New Atheist Missionaries-Nick Cohen and A C Grayling

... behind many of the demands of today's religious apologists that we "respect" Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and even the Scientology cult lies a desire to keep the plebs in their place by protecting their ridiculous but politically useful beliefs.

Nick Cohen's interpretation of religion in The Observer is confused. For a start he keeps conflating the absence of religion with atheism when much of Hindu thought is, in fact, atheist and where the absence of traditional religion hardly means that societies are "atheist" as opposed to merely secular.

In secular societies, religion can continue to exist as secularism is historically an outgrowth of Christianity. It means that temporal and spiritual power is to be separated. Despite claiming not to be a "militant atheist", Cohen's creed does depend on a belief system that makes fantastical claims.

The idea that a society free of religion is necessarily better than one with it ignores the extent to which all societies can have a plurality of value systems that can coexist without conflict and have dome so for generations. Some trends in religious based thought are illiberal and intolerant. Some are not.

Islamism is a "political creed" and an ideology. It has not arisen directly out of traditional Islamic teaching in all cases and the versions of Islamism which preach apocalypse and terror and modernistic in believing that the world will be saved by destroying what are considered the destroyers of Muslim lands-the degenerate West and its oil intensive economies.

The notion that by changing people's beliefs one can change behaviour is a conceit entertained by those whose secularism and atheism derives from the more intolerant elements of religious thought and that all societies everywhere are converging towards or should be compelled by Progress to do so.

This is a myth with no more evidence to back it up than a religious faith. Since the high point of secular thought in the 1970s, religion has returned to many parts of the globe. This has annoyed those who so confidently predicted its demise and those who think like Cohen that it has spread by cowardly "appeasement".

The fall back explanation as why the inevitable has not happened is that religion is simply prescribed for the plebs by the powerful, a conceit that can only be held by those who actually hold to the snobbish idea themselves that the masses are blinkered and mentally shackled by religion.

Not all of those who condemn atheism are pious themselves, as the presence of journalists among their number suggests. Rather, they believe in piety for the masses and fear that without religion the lower orders will lose their moral bearings.

Along with Nick Cohen, the most dreary proponent of this kind of thinking is A C Grayling, who takes up Bertrand Russell's conviction in internationalism and militant Enlightenment but without his wit and with a shrill moralistic tone and the faith in the victory of the progressive intelligentsia that Russell lacked.

John Gray wrote witheringly of A C Grayling's obsession with removing the mental shackles and "fear" inculcated by religion showing, it becomes actually more obvious that the fear of the deluded masses is behind the anxiety of the secular and atheist intelligensia, as the philosophy preaches ,

...the same sermon: history is a record of crime, oppression and superstition; but salvation is at hand through rational inquiry, the gift of the Greeks that was lost in the Dark Ages and rediscovered in the Enlightenment.

Repeating this as Grayling does, over and over again, suggests that he believes the lesson has still not been understood, and throughout his extensive corpus of polemical writings he has the manner of a querulous teacher hammering rudimentary lessons into the heads of refractory schoolchildren.

For Grayling, it seems, few if any of the difficulties of ethics and politics are insoluble. The remedies for human ills are obvious, or would be so if only humans were not blinded by superstition. Never doubting that he is free of this vice, Grayling writes as one conveying the simple truth.

The notion that atheism in free societies will necessarily create better ones has no evidence to back it up: Sweden's social democracy might well have much to do with its peaceful and tolerant evolution in the twentieth century, if the experiments in eugenics are ignored, the kind once supported by the Fabian Society and progressives.

Yet that has much to do with Sweden's history, it granting of aid due to the guilt at having remained neutral when faced with Nazism in World War Two and the desire to expiate it through well meaning actions. It has little to do with atheism as such. And its secularism derives from its pietistic Lutheran inheritance.

Cohen lumps together under "religion" the beliefs and practices of states and regimes whose religions are as different as Sweden's secular society is from the USSR or other unfree atheist states where religion was proscribed by the state.

Saudi Arabia uses its petrodollars to promote its brutal Wahhabi theology

That is, the petrodollars the elite gets from the West's over dependence upon Saudi oil and which props up the consumer society that grew up in the post war period in the West where religion was eclipsed by consumption and entertainment. This trend had nothing to do with people accepting atheism.

Atheism did not persuade many in Britain philosophically in the 1960s and 1970s. Religion of the traditional type, especially Non-Conformism, simply in the context of British culture became irrelevant and dated. The Church of England was never that influential, especially in the cities.

Yet one argument that disproves the idea that atheism necessarily produces better and more rational people in a free society is the level of support given by both prominent religious fundamentalists and militant secular progressives to the invasion of Iraq ( e.g Hitchens, Berman, Michnik, et al )

When atheists criticised the Iraq War, as Dawkins did ) they did not emphasise the fact it was an oil grab but, curiously, tended to opine that Bush was a frenzied idiot and a messianic tub thumping fundamentalist, despite the absence of that from the thinking of most neoconservatives.

Likewise with Afghanistan. It takes much religious faith will the belief to an almost hallucinogenic degree that it was a "humanitarian war" on the part of the US government as opposed to a geopolitically calculated invasion to get a pipeline built, advance US power in Central Asia and win the War on Drugs.

