

Gleefully they strike up: “You see, this is what happens when you don’t listen to us!” With an

unctuous smile they offer a redemption that is not theirs to bestow and, when questioned, put

on the menacing scowl that says, “Oh, so you reject our offer of paradise? Well, in that case we

have quite another fate in store for you.” Such love! Such care!

The element of the wish for obliteration can be seen without disguise in the millennial sects

of our own day, who betray their selfishness as well as their nihilism by announcing how many

will be “saved” from the ultimate catastrophe. Here the extreme Protestants are almost as much

at fault as the most hysterical Muslims. In 1844, one of the greatest American religious “revivals”

occurred, led by a semiliterate lunatic named William Miller. Mr. Miller managed to crowd the

mountaintops of America with credulous fools who (having sold their belongings cheap) became

persuaded that the world would end on October 22 that year. They removed themselves to high

ground—what difference did they expect that to make?—or to the roofs of their hovels. When

the ultimate failed to arrive, Miller’s choice of terms was highly suggestive. It was, he

announced, “The Great Disappointment.” In our own time, Mr. Hal Lindsey, author of the best

selling The Late Great Planet Earth, has betrayed the same thirst for extinction. Indulged by

senior American conservatives and respectfully interviewed on TV, Mr. Lindsey once dated the

start of “The Tribulation”—a seven-year period of strife and terror—for 1988. This would have

produced Armageddon itself (the closure of “The Tribulation”) in 1995. Mr. Lindsey may be a

charlatan, but it is a certainty that he and his followers suffer from a persistent feeling of

anticlimax.

Antibodies to fatalism and suicide and masochism do exist, however, and are just as innate in

our species. There is a celebrated story from Puritan Massachusetts in the late eighteenth

century. During a session of the state legislature, the sky suddenly became leaden and overcast

at midday. Its threatening aspect—a darkness at noon—convinced many legislators that the

event so much on their clouded minds was imminent. They asked to suspend business and gohome to die. The speaker of the assembly, Abraham Davenport, managed to keep his nerve and

dignity. “Gentlemen,” he said, “either the Day of Judgment is here or it is not. If it is not, there is

no occasion for alarm and lamentation. If it is, however, I wish to be found doing my duty. I

move, therefore, that candles be brought.” In his own limited and superstitious day, this was the

best that Mr. Davenport could do. Nonetheless, I second his motion.