Religion is in a league of its own

ONE of the greatest things about football, which I confess I didn't properly understand until this season, is the rivalry.

I'm not talking about the enmity between two clubs vying for the top of the leaderboard, like Arsenal and Manchester United - I mean local rivalry, the love-to-hate-'em competition between neighbouring teams.

Exeter need all the points we can collect this season, but the sweetest win by far would be to trounce Torquay United. When our first game against our neighbours came up, I was on the other side of the world, roughing it in the rainforest for I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

The celebs were supposed to be totally cut off from the rest of the planet. You could see us, but we couldn't even see the cameramen, who were blocked off in camouflaged hides. However we pleaded, they wouldn't speak a word.

Actually, that's not strictly true - Rhona Cameron could persuade them to shout out the time to us by lifting up her bikini top when she was bathing. But if I'd dropped my shorts and waggled my behind, I don't think it would have had the same positive effect.

The best moment of my whole week came when presenter Dec Donnelly broke the rules for me. He knew I was desperate to hear how our match with Torquay had gone, and I was whooping and punching the air during an early-morning meet when, off-camera, he mouthed the words, ''Two-one!''

It was a great feeling, and I came down with a crash when I left the jungle to discover that Dec had been telling me only half the story - the score was indeed two-one, but Exeter got the one...

I'm not Exeter-born, of course, though I am pretty certain my son lived in the city in a previous life. Only three of our first-team players actually come from South Devon - most are British, but Seba Scalise is Argentinian, and Santos Gaia is a Brazilian.

It doesn't matter that we're mostly 'outsiders'. These days, it is only in Royston Vasey that anyone expects everyone in the pub or the village shop to be 'local people'.

Rivalry livens up football, because football is a game. It's meant to be competitive. But what I can't understand is why anyone would want to rank religions on a league table.

I know a few Orthodox rabbis who behave as though they support Moses Wanderers, but they're not really hooligans - they get vituperative when more laid-back Jews, whom the rabbis regard as 'not proper fans', break the Sabbath laws, but that's the limit.

I can't say the same for highly-organised squads of Jesus Athletic thugs, who go to our grounds armed with bricks and spray-paint cans.

The extremist supporters of Mahommedan United are much more frightening - they have declared a never-ending war on all Moses fans, including children and elderly women.

Like many people who enjoy religion for its own sake, I have a lot of respect for the minnows, such as Rastafari Rovers, who exhibit an endearing loyalty to their top striker, Haile Selassie, even though he's been dead since 1975.

The noisiest, most obnoxious, most bigoted and downright scariest fans are the Scientist City followers. I'm not talking Scientologists - this isn't a rant against Tom Cruise and John Travolta. I mean the real nutcases: people who believe unquestioningly in science.

Their worst hooligans are often people of high regard, held in esteem by big business and the media. People like Steven Pinker, who has just published a book called The Blank Slate, which insists that the experiences of our caveman ancestors are what form human nature.

It doesn't matter how your parents brought you up, or what childhood traumas you suffered - the real key to your personality lies in your genes, and they were determined by the massacres and migrations of prehistoric peoples.

This is the complete reverse of everything Freud was saying a century ago, and yet Freud and Pinker share a love of the limelight - the more outrageous and contentious the theory, the better the publicity.

Pinker, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became addicted to controversy after surfing a tidal wave of opprobrium five years ago - he suggested in the New York Times that killing new-born babies might be regarded as a legitimate extension of abortion, rather than murder, because babies had no capacity for logic.

Logic sets us apart from animals; it's OK to kill animals; babies can't use logic; let's kill babies. QED.

Then he says that ''morality derived from religion leads to horrible atrocities'' such as the Twin Towers bombing.

All this is so perverted, I'm going to have to state it again, just so I can believe it myself: this MIT professor argues that we're programmed by evolution to kill our babies when they become too much to handle - when, for example, the need to feed an extra mouth might make life too difficult for the mother or the whole family. And because we're programmed that way, the crime automatically becomes acceptable, since it's all in our nature. DNA made us that way.

And then the professor says that all morality should be scientific, because religious morality provokes terrorism. The Darwinists have already got rid of God, and now they want to wipe out philosophy.

I won't try to point out that religion did not drive the genocides of Hitler and Stalin or Pol Pot.

These people think they own logic, and it would be cruel to try and take it away from them - it's all they've got left.

Steven Pinker makes one thing clear - when a Scientist denies he has a soul, what he loses is his heart

Uri Geller's Monthly column in the Face

Email him at urigeller@compuserve.com

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