CHARLES WOOLEY

According to the 2016 Census, a third of Australia’s population identify as having no religion. Although many on this island worship at the Mona tabernacle, we are actually the most sceptical state. Forty-seven per cent of Tasmanians do not believe in God and I’m one of them. I consider myself a sceptical, rational, evidence-based person – except, of course, when I’m not.

UFOs, ghosts and goblins, along with religion, all go into a large wastebasket of stuff I have no time for. As a rational person I can’t even be bothered arguing with people crazy enough to believe such things. (Don’t write in. I won’t read it.) In fact, I wouldn’t give religion a second thought were it not for the fact that its rival adherents are flat-out killing each other as well as us nonbelievers.

I was watching the aftermath of the recent Manchester bombing on TV when there came a knock on the door. I answered it to find two conservatively dressed and smiling women, one young and the other considerably older. I got in first. “Ah, religious people?” They agreed this was the case, but before they could tout their sectarian wares I explained politely I wasn’t interested and closed the door. Perhaps I should have told them: “I am watching Manchester on the news and you have come uninvited, pedalling your medieval superstitions at the worst possible time. Even at the best of times I find it annoying that you insult my intelligence with nonsense you should properly keep to yourself. Presumably you are not doing this for my benefit so much as to get yourself a little higher up your imagined stairway to heaven. But at a time innocent children have just been killed by a religious maniac, I really don’t want to hear from any of you.”

Of course, I didn’t say that. I only thought it. But was that really too harsh? They would’ve probably claimed they weren’t religious maniacs but (presumably) Christians. And I would have replied that I vividly remember Christians indiscriminately blowing up civilians during the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. They believed God was on their side and so any atrocity was justified. And then my missionaries would have argued that their god was a god of love and I would have argued that the fanatics would have said that, too. And so it would have gone, back and forth all morning to no point. They would have quoted apocryphal texts and in return I would have quoted Emerson’s assertion that “religion is a disease of the intellect”. And because we come from different planets, they would have asked: “Who is Emerson?” That was why I politely closed the door. You can’t argue with zealotry and blind faith any more than you can argue with the Lindt Cafe siege’s Man Monis or with Manchester’s equally crazy Salman Abedi.

The problem in Western society is that somehow we must have rational discussion with the irrational or it is only going to get a whole lot worse. There seems little doubt now that Manchester is coming to Australia and it’s too late to stop it.

Not for a moment am I saying all believers will kill you for their faith but clearly all people who kill for faith are believers, though probably deranged. What is common to moderates and extremists in Islam, as in Christianity and most other religions that divide humanity, is a belief in life after death.

At the extreme, it manifests in Islamic State’s frightening doctrine of fanatical hatred: “As you love life so we love death.” But from Roman times through to the Middle Ages, Christian martyrs often made similar declarations of indifference to this life. It is the mindset of self-sacrifice that allows a deluded young man with his whole life before him to blow himself up and take a large number of innocent people with him.

Abedi believed he would live on after death and be able to see the earthly consequences of his actions while enjoying the rewards of paradise. In the afterlife, the martyr gets to sit beside his god and look down upon the rest of us. Sound familiar?

Even my annoying – but, I hope, fairly harmless door-to-door proselytisers – probably believe in a similar reward for their rebuffed efforts at my doorstep. So perhaps I shouldn’t feel too bad.

Nor is state-imposed atheism ever the answer. It merely replaces one irrational dogma with another, as is clearly defined by the death in Shenyang last week of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

I find the death of this brave man almost too depressing to write about. After 11 years in prison he is lauded in the West but unknown in his own country.

Everywhere it seems the dark tide of fanaticism is rising. How ever will we stem it? Perhaps it’s time for rational people to start knocking on doors.