The Long Slow Death of the Church

A thousand years ago everyone in Europe knew that the Earth had been made for man alone and that it sat at the centre of a universe created in seven days by a jealous, vengeful God who had made us in his form, sacrificed his only son to cleanse us of our sins and controlled the Heavens, the weather, the sea, disease, love, life and death according to an ineffable plan that only he could understand.

Five hundred years ago we knew that the Earth went round the sun and that the moon influenced the tides (somehow) but the Church (and God, of course) still ran everything else. Our knowledge of anatomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, history, geography, geology and pretty much everything else was rudimentary and the big questions, like why did the world exist, could only be answered by the religious. The Church had all the answers, and the answer was always "God did it".

By the mid seventeenth century we understood the circulation of blood around the body, the mathematics that governs planetary orbits and the layout of the world's major land masses. The influence of the Church was still very strong but in some areas it no longer claimed to be the ultimate authority; it had started to cede knowledge to the scientific movement.

After 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we finally had a good understanding of our origins and the development of life. Since then discoveries have come ever more quickly and the role of God in the natural world has shrunk further and further as science has pushed back the boundaries of knowledge. We now know what causes most diseases and how to prevent or cure them, why volcanoes erupt and the earth shakes, how the weather works, what the stars are made of; we have good answers to almost all the questions to which our ancestors might have answered "God did it" a thousand years ago.

The point of all this is that God, previously advertised as the all-powerful creator and dictator of the universe is now a bit of a joke, a relic reduced to listening to prayers and helping out a bit when people need an illusory crutch to lean on. As such, it is now most definitely time to stop treating God as anything other than the fictional character he clearly is. We don't need to worship, follow special dietary or dress rules, abstain from work on particular days or discriminate against people based on their gender or sexuality.

We need a comprehensive overhaul of our legal system to remove laws that are based solely on religious belief (like restricted Sunday trading) or that grant religious entities special privileges (like charitable status). We should dis-establish the Church of England and allow the monarch to choose their religion (or none). Completion of this project will mark the emergence of the UK as a secular and democratic state whose people are free from religious oppression.