Despite the evidence, why do we insist religion is about peace and tolerance?

When you’re almost stark naked, it’s difficult to get a good grip of your busby.

I can vouch for this because of driving past the British Embassy. The embassy has a front gate so ugly, it looks like it was bought on the cheap from the Lubyanka. In front of it, last Friday, were half a dozen undressed protesters.

They weren’t starkers, but if they’d had any fewer garments on, it would have amounted to indecent exposure or a very slow streak. As it was, the flesh on display was extremely pleasing to the journalist (from another newspaper) in the car with me.

He had been singing the Ballad of Lucy Jordan, but the semi-naked women outside the embassy made him lose his words. And his composure.

Two of the semi-naked men looked as if they were playing that old party game where two people facing each other try to nudge an apple up to mouth level without using their hands. These two guys, bare-naked except for black thongs, seemed to have substituted a baby bear for the apple.

The baby bear was actually a busby that had started to fall off one of them.

The second guy had advanced his chest to stop the busby hitting the ground, locking the two men in a near-embrace which made one of the semi-naked girls laugh. You don’t laugh if you’re wearing a busby. It fell off backwards, but, because of the neck-strap, stayed sticking out from her head at the back. She went in a circle trying to catch it, in the process delivering a busby-blow in the kisser to each of the two other girls.

At this point, the traffic lights changed and I had to drive on. Pity. It had been quite a show, and the weather was perfect for it. Face it — if you get taken by the sudden urge to strip, grab a busby the size of Derek Davis and go protest outside the British Embassy, it’s best done on a warm sunny Indian summer afternoon. Which it was.

Pictures of strippers with busbies, appearing in the papers later, established they were from PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

If they stuck to getting their kit off and borrowing the odd busby, PETA would be no problem. But people with religion never satisfy themselves with dressing up and expressing their beliefs — and PETA is a modern religion. Just as the Puritans forced adulterous women to wear the letter A, PETA associates throw paint over women wearing fur, to shame them in front of the world. They’re tough on apostates, too. Whenever a model like Naomi Campbell appears in one of their posters attacking fur-wearing and later backslides into a mink coat, as far as they’re concerned, she’s condemned herself to hell for all eternity.

You can, of course, be for animals without it amounting to a religion.

One of my colleagues at work, for example, won’t eat or wear anything that once had a face. He won’t even don leather shoes.

But he doesn’t proselytise, because it’s a personal conviction with him, rather than a religion. If you want to wear shoes or clothes made from recent roadkill or the skin of the next-door-neighbour’s toy poodle, that’s fine with him.

PETA, on the other hand, is very much a religion, and it gets for its members the irrational admiration we tend to have for believers.

Our ancestors condemned the Godless as pagans and heathens. Our parents dismissed a large swatch of the world’s population as Godless communists. We somehow feel that believing in religion is what distinguishes humanity from the other lot.

Yet the fact is that more violence and oppression derives from passionate belief in God than from any other source.

Believers in God start off by killing people who don’t believe in God. The extermination of species was patented by the monks and priests and armies who took the good news of the Gospel across the Atlantic to the New World, spearing, shooting and burning whole races who weren’t immediately interested in it. Even those native populations pacific enough to convert were killed, albeit unintentionally, by the diseases the missionaries brought with them.

Believers then move on to killing people who believe in the wrong God. The Crusades are remembered within Islam the way the Holocaust is remembered by Jews: as a bitter murderous effort to destroy a religion and its adherents by triumphalist Christians.

The final variant is when believers slay other believers in the right God.

As Richard Whelan points out in his book Al-Qaedaism: The Threat to Islam, The Threat to the World, more Muslims have been killed by other Muslims down through the centuries than have been killed by Christians, even though Christians have devoted enormous persistence, people and fire-power to the task.

So why is it that we insist that religion is a good thing? How do we convince ourselves, in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary from all over the world, that religion is about peace and tolerance and love, and that without God the world would go to hell in a hand- basket? Big brains have helped create that belief. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is all about the dangers of moral nihilism. The central message is that, in the absence of God, everything evil is permitted.

The problem with this thesis is that history and the present demonstrate the opposite: the presence of God means everything evil is permitted.

Passionate belief in God empowers believers not only to break the laws made by humans, but to break the laws made by the God they claim to believe in.

This reality gets watered down by apologists who would like everybody to believe that the vast bulk of believers are good and only a tiny minority of “fundamentalists” who don’t really understand Islam do evil deeds.

That theory feeds our eagerness to be tolerant towards other God-believers and to show interest in their beliefs.

We’re not tolerant at all towards atheists and never show interest in their beliefs or lack of them. We figure that without God in their lives, like a GPS gadget on the dashboard, they find their way only by luck. No credit to them.

Now, unlike Christianity or Juddaism, atheism is not always inherited.

It’s usually decided. Opted for by people brought up in a religious tradition. To so opt requires courage. To opt and then not seek converts requires restraint. (Atheists don’t usually go knocking on doors like Mormons seeking to expand their membership.) To opt to be an atheist and then live an exemplary life, is simple virtue. Atheists do good just because it’s the right thing to do. Not because God is watching, ready to punish or reward in the Hereafter.

We have Holy Days for saints. We have Bank Holidays for banks. We have May Day for the labour force. We have hymns and headscarves and pilgrimages.

In the interests of true diversity, how about an un-Holy Day, where we all down tools, eschew references to our respective faiths and listen to the interesting dispersed minority who don’t want to kill any of us in the name of God?