Until a few years ago I had nothing but respect for Richard Dawkins. Today, having witnessed his transubstantiation from popular scientist to TV personality, I am not so sure.
The certainties handed-down by Dawkins are transformed by his followers into a deterministic and, at best poorly argued, at worst anti-human, worldview. Let’s say it here and now: religion is not responsible for all human misery and adopting the tactics of the daftest believers, such as, say, paying for insulting advertisements on the side of busses, is childish and will do nothing to further the aims of humanists.
This is not a charter for learning to live with religion. Far from it. Although I dislike the idea of laughing at people’s beliefs, humanists and atheists should be up for a straight fight. Frankly, anglophone-style secularism doesn’t go far enough. Ireland could do with a dose of French-inspired laïcité. Having an antagonistic relationship with religion and all of its works is a good idea – why are Irish pro-choice campaigners so timid, for example?
The problem is that ‘new atheism’, by attempting to lay the blame for all ills at the feet of ‘organised’ religion, not only invalidates religion’s very many contributions to human society, particularly in the arts, it also allows all manner of other self-indulgent cod-spiritual nonsense to flower. Christopher Hitchens, author of ‘God is Not Great’, is the worst offender. Hitchens regularly issues broadsides against god-botherers that are lapped-up by atheists who know how to fight but not how to argue.
Hitchens is first and foremost a journalist – he wants readers and knows which buttons to press in order to get them. There is no problem with this in and of itself. I myself am no stranger to whipping-up a bit of controversy, having recently penned articles headlined ‘Let’s demolish Dublin’ and ‘I slept with Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny’. And yet Hitchens’ provocative musings are treated like serious contributions to scholarship. They’re not.
As Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in forth, Mother Teresa is a particular target for the bile of the rocket-eating set: “Today’s screechy anti-God squad is more interested in hectoring the religious – those stupid believers in anything they are told – than it is in creating an Enlightened culture that might give people something else, something more profound, to think about and contribute to.”(1)
Picking one’s battles is all very well, but why attack just one pile of prejudices?
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