I've been preoccupied with the story of a young man in the Middle East who has been convicted after a confession extracted by torture, of taking part in a civil rights protest when he was a teenager. He has been sentenced to a horrible and grotesque death.
There is something obviously wrong with a country when it is so repressive that it needs to kill so many of its own citizens. I think I know what is wrong with it. Religion is what is wrong with it. The country is run by a particularly brutal, reactionary and xenophobic clergy. It looks like it is there to stay, as the people are indoctrinated into it from birth. Any dissenters are killed. (Certain aspects of this remind me of the Reformation in Europe). The trouble is that people who suffer under this system and flee it, often bring the very same values with them.
Disestablishment of religious organisations could only be of benefit to mankind. Let their believers worship freely, but behind closed doors, and criminalise any external show of belief. Indoctrination should also be criminalised. And of course the laws relating to equal rights and to hate crimes should be rigidly enforced, where they are being violated because of a person's 'conscience'. Come on world. Stop killing people. Isn't there enough suffering already, without these organisations causing even more?
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