Religion doesn’t always have to be maleficent. I’m sure it can be valuable when it preaches a ‘good’ morality, and as a comfort to those confused and distressed by the complexities of everyday human life, or by mere contemplation of – for example – the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. Gods are something to hold on to; to make sense of things. But they must be Gods we choose. In other words, religion must always be personal, and not insisted upon by higher powers.

I think the ancient Greeks, Romans and Nordics had it about right when they posited a multiplicity of Gods, representing different values, and rival claims. The rot began with the rise of monotheism – ‘thou shalt have no other gods but me’ – which, as I understand it, was the distinctive contribution of Judaism. (I may be wrong about that.) Both Christianity and Islam took this on. It seemed simpler and more rational than the comic book cast of flawed super-heroes favoured previously by most religions, and consequently was easier to swallow.

But there were downsides. One was that non-believers in your particular ‘I am the Lord thy God’ could be cast as heretics, and so oppressed. (I don’t think anyone was oppressed for not believing in Odin or Mithras. Again, I may be wrong.) That gave rise to – or at least was used to justify – conquest. The more humane alternative to conquest was proselytism, by people like – in my scholarly field – the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, whose chief motive was to bring poor benighted Africans into the embrace of everybody’s loving God. (He broadly failed, by the way.) In the case of Judaism – which I believe is not a proselytising religion – it emphasised the special situation of people born as Jews as the ‘chosen people’ of God. That of course was supposed to mark them off from other peoples, and in a way to privilege them. It also gave them something of a ‘tribal’ identity; repeated more loosely in other religiously-defined groups, like the Catholic and Protestant ‘tribes’ of Northern Ireland, and various ‘racial’ communities all over the world. At the root of all these enterprises was this insistence that there was only one God, yours; allegiance to whom trumped every other consideration.

This was exacerbated when religions became organised, with sacred texts, creeds, holy days, hierarchies and forms of worship, meeting collectively in churches, mosques, temples or synagogues, and in many cases identified with actual or putative nations, which gave them a political clout that a merely personal religious faith could never wield. It is these forms of religion that have, broadly speaking, caused (or bolstered) so much of the harm in history that is often attributed to religion pur, but is really mainly the fault of the organised, proselytising and monotheistic sort.

That’s enough about God. You’ll have realised that I’m no theologian. Back down to earth next time, now that I’m back to proper blogging.