Category Archives: Reason and Religion

How Several Misunderstandings led Megan Hodder to Faith

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The Catholic Herald recently published an essay by a newly minted Catholic, a refugee from the new atheism. It is interesting to reflect that a girl, who was 8 at the time of 9/11 – that’s 9th September 2001, folks – now a young woman of 20 or 21, should be able to say:

I grew up in a culture that has largely turned its back on faith. It’s why I was able to drift through life with my ill-conceived atheism going unchallenged, and at least partly explains the sheer extent of the popular support for the New Atheists …

What is remarkable is that someone so young should already think of herself as “drifting through life,” which is, by her own account, not what she was doing. She was, in fact, by her own testimony, avidly reading (the adverb is hers) “Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, whose ideas were sufficiently similar to mine that I could push any uncertainties I had to the back of my mind.” Scarcely an account of someone simply drifting through life. The unfortunate part is that she read Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens for certainty, for doctrine, and did not find it, though it was “atheist orthodoxy” that drove her to faith. Indeed, she seems, by all accounts, to have been searching for faith all along, for something that she could believe with all her heart. She didn’t seem to notice that the negative argument upon which she set such store, is only the fringe of the garment of a more robust humanism. She may be right. Perhaps the new atheists, in their drive to defeat the powers of religion, made it seem that religion can be demolished with a few cursory arguments, and when you stack those arguments up against an apologetics that began within a few generations of Jesus’ death, it’s hard to think of those arguments as a sufficient basis for a life.

Megan says, at one point, that she read Ratzinger’s Regensburg address, and that she expected to find in it the kind of “bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism.” This in itself is astonishing, and discouraging. Perhaps it indicates that she perceived a tone in the new atheism that is carping and superficial, and some of the criticisms of religion that I have heard are indeed just that, as though religion, which has been around for thousands of years, can simply be dismissed without intellectual sophistication at all, simly by a few contemptuous waves of a dialectical wand. But religion is much more robust than that, and it is unfortunate that the custom has arisen of treating religious thought as simply pointless hand waving. For when you are inside the religious bubble of certainty, everything makes perfect sense, as Megan Hodder discovered. Not only that, but it can be, in its more comprehensively rational form, distressingly coherent. One of the things that I found out, as a priest, was that, in order to question faith, to address questions to faith in the context of the faith community, you had to know an awful lot, and you had to keep one step ahead of the most intellectually adventurous of your parishioners. This is largely the reason why a lot of young priests who have learned many of the liberal details of biblical history and hermeneutics, along with a smattering of revisionist theology, when they get out into their first parish, and find that if they were to “tell all” their parishioners would think them irreligious, possibly not even Christian, they quickly retreat to their Sunday School faith in an almost instinctive move of self-preservation. And all their dreams of bringing about real change in the church comes to grief on the rocks of a defensive religious certainty.

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Did Muslim thought on evolution take a step forward?

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According to Salman Hameed, in an op-ed in the Guardian entitled “Muslim thought on evolution takes a step forward,” which adds, in the subtitle, the claim that the debate on Islam and evolution sponsored by the Deen Institute, was “[a] high-quality debate of a sensitive topic [which] did not disappoint, as all panellists  bar one accepted the scientific consensus,” and so moved Muslim thought forward. This claim is, at best, misleading. Yasmin Khan, also writing in the Guardian, ends her article “Muslims engage in quest to understand evolution,” with these remarks:

As the event closed I was left restless and sensed that others felt similarly conflicted. I tried to envisage how to establish a consensus of Muslim opinion on this topic. Where was the call to action? Who would bring the necessary scholars and scientists together to form a legitimate committee?

The debate has lifted the lid on this Pandora’s Box, but the next steps are uncertain. Without more structured engagement with Muslims, the concept of human evolution will continue to be both an intellectual and spiritual minefield.

If it continues “to be both an intellectual and spiritual minefield,” then there was less apparent agreement than Salman Hameed suggests. Indeed, as Jerry Coyne, reviewing the event, suggests:

Given nearly unanimous Muslim opinion on the impossibility of human evolution (something I’ve learned from studying how Muslims reconcile science and faith), and opposition to evolution itself in many quarters, there is no way to establish a Muslim consensus on evolution (which should be that everything evolved according to natural processes) without getting rid of Islam.

If this is the takeaway message from the conference, then no wonder Yasmin Khan was so conflicted!

But, it seems, after all, that this was the takeaway message. For example, take the summary of the debate offered by Farrukh Younus in a post on his blog entitled ”Evolution and Islam 2013“. While Sameed claims that all except one accepted the scientific consensus on evolution, this is far from being the case. It is even important, I think, to take into account the emphases that Younus places on the different panellists participating in the debate or discussion or series of talks (it’s not altogether clear how the conference was organised). To take one example, Professor Ehab Abouheif, who teaches biology at McGill University in Montreal, apparently defined evolution, and then went on to suggest a common misunderstanding that may impede the acceptance of evolution by religious believers. According to Younus:

Crucially he addressed a common misunderstanding, that in evolution you do not transition from one species to another. That is to say the common belief that we originated from monkeys and apes, despite sharing extensive similarities, is an over simplification and inaccurate representation of evolution.

Of course, this is true. We share common ancestors with monkeys and apes; we did not descend from monkeys and apes themselves, which are species equally evolved with ourselves, just as every other living species has a evolutionary history that shares its origin with the origin of life on earth. But Younus says none of this, as though remarking on the misunderstanding, without explaining the significance of that misunderstanding, is sufficient.

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Why?

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There is a story of a philosophy examination. One of the questions was simply, “Why?” The student who got the highest mark for their answer simply asked in response, “Why not?” It is the only answer that can be given in many cases, even though we should like to have a more definitive reply that made sense of our world, and spelled out reasons why things should have turned out as they have. Of course, science can give us some of the answers that we seek, but none of them will answer the very human question that we often seem compelled to ask, when we are seeking a reply that in some sense accords a meaning or purpose to what has taken place. The question is often qualified. Why has this happened to me? What did I do to deserve this? What purpose does my suffering serve? Is there nothing more than this that I can hope for?

Literary critics, studying tragedy, note that the suffering endured by the protagonist almost always is the result of some fatal flaw in the protagonist’s character. To oversimplify, Hamlet’s indecision, Macbeth’s lust for power, Othello’s jealousy and mistrust, Lear’s gullibility: these lead in each case to downfall and destruction. And so, of course, we can look at our own misfortunes, and sometimes we can see clear reasons why some particular misfortunes have befallen us, since we are none of us so perfect as to be free from faults that can harm us. Yet some things we do not in any sense “deserve,” as though there were some reason deep in the nature of things why a loved one should be suddenly stricken by cancer or other disease, why flood, storm, hail, tornado, earthquake or other disaster should have, quite by chance, destroyed the lives of loved ones, opportunities, wholeness or contentment. Shit happens! People fall sick and die. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, accidents, even stray bullets on an otherwise peaceful street can slice through the heart of a prosperous happy life and tear it to shreds from which we may never recover.

It is arguable, I think, that this leads us into a region of discourse where science is unable to help us with the most important questions, and yet where we need to be able to speak in ways that accord truth value to the things that we say. We may not want to call it knowledge, as such, if knowledge is restricted to factual statements about physical existence, and the laws of nature, but there is here a dimension of human understanding which not only demands attention, but has an equal claim with science to be addressed with care and method and a commitment to what is true. Call it the humanities, if you like, but it includes a richly diverse field of study and interest, including art and music, literature, philosophy (which includes a number of “meta” studies, like philosophy of science, art, logic, mathematics, etc.), and, in many of their incarnations, the social sciences, psychology and anthropology, and even things like textual studies, hermeneutics and, of course, religion too, as a demonstrably dysfunctional extension of humane studies. Historically, as departments of philosophy became mathematically or empirically rigorous, they hived off from philosophy and became specialties in their own right, but their competence is limited to that particular area. Scientists themselves should not pretend to omni-competence, because their meta-disciplines, as, for example, the philosophy of biology, are conceptual-logical disciplines in which active scientists do not have special competence, though clearly close familiarity with the specific sciences and their methods is essential to anyone who ventures to speak in a meaningful philosophical way about the science itself. Clearly, practitioners of a science have special access to materials crucial to the philosophical study of that science, even though they may lack the aptitude.

