‘Or?’
Revelation shook his head. ‘There is no “or”, Uriah. Come, let us go back out into the church as we talk, I want to instruct you of all that belief in gods has done for humanity down the ages, the bloodshed, the horror and the persecution. I will tell you of this and you will see how damaging such belief is.’
‘And then what? You’ll be on your way?’
‘We both know that’s not what’s going to happen, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Uriah, draining the last of his drink. ‘We do.’
‘Let me tell you a story that happened many thousands of years ago,’ said Revelation.
They walked along the north transept of the church, coming to a set of spiral stairs that led to the upper cloisters. Revelation followed after Uriah, talking as he climbed. ‘It is a story of how a herd of gene-bred livestock caused the death of over nine hundred people.’
‘Did they stampede?’ asked Uriah.
‘No, it was a handful of half-starved creatures that escaped from their paddocks outside Xozer, a once-great city of the Nordafrik Conclaves.’
They reached the top of the stairs and began walking along the cloister, its confined walls dark and cold. Dust lay thick on the stone-flagged floor and a handful of thick candles that Uriah could not remember lighting guttered in iron sconces.
‘Xozer? I’ve been there,’ said Uriah. ‘At least I saw what my guide told me were its ruins.’
‘Quite possibly. Anyway, these hungry animals walked through a building holy to one of the many cults that called Xozer home. This cult, which was known as the Xozerites, believed that gene-bred meat was an affront to their god and they blamed a rival sect known as the Upashtar for the defilement. The Xozerites went on a rampage, stabbing and clubbing any Upashtar they could find. Of course, the Upashtar retaliated and rioting spread throughout the city and left close to a thousand people dead.’
‘Is there a point to that story?’ said Uriah, when Revelation did not continue.
‘Absolutely, it tells a universal tale and typifies religious behaviour that has been recurring since the beginning of human history.’
‘A slightly far-fetched example, Revelation. One freakish story cannot serve as a proof that belief in the divine is a bad thing. Such belief is the bedrock of moral order. It gives people the character they need to get through life. Without guidance from above, the world would descend into anarchy.’
‘Sadly, millions once held that view, Uriah, but that old truism just isn’t true. The record of human experience shows that where religion is strong, it causes cruelty. Intense beliefs produce intense hostility. Only when faith loses its force can a society hope to become humane.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Uriah, stopping by one of the arches in the cloister and looking down onto the nave. Dust swirled across the floor, blown by the storm winds chasing around the lonely church. ‘My holy book gives instruction on how to live a good life. It has lessons humanity needs.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Revelation. ‘I have read your holy book and much of it is bloody and vengeful. Would you live your life literally by its commandments, or do you view the people who populate its pages as exemplars of proper behaviour? Either way, I suspect the morals espoused would be horrifying to most people.’
Uriah shook his head. ‘You’re missing the point, Revelation. Much of the text is not meant to be taken literally, it is symbolic or allegorical.’
Revelation snapped his fingers. ‘That’s exactly my point. You pick and choose which bits of your book to take literally and which to read as symbolic, and that choosing is a matter of personal decision, not divinity. Trust me, in ages past, a frightening number of people took their holy books absolutely literally, causing untold misery and death because they truly believed the words they read. The history of religion is a horror story, Uriah, and if you doubt it, just look at what humanity has done in the name of their gods over the millennia.
‘Thousands of years ago, a bloody theocracy that venerated a feathered-serpent god rose in the Mayan jungles. To appease this vile god, its priests drowned maidens in sacred wells and cut out the hearts of children. They believed this serpent god had an earthly counterpart and the temple builders drove the first pile through a maiden’s body to pacify this non-existent creature.’
Uriah turned to Revelation in horror and said, ‘You can’t seriously compare my religion to such heathen barbarism?’
‘Can’t I?’ countered Revelation. ‘In the name of your religion, a holy man launched a war with the battle cry of “Deus Vult”, which means “god wills it” in one of the ancient tongues of Old Earth. His warriors were charged with destroying enemies in a far-off kingdom, but first they fell upon those in their own lands who opposed the war. Thousands were dragged from their homes and hacked to death or burned alive. Then, satisfied their homeland was secure, the zealous legions plundered their way thousands of miles to the holy city they were to liberate. Upon reaching it, they killed every inhabitant to “purify” the symbolic city of taint. I remember one of their leaders saying that he rode in blood up to the knees and even to his horse’s bridle, by the just and marvellous judgement of god.’
‘That is ancient history,’ said Uriah. ‘You cannot vouchsafe the truth of events so lost in the mists of time.’
‘If it were one event, I might agree with you,’ replied Revelation, ‘but just a hundred or so years later, another holy man declared war on a sect of his own church. His warriors laid siege to the sect’s stronghold in ancient Franc, and when the city fell his generals asked their leader how they might tell the faithful from the traitor among the captives. This man, who followed your god, ordered the warriors to “Kill them all. God will know His own”. Nearly twenty thousand men, women and children were slaughtered.
‘Worst of all, the hunt for any that had escaped the siege led to the establishment of an organisation known as the Inquisition, a dreadful, monstrous plague of hysteria that gave its agents free rein to stretch, burn, pierce and break their victims on fiendish pain machines to force them to confess to disbelief and identify fellow transgressors. Later, with most of their enemies hunted down and killed, the Inquisition shifted its focus to wychcraft, and priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they engaged in unnatural acts with daemons. They were then burned or hanged for their confessions and this hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations, a madness that saw whole towns exterminated and over a hundred thousand dead.’
‘You pick the most extreme examples from the past, Revelation,’ said Uriah, struggling to maintain his composure in the face of such tales of murder and bloodshed. ‘Times have moved on and humanity no longer behaves in such ways to one another.’
‘If you believe that then you have been shut away in this draughty church for far too long, Uriah,’ said Revelation. ‘You must have heard of Cardinal Tang, a mass-murdering ethnarch who practised a crude form of eugenics. His bloody pogroms and death camps saw millions dead in the Yndonesic Bloc. He died less than thirty years ago after seeking to return the world to a pre-technological age, emulating the Inquisition’s burning of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers who contradicted the church’s view on cosmology.’
Uriah could stand no more and walked towards the stairs at the far end of the cloister that led down into the narthex. ‘You fixate on the blood and death, Revelation. You forget all the good that can be achieved through faith.’