Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?Alexander Pope "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot"
Quiet Atheism – A Personal Preamble
Despite an absurdly devout Anglo Catholic childhood, leaving the Faith was neither particularly difficult, especially dramatic nor in the least agonizing. If memory serves the moment of decision was made just after Mass on or around my 12th birthday. I recall that during the service there had been some stuff about weeping for Zion and this had struck me as more than a bit odd given that we were in Torquay and the congregation of Our Lady of the Assumption consisted largely of middle class shopkeepers.
“It’s all nonsense, isn’t it?” I asked as we left the church. After a moment’s thought, my father replied that it probably was and that I needn’t go along any more if I didn’t want to. That was more or less it. Downside was off, much to my relief, and I had to have a chat with a delightful old and strangely boisterous priest, the late and much lamented Canon O’Reilly. This exceedingly holy father confessor made a mild effort to convince me by using the design argument, but when I pointed out to the rose he was using as an illustration had black spot and thus didn’t say much for the Almighty’s gardening skills, he desisted and we parted amicably.
I look back on my early Catholic years and education with considerable affection. Being hauled off to confession most Saturday evenings was a bit of pain mainly because it got in the way of Dr. Who but otherwise I’ve no real complaints. The nuns in my first school were sweet and kind; I learnt a lot about art – true it was mainly bad, highly sentimental art – from the devotional cards they used to foist on us; and I picked up a lot of interesting stuff about saints, especially my favourite, Thomas Aquinas. As for the priests, there was one incident in which a priest expressed a fervent desire to brain me for causing an incense burner to explode over my fellow altar boys (see Pious Pirates and Swinging Thuribles); however, most priests were as kind as the nuns and, unless I have remarkable powers of suppression, I can’t recall being sexually assaulted or savagely beaten by either.
Doubtless had I been brought up in the reign of Bloody Mary, or in Spain during the Inquisition or even in Ireland under the Jesuits or Christian Brothers, my feelings might be different. As it is, I tend to regard my erstwhile fellow believers and members of the Christian clergy as slightly simple minded. Religion provides them with the same sort of comfort that a mother gives a weeping child when she tells him that everything is going to be alright. One doesn’t insist on revealing to the child that things are going to be very far from alright and mummy, daddy & he are sooner or later going to turn into insentient compost. Similarly, one doesn’t mock the dying believer by telling her that when she says her desperate prayers she is simply talking to an imaginary friend; or at least one doesn’t unless one’s name is Sam Harris (see the utterly fatuous and unspeakably vile Letter to a Christian Nation) .
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote Eliot in Four Quartets. This, I think, is largely true. The bleak reality that we are merely a rather tatty bunch of apes clinging to a rock in space or that our mothers give birth to us astride open graves is rather too much for most people. The death of a child or partner is beyond agonizing and would render most of us somewhat simple minded. Even at the best of times, religious faith is an emollient for the great mass of not especially bright men against the meaninglessness of existence and the certainty of extinction. Unless there is a good reason, it would be an act of great cruelty to remove this comfort.
Noisy Posturing Atheism – Dawkins & Co
Richard Dawkins always strikes one as a somewhat quaint or even faintly comical ersatz 19th Century figure. He has suddenly discovered there is no God and is so endearingly anxious to tell us all about it all. It is easy to imagine him gleefully chip-chip-chipping away at the bedrock with his dear little geological hammer or skipping manfully across some fossil-rich Dorset beach, oversized top hat in one hand, ammonite in the other and a maniacal, almost messianic glint in the eye. To complete the picture, there would have to be a beard (we'd give the little chap a clip-on one). They all wore them, those hideously relentless and dangerously naïve Victorian proselytizers. Charles Darwin had one, and so did Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Psalmist’s fool was there first. He was there well before Hume, he was there before Marx & Engels, and he was most certainly there before latecomers like Dawkins & Co. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”. Actually, the fool is right on two counts: first, there is almost certainly no God, or at least not in the naïve bearded, ‘something up there’ sense (pace people like Don Cupitt there may well be no other). Second, the fool is dead right in keeping this dangerous truth to himself. It is a truth to be spoken very, very softly in one’s heart; it is not something to be yelled from rooftop, pulpit or television studio. To be fair to Dawkins’s hero, Charles Darwin had some reservations about publishing his findings; not so the others. “God is dead” cries Zarathustra at the top of his voice “I teach the superman”. “Hear! Hear!” bleats little Dawkins from the platform of his utterly daft atheist bus.
