The words militant atheist refer to those who regard religion as some kind of toxin that poisons society by the very fact it can become a dominant part of somebody's psychological make up. That's quite clear from Hitchens' book God is Not Great.
Militant atheists are those who want to push society in one direction and destroy religion's power by destroying the religion meme by exposing people to the real truth where all become enlightened after having cast off their 'celestial comfort blankets'
This revelation of truth is fervently believed to be necessary to create a happier society. Many of these militant atheists are middle aged adolescents brought up on Monty Python and who still cherish the high point of secularism and liberal social democracy reached in the 1970s.
As such it is a legacy of the monotheistic Christianity that the atheists rail against with the smug certitude of evangelisers for the one true faith. Many pedestrian atheists simply parrot bits of the texts and scriptures they like, such as The God Delusion to 'prove' their point.
Naturally, Dawkins and Grayling are somewhat like C of E vicars, but certainly far more earnest about the importance of 'religion' which they generally take as being Christianity and God, with some occasional references to Islam and 'Islamofascism'.
If militant atheism made people better or cured them, it would then still be necessary to explain why Hitchens sees the conflict between secular civilisation and 'Islamofascist' barbarism in manichaean terms as a conflict between lightness and dark, between night and day.
Most informed people do not see the world's problems in this stark apocalyptic way. Religion does not cause wars and terrorism but certain interpretations of it 'up the ante' and exacerbate political conflicts over scarce resources such as oil and water.
Militant atheist believers take a moment in Western civilisation in the post war period and see it as the apex of progress and the approximation to an ideal society from which we are now retreating at our peril. Darker forces from the benighted past are dragging us back.
So there are those 68ers like Hitchens who believe exporting secular civilisation by force might be the solution. By defeating 'Islamofascism', the last kick of a dying Islam, the world can be driven towards a just order of rationality, sweetness and light.
Where people do not read to take succour from moth-eaten texts and absurd religions but from books written by intelligent and lucid people who enlighten and entertain.
Where quoting bits of knowledge and a 'leisurely walk across the library' will take its place as well as exchanging knowledge over the coffee and cheese and wine evenings that will replace all that religion, draughty churches, and compulsory RE lessons.
Now there are atheists, of course, who do not have a fetish for getting the sure frisson of pleasure out of telling people that their often harmless illusions are redundant or that death is final. They just know it.
Life is largely meaningless and painful and death a release e.g as in Schopenhauer who was an atheist but, as John Gray suggested, had no desire to deconvert the world
Yet the neurotic repetition of the same propaganda by atheists like Christopher Hitchens is a pose a bit like that of the Marquis de Sade. If a person knows death is final, then he must want a reason why everybody should accept that and not delude themselves.
In fact, for everyone to accept death as final so we can get on with life is meant to give some kind of cold comfort no less than the Spaghetti Monster that one can laugh at. Laughter brings us into the company of others who can 'get over themselves' and the supposed 'seriousness' about God.
Yet its no less a form of lying to yourself. Not only is death final nor does the ideal of the good society change anything or hold out the prospect of a better life for all. Not least for those who are not Dawkins, for example his fans, who will be forgotten when stone dead.
In Michel Houellebecq's Atomised, the scientist Walcott makes the following observation on the English which could serve at the epitaph to these delusions of importance and divertion through work and humour,
People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved-that they have a way of looking at things-even tragedy-with a sense of irony. There's some truth in it; it's pretty stupid, though.
Irony won't save you from anything: humour doesn't do anything. You can look at life ironically for years; there are some people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end life always breaks your heart....
......That's when you stop laughing. After that, there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. You might say, after that, there's only death'
Paradoxically, the very mental vice of 'belief in belief' that militant atheists rail against is central to the progressive myth behind the creed of Dawkins, Grayling Hitchens et al. They need it it in order to furnish mental strength against all evidence to the contrary.
If God is dead, then certainly so too is Progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment