Richard Dawkins didn’t get arguing with as many complete and utter loonies in this evening’s Root of All Evil (Channel 4) as he did last week, though his opponents arguments still wandered into the mystifying. His reputation as Darwin’s Rottweiler may go before him, or it may be just his frank and direct language, but he tends to provoke some emotional reactions – it also doesn’t help when you choose to debate religion with people of a rather extreme persuasion. A satisfying debate is never too likely when an atheist discusses religion with the religious – people simply have to agree to disagree, because the atheist and the follower will find each other’s arguments just as ludicrous, and the argument often deteriorates into petty point-scoring, desperate and tenuous arguments, and insults. I learnt that the hard way when a fundamentalist Christian friend implied when pressed that my mother’s cancer was a punishment for sin.
People are entitled to believe in whatever they want – God, Allah, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. If people’s religion helps them to be a better and more co-operative person, to be generous and charitable to other people, and to apply moral standards to their life, that’s all very well, though all the millions of decent people without religion wonder what all this God fuss is about when they’re doing fine without it. Maybe most religious people in the world are decent, kind and peaceful. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that religion is and always has been the most divisive and destructive influence on mankind.
Religion has had a hard time, really. It’s been used as a controlling influence on the masses, and a justification for everything from oppression to genocide. Atheists are also capable of criminal actions, murder and atrocities, there’s no doubt of that, but the problem with religion is that it is continually used as an answer for difficult questions of political beliefs and identity; the argument of divine command, or doing the work of the Lord, has always been used as an easy way out, of justifying all kinds of reprehensible actions. Hitler said in Mein Kampf, “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord”. Religion (be it Christianity, Islam or Hinduism) is riddled with contradictions. The Bible speaks of love, hope and charity, while advocating rape and murder. Old texts, vague histories and eons-old ‘laws’ are interpreted subjectively to suit people’s own ends, to provide them with the answers they need or the justifications they seek – to the point where no-one knows the truth any more. Religion confuses matters, and when reality is about shades of grey, religion is busy calling white black and black white.
The problem is that the biggest questions of life, the universe and our place in it are unanswerable. We’re descended from apes, and yet we’re still struggling to find more meaning to our lives than continuation of the species, and death – just because we’re clever enough to have invented the iPod.
Looking for answers, philosophical enquiry, discussion and argument are endlessly fascinating, but religion would deprive us all of this opportunity to make sense of the world around us, by giving us a list of answers to every question, until we had no more questions of our own. They may be the answers, some people insist, I have no proof either way; the fact is that there is no proof whatsoever of Intelligent Design, no proof of the existence of any god, but overwhelming and constantly accumulating evidence for the natural evolution of the universe. Apart from anything else, I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t stare at the stars and be amazed by them simply for what they were, or talk about the meaning of life with friends at four in the morning, not having any of the answers, but mind boggled by the sheer scale, complexity and beauty of the universe. Douglas Adams said “I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day”.
I’ve always taken my freedom to believe what I want (and to express my beliefs) for granted, and yet this freedom is under threat. Our education secretary is a member of Opus Dei, public money is being channelled into an ever-increasing number of faith schools in the UK, some American schools are teaching creation theory and Intelligent Design to children as fact. Religion is on the rise, and the religious are ever more vocal. Religious pressure groups would happily curtail freedom of expression by banning plays, TV programmes and films they see as ‘blasphemous’. I want my children to be raised in an environment where their education and the media they see allows them to make their own decisions about what they believe, but that might be difficult in the future unless reasonable people fight for their right to freedom of expression, and the rights of their children to an education, not an indoctrination.
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Dawkins put in a better performance this week I thought. He was ready with the comebacks and seemed to have the intellectual highground on most of them. Until us atheists/agnostics create a club that’s more appealing than a religion it’s going to be difficult to break the cycle. I don’t know if teaching atheism is tantamount to religion?
You don’t need to teach atheism – atheism is simply an absense of belief in a god, and if I suggested teaching children atheism as the only choice available to them, it might make me no better than a Creationist. Children should be taught about religions, I’m not suggesting for a moment that they shouldn’t – but they should be taught about religions in an even-handed manner, in the spirit of intellectual and philosophical enquiry – allowing them to make their own minds up about the world they live in, and what they believe, or don’t believe.
Atheists, maybe Humanists moreso, would argue that the ‘club’ is simply the Human community we all live in, and that a membership badge isn’t necessary. Atheists and Humanists have clubs such as the National Secular Society and British Humanist Association, but they’re not really my kind of club. While they provide educational resources and speak on TV whenever the BBC wants a non-believer to get into fisticuffs with an archbishop, they also provide precious little sense of community that appeals to me beyond political debate and god-knocking. The problem is that atheists are by their nature more independently minded, so much less likely to be interested in joining clubs.
Atheism – the belief there is no god. Therefore a belief system, like religon, only difference is that it didn’t start any mass killing sprees called wars!
Scientific fact – A piece of information that has yet to be disproved.
