Phill Sacre

Tag: atheism

  • Toynbee Strikes Again

    I don’t usually write about such things on this blog, but this article by Polly Toynbee has got me quite annoyed. Her article is full of misinformation and slightly odd logic (something she’s been guilty of before, but we’ll leave that for the time being). It baffles me how someone who is so vitriolic can get a regular hearing in a national newspaper – but then, I guess Richard Dawkins has written articles before, so…

    Seeing as I don’t have much to do this afternoon, let’s take a quick look at some of the claims and arguments she makes:

    Rows over gay marriage and women bishops bewilder most people. With overwhelming popular support for both, how can abstruse theology and unpleasant prejudice cause such agitation at Westminster and in the rightwing press? Politics looks even more out of touch when obscure doctrine holds a disproportionate place in national life.

    It’s true that most people are probably in favour of women bishops – although that was more of an internal Church of England thing. Parliament haven’t really had to get involved in that; it wasn’t a political issue in the governmental sense. As for gay marriage, I’d hardly say there was “overwhelming public support” for it: according to the statistics from this article, just over 50% of the responses to the government’s proposals were in favour. This is ignoring the number of responses on both the “Coalition for Marriage” and “Coalition for Equal Marriage” petitions (c. 500,000 vs c. 60,000). Clearly, the world which Polly Toynbee lives in is one where even the government’s own official statistics are only just barely in favour of gay marriage is equal to ‘overwhelming public support’.

    With a third of state schools religious in this most secular country, Michael Gove not only swells their number but lets them discriminate as they please in admissions. As he is sending a bible to every English school, the BHA is fundraising to send out its own Young Atheist’s Handbook to school libraries. Government departments are outsourcing more services to faith groups in health, hospice, community and social care.

    Not entirely sure what the point of this paragraph is. So… religious schools are increasing in number. They do a good job; they’re usually popular. And each school has to be somewhat discriminatory in its admissions policy. What’s the problem? [See also this on the Church Mouse blog] And the government are ‘outsourcing’ services to faith groups. Because Christian faith groups tend to have a good track record in health, hospice, community and social care work. What’s the atheist record like in those areas? Oh.

    But of all the battles Jim Al-Khalili confronts, the most urgent is the right to die. Powerful religious forces block attempts to let the dying end their lives when they choose … The public supports the right to die, but many more will drag themselves off to a bleak Swiss clinic before the religions let us die in peace.

    Oh dear oh dear. So the only reason anyone would ever oppose euthanasia is because of religious ideas? Once again, I don’t think this is supported by the evidence. It’s not just the religious who have issues with assisted dying: see, for example, this piece (and, related, this one about the Lords which Toynbee mentioned in the article) – particularly the link through to the Scope website in the quote at the end. It seems that what Toynbee says is just propaganda; the BHA have set out their stall here and I don’t think they’ve considered all the implications.

    Sensing the ebbing tide of faith since the last census, the blowback against unbelievers has been remarkably violently expressed. Puzzlingly, we are routinely referred to as “aggressive atheists” as if non-belief itself were an affront. But we are with Voltaire, defending to the death people’s right to believe whatever they choose, but fighting to prevent them imposing their creeds on others.

    What Toynbee doesn’t seem to get is that governments, pretty much by definition, have to impose a view or creed on others. The government has to take a position on assisted dying. The government has to take a position on gay marriage. Her beef seems to be that the government don’t take her particular view, or that of the BHA. As I said before, atheistic secularism is NOT neutral ground.

    For instance, he might take offence at the charge that without God, unbelievers have no moral compass. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, that’s where it leads. We can ripost with religious atrocities, Godly genocides or the Inquisition, but that’s futile. Wise atheists make no moral claims, seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity regardless of faith. Humans do have a hardwired moral sense, every child born with an instinct for justice that makes us by nature social animals, not needing revelations from ancient texts. The idea that morality can only be frightened into us artificially, by divine edict, is degrading.

    ‘Seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity’ – that’s interesting. Why is ‘good and bad’ randomly spread among humanity? What’s the ‘bad’ doing there? If everyone truly has a hardwired instinct for justice, why is there bad? And what can the BHA do about it? I’m asking a genuine question here. If humans are so brilliant, why is the world in such a mess – especially when much of the world’s current mess is caused by the least-religious West? (i.e., it wasn’t ‘religion’ that caused the problems.)

    And the statement about morality being ‘frightened into us artificially, by divine edict’, is ignorant if nothing else.