The folly of these 19th Century proselytizers is and was to replace one blind faith or superstition with another. Liberate the masses from their illusions, smash the mind-forged manacles, take away the opium of the proletariat and all shall be well (one is tempted to add "and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well"). Having knocked off God, the bearded ones hoped to locate omnibenevolence or, at least, perfectibility in Man. They blithely assumed that with the removal of Original Sin, man’s natural goodness would ineluctably rise to the surface like some sort of richly nutritious cream.
With the 20th Century we moved from theoretical to applied scientific atheism; from the study to the test bench. There was little cream and the Übermensch was considerably less than super. Indeed, the only instance in which man proved himself in any way divine was in the creation of circles of hell. The liberated ‘blond beast’ did this on an unprecedented scale in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, the Soviet Gulags, My Lai, or – stretching blond a little – in Nanjing and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. In the face of such evil one can only echo the words of Conrad's Kurtz:
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"
If the 19th Century saw the death of God, the 20th witnessed the demise of the apotheosis of Man.
Preserving the Noble Lie
Richard Dawkins notoriously described atheists as ‘brights’. Well, the tediously vocal atheist is slightly brighter than the average Christian but not by any appreciable margin. Part of the trouble is that his battle was won centuries ago; the blunt truth is that no one of any intellectual account is an old-fashioned theist. Given this and given that a moderately intelligent 12-year old can see through the teleological argument why does a pint-sized Zarathustra feel the need to waste so much ink refuting it? It is as though a pub bore were constantly wittering on about he had disproved the existence of Santa.
Christianity acts as a prop for the feeble minded (the vast majority of any population); it is a needless cruelty to attempt to kick it away. It comforts the majority by giving some sense of meaning to their otherwise empty lives and by assuaging the horrors of death and agony of bereavement. The claim that the unconsidered life was not worth living only holds true for those capable of sustained reflection on life; for others, a flat-pack cosmology supplied by Rome or Canterbury will more than suffice.
Mindless hectoring atheism is also exceedingly dangerous in that religious belief acts an instrument of social control – a kind of Noble Lie. Looking back at the unprecedented horrors of the last century and at the near total breakdown of order in our modern urban wastelands, it would seem that depriving the masses of their opiates was profoundly unwise.
Moral rules are obviously not grounded in the authority of a divine being. This is a point made over & over by the born again atheists and is entirely valid (such a shame it was first made over two and a half thousand years ago by Plato). However, there is a snag: the alternatives are somewhat intellectually demanding. A frenzied mob is unlikely to be particularly influenced by consequentialist calculations. Nor is it going to be especially easy to persuade it to embrace deontological ethics; Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is pretty heavy going.
Science cannot step into the breach as it is morally neutral. A scientist might be engaged in the quest for a cure for AIDS or developing higher yielding crops; he might equally well be weaponising anthrax or vivisecting Jews. On the other hand, religion can provide moral guidance even though this is imposed though irrational or false doctrines and a reward/punishment mechanism that is ultimately specious. The thug’s boot is poised over the pensioner’s head – does it really matter if he is restrained from kicking through a fear of hell fire or an internalised albeit artificial belief in the sanctity of human life?
The Rapier & the Blunderbuss
There is no doubting that Christianity has had a pretty chequered past. However, Savonarola and Tomás de Torquemada are long dead and, much as one might sometimes regret it, it is exceedingly unlikely that Richard Dawkins will be charcoal grilled à la Jeanne d'Arc . True there are things about the Church that raise politically correct hackles and it is doubtless deeply unfair that we are unlikely to see a lesbian Archbishop of Canterbury or a single mother holding the Keys of St. Peter for a good few years. Who gives a damn?
There are lies & there are damned lies. As I see it the born again atheist would be far better advised to forgo the blunderbuss and take up the rapier. Religious extremism and bigotry rather than religion should be the targets. Here there can be no quarter and no pusillanimous attempts at appeasements like the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act.
