I Don't Believe What You Believe

I’ll never forget the day I learned why Protestants and Catholics hate each other. Especially because, when you think about it, they share a lot of common ground. 

Both Catholics and Protestants believe that the omnipotent creator of the universe is concerned about what and who you do in the privacy of your bedroom. They believe that the roughly 8.7 million animal species on Earth lived together on a wooden boat, for forty days, without incident. They believe this God of love condemns people to an eternity of fiery torment because they failed to believe in him without evidence.

And yet, aside from some minor quibbles about the existence of purgatory and the divine authority of the pope, there’s one detail they just can’t agree on. 

During the sacrament known as Holy Communion, the priest takes wine and thin wafers of unleavened bread, blesses them, and gives them to the congregation. 

Protestants believe that the bread and wine are symbols of Christ’s flesh and blood. Representations of the sacrifice he made on the Cross. 

Whereas Catholics believe that through a process called transubstantiation, the bread and wine literally transform into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. 

This disagreement has cost the lives of somewhere between 4 and 8 million soldiers and civilians. Families have been torn apart, borders have been rent asunder, toasters have been misplaced. All because of a cracker. 

And worst of all, the God that instigated all of this could have set the record straight whenever he liked. But because he refused to come down from his cloud and talk, his followers couldn’t be sure who was still sane. 

---

In 2018, during a discussion about good and bad ideas, Douglas Murray warned that, “we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing worse than religion is its absence.”

It's hard not to see his point. 

Over the past few years, we've fallen prey to several political and social phenomena that have all the features of religion, but none of the limitations. No separation of church and state. No moral codes enforced by fear of divine retribution. No funny robes or solemn vows of silence (oh, if only). Just fiercely held beliefs, impervious to logic and reason, that are treated as moral absolutes. 

Take, for example, the most recent incarnation of “antiracism.” Acolytes wash black people’s feet and go on bizarre, slavery-themed pilgrimages in search of forgiveness. 

“Whiteness” (or perhaps white privilege) is original sin, a stain that one can never escape, only confess. Black people are prophets, guided by the light of "lived experience" (unless they're the wrong kind of black person, obviously). And just like the church, any corruption can, and must, be scrupulously ignored. 

Or, as Abigail Shriner pointed out recently, there's the ministry of gender. 

Here, believers are baptised with new names and pronouns. Their old lives are washed away by the twin blasphemies of misgendering and "deadnaming.” Confused teenagers are sacrificial lambs. Detransitioners are apostates. And anybody who denies the claim that sex is a “spectrum” or that children can make life-altering decisions, or who points out that intersex conditions have nothing to do with trans people, is a heretic. 

Of course, these people are far from alone. Millions of people fiercely believe terrible ideas based on insufficient evidence. To a degree, we're all guilty of this. But the difference is, we don't force other people to believe, or even pretend to believe, what we believe.

Not so with these new social justice religions.

In 2019, 17-year-old Murray Allan was expelled from his school for saying there were only two genders. This has happened over and over again over the past few years.