I am going to raise one of my comments into a post, because, on rereading it, it seems to me to be a manifesto of sorts. It was in response to someone who was (I think) suggesting that the new atheists should cool it a bit, and live and let live. I do not mean, by putting these remarks here, to chastise the person concerned. There does seem to be a bit of intransigence in the new atheism that is deprecated by many people, and this results in the kinds of accusation that people like James Woods, Jeremy Stangroom, and so many others fling at us. For some reason it has seemed appropriate to many of them to berate the new atheism – in what can only be called the most strident and often plainly abusive terms – for any number of faults, chief amongst which, perhaps, is the notion that the new atheism is stridently simplistic, and because, being simpletons about religion, unentitled to their stridency. Well, if the new atheism is simple-minded in the way suggested, it is so for a very good reason: namely, that most religion just is simple-minded, and because it is simple-minded, dangerous.
“Sophisticated” religion — if sophisticated institutional, dogmatic religion is really possible — dragoons an army of very simple-minded believers to do its dirty work, to put pressure on governments, to harangue and condemn free societies for their supposed moral failings and excesses, without recognising that one of the results of free societies will be extremes, and that, to rid ourselves of those extremes, we must destroy the freedom too. The religious think that without the governing hand of religion, free societies would collapse into chaos. So far I have seen no reason to believe this true. But religions are not simply altruistic organisations which only want what is best for people. Religions are instruments of power, and those who lead them are both conscious of the power they wield, and also very sensitive to any diminution of that power. Part of the reason for the extremely strident responses of the religious — as well as those who are not religious, but for social reasons take religion’s part – to the apparent success of the new atheism in capturing the attention, if not the allegiance, of so many, is the minute sensitivity of religions to any loss of power or threats to it. It was in this vein that the following remarks – slightly edited – were made.
While I agree that live and let live is a nice slogan, and sometimes we should just heed it, it seems to me that, when religions are making something of a comeback on pretty unstable premises, and think that it’s okay to impose their will on the rest of us, we should, from a practical point of view, oppose them. I think there are strong moral reasons as well to oppose religion and do everything in our power to minimise the damage that they do to so many people who look to religion for the kinds of answers and comfort that no one can really provide, though religions, of course, claim that they do.
Democracy is a surprisingly fragile thing, much more fragile than the big religious institutions that underwrite beliefs which become, in their working, part of the very fabric of the individual, waking and sleeping — so democracy and free societies need to be defended. Many people died for the freedoms that we enjoy. I’d like to hang onto them for the next generation, and we won’t, if a lot of religious people have their way.
What troubles me most about people like Woods is the serene assumption that the new atheists are simply untutored barbarians without any sensitivity for the refinements of “serious” religion. But the so-called “serious” religion that he has in mind, all very vague and humanistic, is precisely the kind of religion that is on the wane. Liberal Christianity has all but collapsed. Even in a church like the Church of England, one time bastion of liberal Christianity, with the likes of John A.T. Robinson, David Jenkins, Don Cupitt, Maurice Wiles and others, evangelicals who read their religion almost as literally as American fundamentalists have become very prominent, and liberals are now an endangered species.
Sure, there’s a level of “village atheist” simplicity in some of the things that the new atheists say, but that is in part because the defence of Christianity, in the hands of people like Alister McGrath, Arthur Peacock, Francis Collins, John Polkinghorne, and others on the “sophisticated” side, and Ted Haggard, Pat Robertson, Rick Warren, and others on the American fundamentalist side, not to mention the widespread influence of fundamentalist Islam, is itself surprisingly simple-minded. If the new atheists temporise every time they’re faced with a theological proposition, and if they give in to the simple trick of saying that belief is a complicated psychological phenomenon, then they’ll never put their case, which is, quite simply, that the world would be better off without totalising forms of life which would abridge the freedom of others if they could.
My own concern is immediate and pressing. I believe that it is religion, almost entirely, that is keeping the door closed for those who are suffering greatly as they die to receive the assistance in dying that some of them would welcome. Just knowing that when you are dying or in chronic distress there is a way out that does not pass through the dark rooms of extreme pain, distress and existential despair would be, I believe, a source of strength to all of us. My wife died early, because there was no other way to assure that she would not be trapped in her body, without the ability to carry out her own wishes. I find it hard to forgive the religious for their obstruction of the right to die. Make that impossible. And this is an ongoing clash, and I won’t stop clashing with religion until the religious recognise that they have no more right to obstruct my right to die than they have to obstruct my right to express myself freely. For me this is a fight with no quarter. Religion must give up its claim to control my life — as it controlled my wife’s — or I go on fighting. When it has retreated to the private sphere where it belongs, then, and only then, will I relent.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was so vague and uncertain about how to defend the resurrection and the so-called virgin birth, had no hesitation in getting up on his hind feet in the House of Lords and arguing against the right of people to die as they choose, instead of going through the whole disintegrative process of disease and dying. It was that speech that precipitated the relinquishing of whatever “faith” I had left, whatever it means to speak of faith. Vague and woolly when it comes to faith, he had no question when it came to morality. When I called him on it, he wrote back in such a way as to minimise the number of people who die in extreme suffering and indignity, and to magnify the vulnerability of those who are quite capable of speaking for themselves. At least he wrote back. The Primate of my own church, who used, I think, to be a friend, never responded to my letter.