    The new president will confront another common insult: atheists are desiccated rationalists with nothing spiritual in their lives, poor shrivelled souls lacking transcendental joy and wonder. But in awe of the natural world of physics, he’ll have no trouble with that. Earthbound, there is enough wonder in the magical realms of human imagination, thought, dream, memory and fantasy where most people reside for much of their waking lives. There is no emotional or spiritual deficiency in rejecting creeds that stunt and infantalise the imagination.

    ‘Creeds that stunt and infantalise the imagination’ – all I will say is, [citation needed]. I mean, seriously? Given how much incredible art, music, architecture etc. that religion has inspired? Sounds like the words of someone with a massive chip on their shoulder.

    Still, if all members of the BHA are as bitter as Polly Toynbee, with such a massive chip on their shoulders, I can’t see them ever being that popular. Self-worship is never particularly inspiring; and I think essentially that’s what is happening with humanism: we have a ‘can-do’ attitude, we can solve all our own problems. “Hey, look at us! We’re brilliant!” This ties in with something else I’ve been thinking about recently, about atheism being the ultimate form of idolatry, but we’ll leave that particular theological discussion to another day…

  • Atheist Delusions: The Review

    Recently I mentioned that I was reading through “Atheist Delusions” by David Bentley Hart, and I said I would write up a review of it when I’d finished reading it. Well, I’ve finished reading it now, and really enjoyed it. Quite a lot of the book deals with the same kind of things I’ve been talking about with regards to atheism/secularism, although he takes it from a different angle. Essentially, Hart is going on a journey through Christian church history, and along the way correcting a lot of misperceptions about the past and how our society relates to that. From that perspective, I think he does brilliantly: he writes like he knows what he’s talking about – he’s done the reading and interacted with what we know historically (unlike a lot of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, who seem to basically ignore it). His basic contention is that the New Atheist reading of history is completely back-to-front, when Christianity arrived on the scene it changed the world in ways which are hard for us to imagine now.

    Speaking of the New Atheists, it’s written in a fairly robust style in that he spares no love for the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris – although in general they (and especially Dawkins) spare no love for Christianity in their books so it’s like for like. And most of the book is spent not so much on interacting with their arguments directly but interacting with history and various views on it. My main problem with the style of the book was that it is fairly dense prose, which isn’t really good when you’re trying to read it late at night! It’s definitely a book which you really need to be fully awake for to read properly, but it’s worth it.

    What I’d like to do is pull out some of his arguments about secularism, which should both tie in with what I’ve said before as well as give you a flavour of what the book is like. This all comes from the last quarter of the book, the previous three-quarters being groundwork for it. (I apologise that it’s a bit long… skip to the end for my tl;dr!) I’m going to do this in two sections – firstly about Christian morality as opposed to the pagan morality which preceded it, and then secularism.

    (more…)

  • New Scientist: “The God Issue”

    Yesterday Mrs Phil bought me a copy of the latest New Scientist magazine,  “The God Issue”, because it looked interesting. I’ve had a chance to read through it now – or at least the relevant articles – and I thought I’d post up a quick review.

    Know Your Enemy

    The introduction, ‘Know your enemy’, starts off promisingly:

    Children are born primed to see god at work all around them and don’t need to be indoctrinated to believe in him.

    This is interesting information. But we’ll come onto that a bit later on.

    This is not an apologia for god. Religious claims still wither under rational scrutiny and deserve no special place in public life … [But] religion is deeply etched in human nature and cannot be dismissed as a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity.

    Ah. Religious claims still ‘wither under rational scrutiny’? That’s a bold claim to make given that many scientists are, in fact, Christian – see, for example, Wikipedia’s list of Christian thinkers in science. Alienating some of your readership is not a smart move in any magazine, and in this particular case it seems like unnecessary sniping. Also, one logical conclusion of children naturally predisposed to believe in ‘god’ is that there is a possibility that ‘god’ might exist – a possibility which seems to escape every writer throughout the magazine.

    Still, it is good to see that atheists are coming round to the idea that religion is not a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity: hopefully this will signal the beginning of the end for the Dawkins school of atheism, which seems to hold that every religious person is hopelessly deluded.

    (more…)

  • Post-script to Secularism

    My last post has generated a fair bit of controversy – I don’t think I’ve ever made a blog post which has attracted so many comments!

    I’d just like to write a very brief postscript to that with a link to a blog post about after-birth abortion: two doctors have written in the Journal of Medical Ethics a paper entitled: “After-Birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” This is part of the abstract:

    the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

    In other words, once a baby has been born, it should be possible to kill it as it does not yet have any moral status as a person.