Those like Peter Bracken who delude themselves with the theology that there is correct consciousness of those who see the wars as stridently part of Good against Evil are unaware of the scale of the rationalisation that even secular thinkers and atheists will put up to avoid confronting reality.

When bien pensants such as Grayling have indulged in spasms of indignation about Iraq they only went into print to condemn General Dannatt for proclaiming his religious faith and that it was irrelevant to the military and his mission.

......if General Sir Richard Dannatt were genuinely and fully consistent in his views as an evangelical Christian, he would not be a general or indeed any kind of soldier (except a "Christian soldier" in the meaning of the hymn).

His trade is war, war involves killing, the rather thin ethics of the founder of his faith implies pacifism and explicitly demands turning the other cheek rather than shooting and bombing: and so we see what professions of faith are really worth, in the long tradition of bishops blessing tanks.

But it is no surprise to find inconsistency and hypocrisy among the bulwarks of faith, and the general might share views about the good that the profession of killing does (not least, one supposes, to those who deserve it) with the crusaders and Torquemada and other more vigorous theorisers of what faith licenses and requires.

That will not make his views less inconsistent or unpalatable, but at least less hypocritical.

If so, then it was hardly pertinent for Grayling to bother commenting on that and claiming that it was inconsistent for a Christian to kill as opposed, presumably, it is for an atheist. If so, then at least some consideration as to why Iraq was invaded or whether it was a Just War could have been offered.

Grayling sententiously opined,

Members of the armed services have volunteered for a hazardous profession. It is remarkable and admirable how much courage and dedication they display, and how much sacrifice they make - so hackneyed, these terms, yet far more true than hackneyed, which is why they always bear repeating - in the execution of the duties they have been rigorously trained to perform.

Their duty, courage and sacrifice belongs to the army and through it the country; what they think about matters of value, life and death belongs to themselves.

It was odd that Grayling castigated a man as a hypocritical killer if he was a religious man in a war, a view held by some Christians such as the Quakers, but as admiral, dedicated and courageous in doing a duty so long as they do not proclaim any religious feeling or what they think.

If "matters of value" do not matter, then soldiers could not appeal to conscience in opposing torture. Unless, rather like Christopher Hitchens they come close to rationalising the need for torture because the "Islamofascist" opponents in Afghanistan do not play by the rules of the Geneva Convention.

Nothing General Dannatt said comprimised his ability as a general: he had a duty to do and Grayling as a "free thinker" was in a position to look at why it was that troops were in Iraq being killed and towards what ends: they were not religious but secular and based on what its authors considered a rational geopolitical scheme

The hypocrisy was more a quality evident in Grayling than Dannatt, that of avoiding such a question or looking at the ethics of invading nations to control their oil and hence maintain the profligate Great Car Society and consumerism that makes the invasion of such nations necessary was never considered.

Blair contended that he is a man of faith and clearly this "faith" is yet another rationalisation for his messianic idea that force can be used as the midwife of history, to rid the globe of Evil Forces and put the oil under the control of benign powers who make it work for the Good of All.

In that sense religion was merely the extension of Machiavelli: that is of political expediency, of being seen to have all the Christian or religious virtues, including praising the Quran and setting up TheTonyBlairFaithFoundation ( supported by Coca Cola ) whilst departing from its teachings for gain.

None of that ever seems to penetrate into the awareness of those preaching Britain's global mission to root out and defeat Jihadi Islamists or Islamosfascists everywhere as if it was a threat to the West comparable to Hitler's Nazi Germany and the USSR during the Cold War, a "seamless totalitarian threat".

Cohen and Hitchens were quite clear that "liberal interventionism", the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were a moral cause against fanatical religious based fundamentalist fanatics at home and abroad. Those like Grayling provide the unwitting rationalisation for such global crusade too through their ideology.

One reason for that is Grayling denies that the crimes of the twentieth century totalitarian regimes had anything to do with atheism. John Gray put this faith to rest thus,

The worst acts of the twentieth century were committed by atheist regimes that claimed a scientific basis for their policies. This fact is mentioned nowhere in Grayling's dictionary, and throughout his writings he is adamant in denying that the crimes of Nazism and Communism had anything to do with atheism. Instead, he asserts, they were due to the repressive character of the regimes.

He advances this proposition as something like an a priori truth, which may be prudent as it is certainly not supported by historical evidence.

Lenin and Stalin made plain, in both words and deeds, that the destruction of religion was essential to the achievement of their goals. A type of atheism was at the core of the Communist project, and the same was true of Nazism. Both made concessions to religion when circumstances dictated-Stalin during the Second World War, Hitler in his cultivation of "German Christianity" and his overtures to the Vatican.

They also concocted state cults-around Lenin in the USSR, and around Hitler and an ersatz paganism in Nazi Germany. (A similar pattern was evident in Maoist China.) The long-term aim remained the extermination of every variety of traditional religion-a goal that could only be realized by repressive means.

.....Anyone who remembers British left-liberal opinion as it was in the seventies will immediately recognize it here. Socialism and democracy, the horrors of religion and the near inevitability of ongoing secularization-these ephemera of a half-forgotten past are presented as ruling ideas of the twenty-first century.