Wednesday 30 June 2010

New Atheism Missionaries for Evangelical Secularism


Nothing is more likely to annoy militant atheists than the view that Progress no less than the God that Freud wrote about in his The Future of an Illusion is a myth. As can be seen from the response here from one frantic disbeliever,

The evidence is clear that the world evolves and changes, societies evolve and change, we seem to be roughly optimising with some good changes and come bad. You can call it 'progress' if you like, but things are indisputably better for more people now than just about any other era in history.

That's conflating evolution necessarily with progress. Yet the view that history ascends on a linear trajectory is a myth that comes from Christianity. There is progress to be sure as humans ingeniously develop ways of making themselves more comfortable, healing the sick and curing diseases etc.

Yet the increase in knowledge has never made people sane or reasonable nor outside the developed world has the suffering of ever more vast masses of people been eased. Africa has got worse in recent decades and the very wealth and consumerism of the West is powered by diminishing supplies of oil.

The knowledge that is used to cure can also be used to kill on a massive scale. The research that led to the X Ray and spitting the atom etc also led to the Atom Bomb. Harbingers of progress like H G Wells were wrong about the twentieth century whilst writers like Dostoevsky predicted it better.

And God isn't dead, he's always been purely imaginary

When Freud called religion an illusion in the 1920s he meant that whereas in the past it might have seemed reasonable to presuppose the existence of God, there was certainly no grounds for it now. The prediction was that religion would lose its hold over minds as it did until the 1970s in the West.

The problem is that the consumer society destroyed religion more than anything else but with the return of privation, economic volatility, the conflict over resources and the psychopathology of nations and power blocks competing over them, religion is returning in disguised forms.

The idea of God and Heaven is only slightly more irrational than the idea that a consumer Utopia will arise across the entire globe and that it will happen alongside the eradication of all religion. The hope is no less absurd than life after death. Though it might constitute a form of death-in-life.

Then the militant atheist replies,

I won't know or care if I'm forgotten after I am dead or not. I got through 14 billion years of being unknown before I was alive so I suspect that the time after I am dead will be similarly painless for me.

Well, there was no 'you' to 'get through' anything. So if you find yourself alive after so many millennia of non-existence and know in advance that you will travel to sure extinction, the best thing to do is to understand why the world is in the current condition it is. On that score, many militant atheists refuse to look at the reality

Indeed simply repeating that God is a delusion and that most of the world's suffering happens because of a God Delusion sets up the equally futile delusion that just by getting rid of religion people will necessarily become saner, wiser and happier, as if greed, hypocrisy, and stupidity did not exist before Christianity.

That's an invertion of religious hope but a religious expectation of deliverance none the less. Those who believe neither in God nor in the idea of Progress are more realistic. As the poet Philip Larkin had it in Aubade when he wrote of 'The sure extinction that we travel to/And shall be lost in always',

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

For a start much religion has in the West become a private belief system to help cope with experience. Death is still frightening to many, or at least the prospect of premature death. Outside the West this is still the situation for most, whilst within the USA, religion as fundamentalism is still a force.

That's what really annoys Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Grayling et al. The experience of US Christian fundamentalism is most disturbing because it was never meant to happen. Yet not even the neocons, as represented by Bush and hated by Dawkins, really believe anything but power.

If the USA is going to be the world power, to send so many of its people to fight and protect its interests, then obviously the utility of religion is provide a sense of missionary purpose. If Iraq was about oil, then no person with a stake in US pride and power will admit that openly any more than they will say marrying their wife was really about sex.

Now those like Dawkins admire the USA, its science, money invested in research and much of its secular foundations as a civilisation but if that depends on Empire, then obviously large numbers of people who defend it will tend to believe that God protects it or that the deaths in Iraq are 'worth it'.

The idea that the USA went into Iraq because of Christian fundamentalism is absurd: it was just the necessary credo to draw on in order to mobilise people and rationalise what was obviously a resource war. A war misconceived but part of a general trend towards maintaining Western hegemony.

So if one prefers the alternative with the barbarians knocking at the gates, as Sam Harris refers to Muslims, then it is logical to assume that the irrationality of Christian fundamentalism and a missionary credo to free the world is essential to procure the oil upon which consumerism and atheism depends.

Atheism or lack of belief can retain ground in Britain and Western Europe because it knows that the USA is always there to protect it, even when know they can mock Bush or being a 'religious nut'. Much Anti-Americanism in Europe is based on that cheap sentiment and the hatred of fundamentalism and the US believing its 'simply the best'.

So many who mock religion are those who can afford to because they have and perhaps never will be in a terrifying life or death situation. It's part of the repudiation of the bleak Britain of WW2, austerity and the privation of those years along with the protection afforded under the nuclear umbrella in the Cold War years and a placid social democracy.

The real test of whether atheism is a serious belief system for many which is not contingent on consumer plenty and long term employment and the future being infinitely better will be tested in the coming decades. Certainly, there has already been a rise in support for 'political religions' like Islamism within the West as well as fellow travellers from Trotskyist groups.

Written first on Sunday, 16 November 2008

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