    Now, this sounds like very shaky ground to me. The blog post I linked to above makes the point that once you allow for abortion, any lines you draw in the sand are essentially arbitrary. When I was writing my blog post last week, I just suggested that a secular society might lead us in a direction we didn’t want to go. I’m wondering whether this is a concrete example of what one of those directions might be.

  • Secular Society: A Good Thing?

    I’ve been thinking a bit about the whole ‘militant secularism’ thing recently. If you’ve missed what’s happened, you must have been living under a rock. Or, paying no attention to the news. Either way, there’s been a whole lotta bloggin’ going on about it! This is the news article which kicked it off, although also see my post on healing and the ASA. Also you can read Baroness Warsi’s comments which I think really kicked off usage of the phrase ‘militant secularism’ in the past week or two.

    What I’d like to talk about today is secularism itself: it’s often portrayed as a ‘neutral ground’ where those of all faiths and none can come together and make a stable society where people’s personal beliefs can stay out of the way. Just leave your religious beliefs at home, and there’ll be no problems.

    The problem with that is that I don’t see secularism as ‘neutral ground’: secularism is a belief system too. What I mean by that is, the implicit idea behind secularism is that it’s possible to rightly govern, administer justice, and act ethically without a religious reference point. In other words, in this country at least, essentially secularism is equal to atheism.

    The problem with that – with respect to the governance of this (or any) country, is that I think theism in general and Christianity in particular provides the only sound, rational foundation for any kind of ethical system. As such, what the secularists or atheists want to claim – that the country would be better off if we dispensed with the religious element in leadership – is simply not true.

    Let me try and explain: in atheism, you don’t have many options for morality. I’ve heard a few different explanations, including reading an interview with Richard Dawkins the other day when he explains that morality comes from the cultural ‘Zeitgeist‘ (his word) – in other words, what people think is right and wrong at the time. But the general principle is that there is nothing objectively right and wrong – in other words, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ are simply labels which we have almost arbitrarily come to define in a certain way. That definition may well change in the future.

    So to take an example, in some Islamic countries I understand a woman may be stoned to death if she is caught in adultery. Is that a moral or an immoral action? It seems to be the cultural ‘Zeitgeist’; it’s the law of the land – the punishment is not hidden. In other words, I can’t see how an atheist could say, with all integrity, that that was a wrong or immoral action. Now if that’s not an immoral action… what’s to stop the same thing happening in this country (UK)?

    Similarly, in this country: for a long period of time (c. 8-900 years), kings and rulers have been under the same law as everyone else. In other words, all are treated equally according to the law (in theory, at least). Why should that be so? The original reason given was Genesis 1:27 – everyone is created in the image of God, and therefore everyone deserves to be treated equally. This isn’t an obvious idea – just look at the history books, look around at the world, to see that this is not so.

    I believe that something underpins morality, and that something is the Christian God. There are no two ways about it.

    This is what Dorothy L. Sayers saw clearly in her essay ‘Creed or Chaos?‘ (originally from 1940, the reference to Germany is to the Nazi party):

    We on our side have been trying for several centuries to uphold a particular standard of ethical values which derives from Christian dogma, while gradually dispensing with the very dogma which is the sole rational foundation for those values. The rulers of Germany have seen quite clearly that dogma and ethics are inextricably bound together. Having renounced the dogma, they have renounced the ethics as well—and from their point of view they are perfectly right. They have adopted an entirely different dogma, whose ethical scheme has no value for peace or truth, mercy or justice, faith or freedom; and they see no reason why they should practise a set of virtues incompatible with their dogma.

    If you reduce morals to things you can rationalise – well, you can rationalise just about anything. A secular society could well lead us down a direction we don’t want to go.

    This is where I want to draw back to the issue of militant secularism. Now I don’t agree with Baroness Warsi that we are facing ‘militant’ secularism (Although I do think there are a number of strident voices which want to get rid of any religious influence in the public square whatsoever, which may have muddied the waters). What is more worrying to me is ‘secularism creep’ to coin a phrase. In other words, more and more, secularism is becoming the ‘default’ position without it ever being democratically introduced.

    We’ve ended up in a situation where religion is marginalised in the public square, almost without anyone ever agreeing that’s a good thing – it’s just happened because of inertia and people believing that ‘secularism is neutral’.

    What I’m hoping is that all this will provoke some kind of debate about the role of religion, Christianity and secularism in our society. If the people want secularism that’s fine, that’s democracy for you – but I’d rather people were aware of what they were agreeing to rather than it just creeping in by stealth.