Spectator letters: The trouble with religion, alternatives to HS2, and whisky-drinking dogs

A history of persecution

Sir: Colin Brown (Letters, 7 June) ignores some good reasons for keeping religion out of society. Small groups of believers are fine, but not totalitarian dictatorships. The early Christians were treated as heretics until 313 ad, when Constantine made what became the Roman Catholic Church the official religion of the Roman Empire. The church promptly started persecuting all other religious groups. In the Middle Ages the Church let loose the Inquisition and decimated civilised communities such as the Albigensians.

As for his statement that ‘all religions have provided society with ethical and moral rules’, how ethical were the laws and morals that subjugated women and slaves and persecuted anyone who questioned the authority and dogma of the Church? In fact, it was the humanitarian and moral rules of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the Enlightenment and the 18th-century Age of Reason that gave us ‘the fundamentals of a civilised society’.