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And the Real Turkey Is?!

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Christine Odone, whom I once called the most rebarbative journalist published in English newspapers today, has crossed the line in an article that flew under my radar a few days before Christmas, not only expressing her views in her familiar, constipated prose, but this time tipping over into outright abuse. It all stems from an interview given by Richard Dawkins to the Muslim Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera. Hasan had an op-ed in the Guardian (as long ago as last July), which makes a nice companion piece to Odone’s childish tantrum regarding some incidental remarks made by Dawkins in that interview. The key issue being discussed seems to be the old chestnut of whether religion does more good than evil in the world. That’s really a roundabout way of getting at the real point at issue; namely, whether religion can be reasonably criticised. For the strange thing is this. Criticism of religion is taken as a blanket denial of any value in religion whatsoever, and defenders of religion are very quick to pick up on anything, any little word or expression which can be taken to be a chink in their opponent’s armour, and by then putting the Schwerpunkt of their argument at that point, they give the impression of having overturned their opponent altogether.

One thing that nonbelievers have to remember is that religious believers have been at this business of apologetic defence of their religious beliefs for much longer than nonbelievers. They have been hardened and inured to criticism, because the religions themselves have been constantly at each other’s throats for millennia. If you listen to the Mehdi Hasan interview straight through, you will notice how unfazed he is by Dawkins’ expression of amazement that Hasan should actually believe that Muhammad rode to heaven on a winged horse. It is in the Qu’ran, so he believes it. He asks Dawkins if he is abusing his children by telling them the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven, and Dawkins says no, of course not. Here is the story, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Muhammad travels on the steed Buraq to “the farthest mosque” where he leads other prophets in prayer. He then ascends to heaven where he speaks to God, who gives Muhammad instructions to take back to the faithful regarding the details of prayer.

I happen to disagree with Dawkins. I think it is abusive to teach such stories to children, if they are led to believe that they are true. It encourages them to believe in fantasy as truth, which must have an effect on how they regard truth itself. Hasan was actually successful in getting Dawkins to give way on this point, clearly because Dawkins did not want to appear insensitive and strident. If Hasan tells these stories to his children as part of the mythology of Islam, then perhaps no harm is done, but if he tells these stories as confirming the immediacy and reliability of Muhammad’s revelation, that is certainly a form of child abuse. Fairy tales are one thing, since children know that fairy tales are not true; but telling children tall tales in contexts that are heavy with religious significance and seriousness is another matter altogether. This kind of story telling is only a very short distance away from the sources of religious violence, and this is a practice that needs to be acknowledged and opposed.

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Ruse on the warpath again, Spufford still unapologetic about basing belief on emotion

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Ruse will immediately accuse me of contributing to the narcissism of small differences, since that is how he regards the New Atheist tendency to respond critically to criticism. What, I wonder, did he expect? His own criticism is so unwieldy and chaotic that its difficult getting a handle on what he really wants to say. I don’t know whether his books are like this or not, but he writes in such a loose, disjointed style, that it is hard to tell what exactly it is that he is trying to convey to his readers. Yes, of course, the basic idea, that the new atheism is a humanism and that this humanism is like a religion, with its sacred texts, orthodoxy and sacred persons, is clear enough. The problem is that he doesn’t really achieve very much by way of justification of the claims made. And then there is his apparently happy-go-lucky “I don’t mind being the butt of jokes, and I like to court controversy; in fact, anything that will put me in the public eye is fine with me” attitude is starting to wear just a bit thin, and does not convince. Indeed, it is hard not to detect a seam of pure jealousy running through what he says about Richard Dawkins and charisma.

No doubt his title is not of his own choosing, but I think it captures his intent fairly well: “Why Richard Dawkins’ humanists remind me of a religion“. Who, I wonder, does this refer to? Perhaps there is, and I am simply unaware of it, a claque of fawning disciples around Dawkins, but while Dawkins seems fairly actively involved in the British Humanist Association, the renewed trend towards disbelief, of which his book The God Delusion may have been a herald, has no organisational unity that I know of, and is certainly not invested in humanism as such, though I am sure that many of us are prepared to acknowledge the importance of associations that represent some of our beliefs as well as our disbeliefs. Nor can the book be considered a holy text, for we are quite prepared to dissent from Dawkins’ views, just as we are of any beliefs which we consider unfounded or poorly expressed.

