When a faith outlives its usefulness.

last updated 8 January 2015

Uganda

Alan Tacca

The time has come to abolish Christianity, said Alan Tacca in the Kampala Monitor. Most Western societies are now only nominally Christian. Even for churchgoers, “God is clearly a cultural construct.” True believers are a dying breed, and Catholic and Protestant churches alike are struggling with a chronic shortage of priests and ministers. Rather than bemoaning this trend, the West should embrace it. Religion is doing little these days but provide fuel for conflicts: Muslims against Christians, Hindus against Buddhists, and everyone against the Jews. So let’s dispose of the Christian God, the way the Western colonial powers got rid of African deities long ago. Back then, colonizers “actively undermined those gods until they were stripped of all dignity. It is now time to declare their God also primitive.” References to God should be removed from currencies and national anthems, sand-blasted off government buildings. Only after faith in the supernatural is gone can people take responsibility for generating “virtue and beauty” in “the human realm.”