You don’t have to be religious to understand the value of peace

Editorial: The big lessons are universal – and the values of peace and forgiveness are a lot harder to relearn once they have been forgotten

We have been lucky, in this country and in much of the world, to live in a long era of comparable peace (AP)

Whenever religion makes its scheduled appearance in the calendars of our increasingly secular lives, it does so to say something boring or worthy that we have all heard a million times before, before disappearing again for a few months.

Charity, forgiveness, peace and goodwill to all men, yada yada yada. Their repetition and their unfashionable nature makes it easy to forget that these were once radical ideas, which undeniably changed human history.

This year, Easter, Passover and Ramadan all coincide, which happens only around three times in a century. Tragically, they do so at a time when their weary messages of peace could not be any less boring.

The UN secretary general Antonio Guterres has called for “the moment for us to be all united for peace”.

“Peace is the most precious thing that we can have in the world,” he said, “so this is the moment to come together and for those that believe in God in different ways, with different expressions, to join their voices in a common prayer for peace.”

Human beings have always failed to live up to their values of the gods and the prophets they praise; and never more so, ironically, than when imagining themselves to be acting in their name.

It will not have been lost on Mr Guterres that as he issued this secular prayer of his own, China was acting out an extravagant rehearsal for an invasion of Taiwan, in response to the Taiwanese leader’s visit to the United States. It is a moment of immense danger.

We have been lucky, in this country and in much of the world, to live in a long era of comparable peace. Lucky to be bored by the fairy stories of religion. Easter, for most people, is about running around the garden looking for chocolate.

But you do not need to have any religious conviction at all to accept that there was a human being called Jesus Christ, who died a violent death because he was denied a right that is now all but taken for granted – a right to free speech, to freedom of religious expression, and who, at least in the mythologised version, chose to forgive those who had visited that violence upon him.

The Passover commemorates the sparing of the Israelites from the murder of Egypt’s firstborn by the Angel of Death, and their ultimate liberation from slavery. It seems somewhat unlikely that such an event ever occurred, but whoever mythologised it was clearly desperate to tell a story that values peace over war.

Of course, it is not always easy for nations to act in the spirit of the values their leaders are meant to live by. Vladimir Putin considers himself to be a Christian, yet he deploys deliberate cruelty as a strategy in itself. The only two nuclear weapons ever to have been deployed were done so on the ultimate instruction of a man who considered himself to be a very devout Christian.

People, certainly in Western countries, may have become cynical about the religions that still carry great influence on their cultural lives, not least as they can see the cynical ways in which these religions have been deployed to legitimise and conceal all manner of wrongdoing. But nevertheless, the big lessons are universal. And the values of peace and forgiveness are a lot harder to relearn once they have been forgotten.