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Michael Ruse is a Tiresome Embarrassment to Philosophy

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Michael Ruse is tiresome, at least when it comes to talking about religion. Like Terry Eagleton, he seems to have a gene for silly religious thinking. In the end, you wonder whether they really mean it when they say they don’t really believe, or are they hedging their bets and cramming for the finals? I was put onto this by Jerry Coyne, whose response to Ruse, “Was the evolution of humans inevitable? Nonbeliever Michael Ruse still tries to help Christians reconcile evolution and faith“, is really decisive, but I still want to have my say, denn dieser Mann irritiert mich so viel.

Michael Ruse is using his soapbox over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, once again, though undoubtedly not for the last time, to try to make the world safe for Christianity — but why not safe for Islam, or safe for Judaism? (The article has the title “Does Darwinian Randomness make Christianity Impossible? “, and you know, just by the way he asks the question, that his answer is going to be no.) The trouble with Ruse is that he apparently thinks that Christianity is the only religion worth bothering about — that’s his silly gene kicking in — but there are all sorts of religions, and each one has its theologies, though, admittedly, Christianity has a lot more invested in theology than either Islam or Judaism. The reason for this is to be found in the history of Christianity, since it developed originally within the Greek-speaking regions of the Roman Empire, and simply could not escape questions and refutations that had been raised by thoughtful and rational pagans. Hence, Christianity was marked by its attempt to make rational arguments, not only for the existence of God, but for the more esoteric of its doctrines as well.

That doesn’t mean that Christians ever succeeded in providing rational justifications for such things as the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, or of the divine and human natures of Christ — which Monophysites, such as the Copts, still deny — and other esoterica of no more interest to us than these. However, once they had outlawed and persecuted paganism, it could pretend, at least, that arguments, which had never satisfied the most learned of the pagans, were enough to provide Christianity with its intellectual bona fides, even though most Christians were still really pagans at heart, and superstition ruled the Church for well over a thousand years, except in nooks and crannies where the appearance of rationality was preserved. What this really means is that Christianity, despite its superstitions, which continue unhindered within the church until our own day, had the illusion that theology provided a rational account of Christian beliefs. So, you could allow members of the Church to be as superstitious as you liked, just so long as you iced the cake with some form of apparently rational argumentation. The trouble is, despite all the systematic theology in the world, religion cannot be made into a rational pursuit. It just can’t. A glance at Pope Wojtyła’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) should be enough to disabuse you of any such conviction. It’s right there in the second paragraph:

2. The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, through the Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life [my emphasis], the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6). It is her duty to serve humanity in different ways, but one way in particular imposes a responsibility of a quite special kind: the diakonia of the truth. (1) This mission on the one hand makes the believing community a partner in humanity’s shared struggle to arrive at truth; (2) and on the other hand it obliges the believing community to proclaim the certitudes arrived at, albeit with a sense that every truth attained is but a step towards that fullness of truth which will appear with the final Revelation of God: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully” (1 Cor 13:12).

The Greek word ‘diakonia’ — from which the church gets the name of its diaconal ministry (viz., deacons) — means service or mission. Notice how quickly Wojtyła moves to the claim that “the believing community [is] a partner in humanity’s shared struggle to arrive at truth.” This, despite the fact that theology can provide no methodology for determining theological conclusions as true. The pope can’t have it both ways. He can’t both say that the believing community is a partner in the search for truth, and then say, immediately, that the believing community is obliged “to proclaim the certitudes [already] arrived at [by revelation].” This is the well-known Magisterium of the Church, and it pertains to revealed truth, a truth which is at once certain and incomplete, as Wojtyła says. Certainly, for appearance’s sake, it pays to claim that theological and scientific truth are somehow related and coordinate; but this is just smoke and mirrors.

