New atheists are not so new

In order to create a beautiful garden, you have first to clear the land of stones and weeds. This is what the so-called “new atheists” are trying to do. They are trying to show that the beliefs on which this great edifice of religion is built are a lot of empty hooey. A con trick, a sleight of hand.

Unless the theological claptrap is bulldozed from the garden, the green shoots of a rational, peace-loving secular society cannot emerge.

This is not a new argument at all. It has been raging since the 18th century Enlightenment and it has been resisted all the way by the vested interests in the various religious bodies. All the arguments made by the “new” atheists were made just as eloquently back in the 19th century by people like Robert Ingersoll who was, in his day, one of the most famous and influential men in America. (1)

When Ingersoll embarked on his lecture tours, great opera houses and meeting places would be literally packed to the rafters by people anxious to hear the great agnostic speak. There was a thirst for his anti-religious rhetoric then as now.

Ingersoll’s memory has now been effectively wiped from the national consciousness by the all-powerful Christian lobby. They just wouldn’t tolerate the idea that an anti-clerical God-basher could possibly be a great American. Ingersoll and his ideas were vaporised from popular culture.

That is, until the “new” atheists revived them, and lo and behold, they’re just as popular today as they were in Ingersoll’s day.

Until the apologists for religion are comprehensively shown to be, at best, deluded idiots or at worst manipulative power-mongers, we will never be free from their influence. They must be shown to be emperors with no clothes. You can’t do that by trying to talk to them on their own terms (“let’s have a bit of respect around here – these are deeply held beliefs and any challenged to them is unacceptably offensive”).

The present challengers of theology – Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling et al – have taken the gloves off. And rightly so, in my opinion. I consider H.L. Mencken had it right when he said: “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.” And Thomas Paine said it even better: “The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.”

Someone very wise once said to me that if science disappeared from the world, we would still be living in caves. But if theology disappeared from the world, no-one would notice.

Religion has had it too easy for too long. It has erected around itself a completely unjustified wall of respectability. Many people still feel guilty or even “bad” if they speak ill of religion. I have even heard victims of the most horrendous clerical abuse holding back from condemning the institution that made that abuse possible because they had absorbed so deeply the Church’s own propaganda about its “goodness”.

The attack on the Catholic Church launched by Hitchens and Stephen Fry at a recent debate in London puts much more eloquently than I can the reason why their criticisms are more than justified.

The debate was not respectful and it is right that it was not respectful. I detest the Catholic Church with such vehemence that I do not wish to be respectful to it in any way. It is my considered judgment that on balance, if the Catholic Church had never existed, the world would be a better place.

The works of art that it is supposedly responsible for would still have been created, the music would still have been written, it would just have had a different subject matter. Artists would create art with or without religion – did Van Gogh need religion or Chopin? No trace of it in their work.

Those atheists who think the more honest and pugnacious of their brothers are “misguided” should give better reasons for saying so than the ones put forward by Jason Walsh. (3)

Terry Sanderson is the president of the National Secular Society

(1) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Ingersoll
(2) Intelligence Squared Debate - Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the World?, National Secular Society
(3) New atheists, old bottles, Jason Walsh, forth, November 10, 2009