Thought of the day. If you were the size of an ant then the black ipod would look like the monolith from 2001.
Does this help the debate?
Was that actually an iPod in 2001?
there are no parallels between religion and atheism…strongly believing in something that has not been proved and not believing in something that has not been proved are entirely different.
Getting into semantics is one of the reasons why discussions about religion end up never-ending…
Words like faith, belief, truth, fact and conviction all have their own meanings, and there’s room for all of them in any discussion about religion or atheism, though some atheists might argue that everything is fact and evidence, not belief and conviction.
As for what’s parallel or opposite, I’m now drawing lines and rectangles and equilateral triangles in my head and it’s getting very confusing so I’m going to stop.
Atheism is being taught in schools now, in Suffolk and elsewhere, though some religionists don’t like it. Since the 1944 Education Act, RE has been the only compulsory subject in the curriculum, but it never became part of the national curriculum so there were 151 different RE syllabuses around the country. However, the new National Guidelines for RE were approved by the QCA (Qualifications & Curriculum Authority) last year, and Standing Advisory Councils on RE in each local education authority are revising their guidelines for schools in light of it.
When the new guidelines were introduced, there was a predictable hoo-ha in the press about kids being taught to be atheists, which is not what it’s about – they’re supposed to be taught about humanism and other secular life stances – as religion should be taught. I’m on the Suffolk SACRE and we’re working on a new model syllabus to ensure that all kids are taught about atheism and humanism in schools. Some already covered the subject but only as an afterthought, usually for kids in Years 10 and 11 (15 years plus).
I wrote the following to the National Secular Society last week:
‘In my experience, RE (as taught in non-faith schools in an even-handed sort of way) is putting them off religion for life. Most young people aren’t stupid and can see how religions contradict each another. I go into schools to talk about atheism and Humanism, and have been approached by youngsters who’ll say things like they’re glad that I’ve expressed views similar to theirs, and they’re sick of being “got at” by religious people. University of Manchester research seems to show that it’s not RE in school we need to worry about but the influence of religious parents, though they’re having less success than they used to in passing on their irrationality. A Sikh woman who recently attended a SACRE meeting in our county complained that the young people in her faith were not interested in attending the temple. She was disappointed that we didn’t think it was the school’s job to encourage them to do so.’
The god that Nathan’s fundamentalist Christian friend believes in is self-evidentally an evil god. Surely, this cannot be be acceptable for any right minded person, whether religious or not.
If Christians want to believe in stories, this is ok, but my personal search is for truth, and it is disingenuous of religious people to claim that they have truth on their side, when this palpably not so. It seems to me that most religions are fundamentally based on dishonesty, and yet Christians view dishonesty as wrong!
Incidentally, Intelligent Design has been banned from Dover High School, lets hope this sets the precedent for the rest of the US.
I once got hit by a fundmentalist christian for disagreeing with him.
I physically turned the other cheek but the irony was lost on him.
I think this was for three reasons:
1. He was an idiot.
2. I suspect he had actually read very little of the book (i.e. the bible) his rather aggressive interpretation of christianity was based on. I *have* read the bible, I think the King James version is an exceptional piece of writing but I don’t think that it’s contradictory stories, rules and glorification of various acts of genocide by the israelites in the distant past are what I would choose to base my belief system on.
I have also noticed that many of the more arduous, vocal and in-your-face christians that I have met seem to have a very sketchy knowledge of the supposed word of god (fine on the intolerance towards gays, fully versed in the oppression of women (despite often being women themselves) and seem to have no problem in professing to follow a religion based on peace and love, but still somehow manage to believe that killing people is ok).
3. Irony is generally wasted on those that need it most.
Irony is lost there, as well as a sense of humour. We might all get along a lot better if even the fundamentalists amongst us were able to take a bit of a prod at their beliefs, even a light tickle – but I have found that normally polite people become monsters when their beliefs are questioned. Atheists, I have found, usually take attempts to convert them with the very sizable pinch of salt it deserves, even putting up with considerable rudeness from the religious (and abuse in Iain’s case) with patience.
The simple fact is that the religious often know that they are standing on shaky ground, but have no other argument, while atheists do not claim to know all the answers and are willing to entertain different ideas. I always think that religious people look like they’ve been backed into a corner incredibly quickly if you start discussing God and alternatives – they’re expecting a fight. Fair enough, I’m not prepared to treat them with kid gloves.
This is being a bit disingenuous to all of the moderate religious people (such as the Bishop of Oxford that Dawkins spoke with in the second part of Root of All Evil), who are willing to talk about their religion, accept and answer questions, and admit that they are ‘selective’ about what they believe in the Bible.
As for agnostics, they just need to get off the fence. I can’t help but think that the amount of atheists and Humanists you could count in this country would shoot up if many of the people who currently describe themselves as agnostic had the courage to put some thought into what they believed or didn’t believe – and this would be helped if atheists were a bit more positive in their atheism, even though that sounds like an oxymoron. If agnostics all end up as true believers, that’s fine, but at least they’ve made their minds up.