So why, one wonders, is Ruse trying to make the world safe for this kind of “truth”? The kind of truth that is really not truth at all, but at most opinion, and more likely self-deception. It cannot be permitted to allow an organisation to get away with simply proclaiming, as certitudes, beliefs for which there is no more foundation than the historical claim that these things, though intrinsically beyond understanding, have been revealed and entrusted to the Church for safe-keeping. This is a bit like allowing the prisoner in the dock to claim as true his assertion of innocence, and have this claim accepted, before any of the witnesses and forensic experts have testified. At the end of his essay Ruse says:

Do I believe any of this? Not really, but that is not the point. The real point is that New Atheists like Jerry Coyne have some good arguments but before they declare the case closed they should let the philosophers and theologians have their turn to fight back. That is what a doppelgänger is good for.

This is staggeringly silly! If Ruse doesn’t believe any of this — and, presumably, if he doesn’t, he withholds belief for what seem to him to be good reasons — what reason can he give for suggesting that, by denying that theologians can give good reasons, Jerry Coyne has not given theologians the chance to fight back? There is nothing stopping them. Jerry Coyne cannot put theological texts on the index, and forbid his “followers”, on pain of excommunication, to read them. If this is all that Ruse has to say about the matter of whether Christianity is or is not made impossible by Darwinian randomness, then he hasn’t said anything at all. He certainly hasn’t provided a good reason or argument, and it is very doubtful that Jerry Coyne would reject a good argument if provided with one. But Ruse obviously thinks there are no good arguments as well, or at least he pretends to.

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Religion and Morality

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You can now read this post in Polish at Racjonalista.

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How many times do we have to say it in order to get it across? You don’t need religion to be a moral person. In fact, religion itself has very little if anything to do with morality. It may be, as Philip Kitcher suggests in his book The Ethical Project, that, at a certain point in the development of morality, religion served as a way of getting people to avoid altruism failures when they were all alone, and no one would know that they had not acted altruistically — which Kitcher takes as a helpful but dangerous stage in the ethical project — but the idea that we need religion for that purpose was discarded long ago. As long ago as Plato, and perhaps earlier. And people who assume that morality is bound up with religion often prove that it is not, for they themselves are prepared to make judgements about religious morality. If morality depends upon religion, this should be impossible, but it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

In fact, the truth seems to be diametrically opposed to the assumption that religion and morality are dependent on each other. Now, I know it’s difficult for some people to see this, because they’ve already done all the work necessary in order to sort out, from amongst all the possible prescriptions and proscriptions of their religion, those things that they consider bad or good. However, the truth is that almost everyone has done this sorting for themselves. Catholics, for example, don’t need the Church to teach them what is right and wrong, because large numbers of them don’t follow the moral dictates of the Church in the first place. They figure — and they figure correctly — that they can distinguish bad from good on their own. Of course, they may be stuck — if they’re at all serious about their faith — with telling some little white lies when and if they go to confession. After all, if the Church says that abortion is wrong, and a woman has had, for perfectly good reasons, an abortion, then that’s something she might find herself confessing, and being shriven for; but she’ll keep her fingers crossed, because she doesn’t really think she’s done such a bad thing.

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Kepler and the Divorce between Religion and Science

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Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Since Kepler (see Wikipedia on Johannes Kepler) spent so much of his time expatiating with baroque grandiloquence on the harmony of the spheres, the perfect solids, the cosmological influence on individual lives (though he came to regard the specific predictions of astrology to be superstition), and tied all this and his cosmology up in Christian vestments and theological presuppositions, it might seem strange to speak about Kepler and the divorce between science and religion. Indeed, Kepler’s own laws of planetary motion almost got lost in debris from the Christian past with which his books were stuffed to overflowing; but when it came down to the fine points, the facts spoke for themselves, and religion was just the icing on the cake, and had nothing to do either with his major discoveries, or with the method used to discover them.That, at least, is my conclusion from reading Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: The History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Now, no doubt many scientists and historians of science will consider Koestler’s book a bit of wheeze, really, a kind of jeu d’esprit, mainly concerned with the creative process, the near unconscious manner in which scientists stumbled onto their discoveries as if by accident, as though they were sleepwalking, and sometimes, as in Kepler’s case, almost without knowing that they had actually stumbled onto them. Kepler was, according to Koestler, much more concerned with the Pythagorean solids than he was with the actual mathematical relationships of the planetary orbits to the sun, and yet, despite this idée fixe, he managed to acknowledge not only the power of the facts, but their priority.

