On the local London news a few minutes ago, there was a short item about four religious leaders “coming together in solidarity” to show their resistance to the trouble in the Middle East. Of course, it was supposed to be a show of unity, about people coming together in spite of their faith. Yet I feel compelled to come back to my blog to point out the perverse, even sickening irony of such ‘gestures’. It is faith/religion which caused the horrific conflict we’re currently witnessing in the first place. Religion divides humanity; it splits us into one group or another, depending on which set of myths people are convinced to believe. These groups are lead by people who insist we believe such stories without question, using them as sources of baseless authority so that they can tell us what to think and how to act. If nobody believed such stories, if nobody listened to such preachers, the groups and the divisions between them would not exist.

Thus for these religious leaders – an imam, priest and rabbi – to come on the evening news and try to preach to us about unity is not only ironic but profoundly hypocritical: such people maintain our divisions; they need such splits in humanity in order to keep controlling us. Moreover, by arguing that faith offers any form of solution to the current conflict, they are using, even usurping, it to reinforce their authority as religious leaders, something I find utterly cynical, even perverse. They said they wanted peace, but rather than offering any solution, they are the very problem.