So this is very personal, as well as being a general and real concern of mine, that religions will, if they get the chance, exercise as much power over others as they can get their hands on. And religions are always questing for power. They are missionary enterprises. They want converts, numbers that will give them more political and economic clout. So they need to be opposed with every fibre. We know what religions are like when they do hold the reins of power. They already have too much. They should have no more power than the Lions, the Rotary or the Kiwanis clubs, and not nearly so much as the Masons.
As on my previous comment, I think what new atheism represents is an attack on the legitimacy and justification that religion claims for itself, when it comes to talking about science or ethics or wider society. It is really a political attack on the claim to authority of religious institutions and leaders.
What is does not represent is an attack on religious belief, or God belief, which is the ordinary atheism that we’re all familiar with in philosophy and rational debates.
The reason for this resurgence (rather than it being actually new) is that secularism and political socialism or political liberalism had been–until recently–successful in the west. But over the last decade this secularism and liberalism is seen as threatened or in decline, and atheists are once again forced to revert to a political stance.
Our critics, however, don’t seem to understand this political stance, and to some degree, neither do new atheists. New atheists are doing it somewhat intuitively and not through a manifesto or philosophy. But our new voice is in fact a simplistic political polemic against the political legitimacy of religion and if we are to be effective, we must become more sophisticated politically, not so theologically nor philosophically.
Our political naivety means that we’re propping up systems like liberalism, socialism and secularism, which are themselves problematic in their justifications and in decline. It was the critique of political justifications (both by the far-right and far-left) by neoconservatives, fascists and marxists that has led to the decline in the authority or legitimacy of liberal politics.
I think that is perhaps our blind spot as new atheists, and why our politically naivety may itself lead to a kind of hypocrisy and abuse of power that our own critics fear in us.
Shrewd response, Egbert. I think you are right. We are politically very naive, and that is a problem. I guess, in a sense, that’s what prompted me to start a blog. I was on the board of Dying with Dignity (Canada), and it seemed to me they were politically naive too, unable to see that, in order to further their aims, they had to be prepared to oppose the church in some politically astute way. I’m not sure that I see, yet, where this astuteness is going to come from or how it is to be organised, but I think you are right about the decline of political liberalism and socialism. No, I don’t give a hoot whether people believe in gods or fairies, angels or gnomes. It’s religion’s sense of political legitimacy that bothers me. I’m not sure about your take on secularism, though. It seems to me that this just is the kind of system that we need, one that is impartial as to world views, and provides security for people to work out their own lives (and deaths) without state interference — which of course means, contra libertarians, that there must be state interference, in order to provide the conditions in which people can work out their own lives in peace.
While secularism is what we might need–and I am a member of the National Secular Society here in the UK–I don’t think there is enough political will supporting it, not enough to combat the political will against it. I think the shift in power in the West, from protestant liberalism to protestant fundamentalism, is why secular and liberal states may now be under threat.
Political will, in the end, seems to control where we go, rather than reason. Hence my general sense of pessimism, frustration and growing scepticism about things.
Understood, Egbert, I find optimism hard to come by very often. When I was an active participant in the Anglican Church I watched it shift, from a place that welcomed thoughtful people, to an increasingly conservative force, mainly, I think, through the influence of the growing power in the Communion of the third world churches, and through their alliance with conservative forces in the developed world. Watching that conservative religion being imported into the West in the form of an incresingly conservative Islam is, I think, simply selling our birthright. It seems unstoppable, and believers wonder which atheists are militant. Will unbelief ever be any more than marginal? Probably not. It is depressing — especially when you consider Hitchens’ point that people with 7th century beliefs have control (they do, in Pakistan, and soon in Iran) of 21st century weapons. Think what Mohammed would do with nuclear weapons, if he had had them!
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@Egbert #3
The growth of protestant fundamentalism in America is basically a myth. If you look at any measure of religious fundamentalism, each successive generation is becoming less fundamentalist. Only 27% of Americans in the Millennial generation believe that the Bible is the actual, literal word of God. People in the Millennial generation are also much more likely to believe that there is more than one way to interpret their own religion.
http://pewforum.org/Age/Religion-Among-the-Millennials.aspx
There is a vocal and visible hard core of fundamentalists, but they are not growing.
Thanks for that Daniel. I’m not so sure it’s a myth as such, but rather I am talking about its rise in political organization and influence, rather than an increase in its population. I think the neo-conservative agenda combined with the cold war had a large part to play, and that is why we have octopus organizations like Templeton and the Fox empire (as well as less well known others) who are using fundamentalist Christians for their authoritarian political agenda.
The growth of fundamentalist protestantism may be a myth (Daniel #5), but it’s not a myth that they are gaining in political clout. In the United States they are fabulously wealthy, and now they can have large corporate sponsors. And know-nothing Republicanism is obviously on the rise. In what great developed nation other than the US could the presidential candidates be as ignorant as Perry, Bachman and Romney? It’s both remarkable and troubling.
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Sorry for the irrelevant question, but where did you get the drawing of the pirates? Thanks.
No idea Larry. Probabled googled “pirates photos”.