As the twenty-first century progresses, there has been an increasing interest and not a small amount of debate on the role of religion in society and particularly on advances in secularisation. Richard Dawkins’ book , ‘The God Delusion,’ was a best-seller in the UK and novels like ‘The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ’ by Richard Pullman have touched raw nerves in Church hierarchies.
As we approach the 95th anniversary of the Easter Rising many Irish socialists and republicans will go out as they do every year to marches to celebrate the anniversary of the episode which asserted Ireland’s right to national self-determination. It was, however, also a revolution which saw the working class prove itself in the words of Connolly as “the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.”
As the last Russian soldier crossed the Oxus River going back from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union in 1989, the Japanese-American philosopher at St. James’s University, Maryland and a CIA operative, Francis Fukuyama, came out with his iniquitous thesis on the “end of history”. However, although the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union had collapsed, this thesis was soon refuted by history itself as the first Gulf War broke out in 1991.
