We’d have been ‘better off’ without Jesus, suggests leading columnist

21st December 2024

One of Ireland’s leading columnists has suggested that the world might have been better off if Jesus had been among the babies killed by King Herod’s men.

In her December 20th column for the Irish Times, Justine McCarthy describes Jesus as “one of the greatest influencers of all time”.

However, while pondering the attempt by Herod to kill the newly born “King of the Jews”, she asks: “Had the baby Jesus been among the massacred innocents, might history have turned out to be less hellish for humanity? The Spanish Inquisition might not have happened, nor the Crusades, the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland”.

She added: “History warns us to think twice before reaching for religion as a flag of convenience, because its consequences can be cataclysmic. Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the people. Its abuse has killed legions of human beings down through the centuries.”

In the column, she even seems to blame religion for the horrors of Nazism even though Hitler was guided by bogus theories about ‘racial purity’ which drew on pseudo-scientific Social Darwinist thinking.