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Sister Margaret Farley has been a cause of confusion among the faithful, and risks great harm to them

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Most of  you, by now, will know about the book by Sister Margaret Farley, R.S.M., whose 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, which rocketed from a ranking of 146,982 on Amazon to 16 (number 1 in religious studies) and sold out in three days (according to a Guardian report). Though delivering a stinging rebuke to Farley, now retired from her position as professor of Christian ethics a Yale Divinity School, the Vatican, through the Inquisition (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), issued a condemnation of the book, its many divergences from Catholic teaching and Sister Margaret’s “defective understanding of the objective nature of the objective moral law,” but does not intend any further discipline, since Sister Margaret has now retired from teaching (and, presumably, can do no further damage).

The quotation comes from the official “Notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” 04.06.2012. The primary author of the notification is William Cardinal Levada, whose name appears on the Notification, who, before being raised to the cardinalate in 2006 was the Archbishop of Portland (Oregon) (1986-1995) and Archbishop of San Francisco (1995-2005). Now, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (also known in the past as the Holy Office of the Inquisition), the present pope’s former position under Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, and making pronouncements about Catholic sexual ethics, it is probably appropriate that we recall that, in 1985, Levada was presented a report compiled by a priest, Tom Doyle, head of a three-man panel,  dealing with (according to Wikipedia) the “medical, legal, and moral issues posed by abusive clerics.” Doyle asked that the report be presented to a meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and was turned down. Levada himself, in an 2008 interview, stated without qualification:

I personally do not accept that there has been a broad base of bishops guilty of aiding and abetting pedophiles… If I thought there were, I would certainly want to talk to them about that.

Father Doyle said, in response:

I vividly recall briefing Levada in May, 1985 when he was an auxiliary bishop, about the sexual abuse crisis. I also have seen volumes of documents and sworn testimony from depositions that clearly shows that most, probably all, bishops clearly knew that priests were raping and otherwise sexually abusing kids as far back as the 40′s….and I limit it to that era because I have not gone beyond that in studying documents. So, Levada’s statement is either an outright lie or evidence of a very narrow understanding and perception of reality.

Yet this is the man who now presumes to condemn Sister Margaret Farley for her stand on various aspects of sexual ethics! It is only fair to remember this, and to recall that, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine the Faith, the man who is now pope joined cause with Levada in covering up the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests and other religious in worldwide Roman Catholic Church. There is scarcely a country in which this abuse did not happen under cover of the pretence of sanctity.

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Michael Coren and the faults of Christianity

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I had the fortune until recently of not knowing that Michael Coren existed, but now that he has been thrust upon my attention by Jerry Coyne’s really hard-hitting “Vacuous Comment of the Week” over at Why Evolution is True, and since, whatever his nationality of origin, Michael Coren writes as a Canadian (for shame! for shame!), I feel the need to venture into the quagmire too, and (mixing metaphors) to hold Michael Coren’s feet to the fire. Let’s start where Jerry starts, with the Amazon.com blurb comment on Coren’s new book: Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity:

Michael Coren explores why and how Christians and Christian ideas are caricatured in popular media as well as in sophisticated society. He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. In a climate that is increasingly as ignorant of Christianity as it is good at condemning it, Coren gives historical background, provides examples of how these attacks are made, and explains the reality of the Christian response, outlining authentic Christian beliefs.

The interesting thing about this comment is that it is contradicted by statistics.  Apparently, in the United States, at least, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about religion than religious believers. Only slightly more than half of Catholics polled knew that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine become substantially the body and blood of Christ when consecrated by a priest! (Google “Atheists and knowledge of religion” for 16 million hits.)

However, there is something even more important to note in the blurb’s claim about Coren’s book. According to Coren, Christianity does not support slavery, is not racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, does not provoke war, resist progress, and is not repressive or irrelevant. Let’s take them one by one.

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