Quote 2841

The 20th century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows no sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality- a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion...The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters- they are also misologists - haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations. This is the thrust of the greatest novel ever written, Ulysses, in which Joyce identifies Roman Catholicism, and anti-semitism, as fossilisations of dead prose and dead thought. - Martin Amis, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,725608,00.html