So reassuring to know that our Prime Minister is guided by superstition and myth now turned into Christian theology – which “induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.” (Bertram Russell).  2,400 years ago Epricurus (341 – 270 BC)  wrote of the dangers of these superstitions and two hundred years later his philosophy was articulated and refined in Titus Lucretius Carus’ epic poem “The Nature of Things”.  Here we present a few lines of this 7000 line epic.

From Book 1 Matter and Void.

One thing I am concerned about: you might, as you commence
Philosophy, decide you see impiety therein,
And that the path you enter is the avenue to sin.
More often, on the contrary, it is Religion breeds
Wickedness and that has given rise to wrongful deeds
As when the leaders of the Greeks, those peerless peers, defiled
The Virgin’s altar with the blood of Agamemnon’s child,
Iphigenia.  As soon as they bound the fillet round her hair
So that its ends streamed down her cheeks, the girl became aware
That waiting at the temple for her would be no groom –
Instead she saw her father with a countenance of gloom
Attended by the priests who kept the blade well hid.  The sight
Of people shedding tears to see her froze her tongue with fright.
She sank to the ground upon her knees.  It did not mean a thing
For the princess now, that she had been the first to give the king
The name of Father.  No, for shaking, the poor girl was carried
By the hands of men up to the altar, not that she be married
With solemn ceremony , to the accompanying strain
Of loud-sung bridal hymns, but as a maiden, pure of stain,
To be impurely slaughtered, at the age when she should wed,
Sorrowful sacrifice slain at her father’s hand instead.
All this for fair and favourable winds to sail the fleet along! –
So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

From The Nature of Things, Book 1, Lines 80 to 101.
Translation by A.E. Stallings 2007.  Penguin Classics.

Stallings suggests that the poem is not antagonistic to piety but to organised religion.