Cameron, Faith and Missionary Atheists.

It's Good Friday.

In the last few days PM Cameron has started to make utterances on Britain as a Christian Nation, most likely because he wants to 'moralise' his economic policies at a time when the Church of England is criticising him over growing levels of poverty and the dependence on Food Banks more and more British citizens are having

On this Polly Toynbee, one of the most stupid and boringly partisan columnists in the British media,  prattles forth in The Guardian,

'It's mostly toe-curling stuff. Alastair Campbell never gave better advice than in warning politicians off doing God: it's horrible to behold. Sincere or not, they become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, as did Cameron talking of "our saviour"'

True, but the politician he gave that advice to most was Tony Blair whose entire time in office was marked by an evangelical zeal and kitschy uplift. By comparison Cameron seems to be quite moderate in 'doing God', though he has decided to start bringing God in order to bolster his moral credentials.

Toynbee warbles on,

'At a time of anti-Muslim attacks, when Islamist extremism is feared for its terrorist potential, Cameron's "Christian country" is soaked in white nationalist significance'.

No it isn't. The most fervent Christians are often from Afro-Carribean and African British citizens who keep alive inner city churches and chapels.Moreover, at the present time, 2014, 'Islamist extremism' is not feared as much as it was under Blair in the early part of the last decade. This is guilt fuelled politics enlivened by a weird racial obsession.

'He has great verbal agility in sounding eminently moderate and reasonable while planting darker ideas. Behind a harmless love for country churches is a whiff of Lynton Crosby's culture war politics'.

That's one reason why it is better to keep an established C of E. It tends to warn governments about the unethical effect of their policies. The alternative is to allow more 'privatised' faith groups and US style hucters to start to dominate the tone and direction of politics.

Asked in the 2011 census "What is your religion?", 59% said Christian – surprisingly few as most people saw it as a question of culture rather than belief.

There is no reason why is should not be a question of culture, unless Toynbee thinks that secular humanists and atheists should be on some universal mission of conversion to persuade people to proclaim they are atheists on the census. It's curious Toynbee is so obsessed with beliefs.

'Take schools, where a third are under religious control. They take many fewer free-school-meals pupils and pews near good C of E schools swell unnaturally with new parents. Selection makes them popular, yet even so a majority want them abolished'.

England has a free society. The case would have to be for removing funding from faith schools and not for a majoritarian form of coercion in which schools that are disliked are abolished. A majority could well want a mosque demolished or closed down in their town.

Toynbee clearly has an authoritarian outlook. The reason C of E schools thrive is because they are better at teaching subjects that comprehensives. The best thing to do is to try and raise standards in these failing schools instead of trying to level down in the name of abstract ideals of equality.

'Like all humanity, the religious are both good and bad. The C of E is good on food banks, bad on sex and death. Faith makes people no more virtuous, but nor do rationalists claim any moral superiority. Pogroms, inquisitions, jihadist terror and religious massacres can be matched death for death with the secular horrors of Pol Pot, Hitler or Stalin'.

That is not borne out by Toynbee's belief in the majoritarian popular will in opposing or for abolishing faith schools. This bland generalisation ignores the fact that communism was often both both rationalistic and pseudo-religious. Nazism was a pseudo-religion and its ideologues despised Judeo-Christian ethics.

'The danger is where absolute belief in universal truths, religious or secular, permits no doubt. Politicians do well to stay clear of the realm of revealed truth. Cameron will win back few voters by evangelising for Britain as a "Christian country"'

Cameron is not claiming he has any absolute belief in universal truths. He has explictly rejected doctrinal correctness. It was Blair with his missionary zeal to use military force to liberate the globe from tyranny ( one supported by a good number of militant atheists and liberal leftists in Britain ) who held to that creed.

Tony Blair on 'Religious Extremism'

'The fact is that, though of course there are individual grievances or reasons for the violence in each country, there is one thing self-evidently in common: the acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. It is a perversion of faith-

'Tony Blair on 'religious extremism' as the force for global conflict in The Observer, January 27 2014)

'Well, I think if you have faith about these things, then you realise that judgment is made by other people...If you believe in God, [the judgment] is made by God as well.".

Tony Blair to Michael Parkinson in 2006 on the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Likewise, the decision to invade Iraq could be considered to be at least partly motivated by a perversion of faith, a belief that both all dictatorships and all terrorism were alike motivated by a seamless global geopolitical Evil that could be comprehensively defeated by the USA and Britain.

Of course, the invasion of Iraq was based on geopolitical calculations,namely the idea of controlling the second largest oil supplies on earth and spreading democratic revolution across the Middle East through a 'domino effect' that would be stages in rolling back Assad's Syria and the Ayatollah's Iran.

Blair's evangelical zeal was probably far more sincere than Bush's born again Christianity but in both cases the war was about calculated strategies leavened by a militant and missionary foreign policy that appealed to scores of atheists, most noticeably the Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens.

There were some prominent atheists who disagreed with the Iraq War and chose to do it on the basis alone that the US was dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, such as President GW Bush pretended to be, and the fact that Blair was prepared to invoke God and religion in his decision for war.

Dawkins, however, remains largely ignorant of global geopolitics and peddles the banal idea that wars are all 'the fault of religion' or that only societies in which religion is predominant could wars be aided and abetted enthusiastically, the parochial conceit of those reaching maturity in a more secular Britain in the 1960s and 70s.

Most of the violence perpetuated by terrorists globally is largely due to politics and politicised versions of religion-or 'political religions'- that gain ground in lands beset with conflicts over territory, scarce resources from oil to diamonds and even water, and great power conflicts. This is the case in the Middle East.

Syria's crisis is a consequence of global climate change, increased scarcity of cheap food, an incompetent dictatorship that represented certain minorities which could no longer ensure sufficient living standards for all and the geopolitical contest between regional and global powers over pipeline routes and access to oil and gas.

Syria's civil war is in reality a series of civil wars between minorities created by the fracturing of the artificial state into warring factions that want to break away ( such as the Kurds into a new oil rich state ) and the Sunni Muslims who have less of a stake in gaining from new gas pipeline projects from Shia Iran and Iraq.

The way Blair draws attention to the Syrian Crisis at present is always, however, with a view to portraying it as a consequence of sectarian divisions and 'perverted faith' that has ramped up casualties without US and British intervention to levels surpassing his mendaciously low figure of 100,000 deaths in the Iraq War.

'At present, our screens are dominated by the hideous slaughter in Syria. We have to hope that the peace negotiations succeed. But with more than 130,000 dead – and, on some accounts, the total is nearer 200,000 – millions displaced and the country in a state of disintegration...'

When Blair gives his opinion on any matter of global significance, it is invariably connected to his attempt to consolidate his image as a 'visionary' statesman and guarantee his 'legacy' in world politics. And that, in turn, means attempting to rationalise the catastrophic impact the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has had.

Contrary to the claims that Blair is a 'psychopath' and a mere 'warmonger', Blair does have a conscience which is why he seems to be obsessive in trying to prove that his decision to back the US invasion was justified in the light of some broader providential plan for the world.

By claiming contemporary terrorist atrocities are part of a 'clear common theme' and that other world leaders must 'start to produce a genuine global strategy to deal with it', Blair is trying to argue that the hitherto underestimated potency and power of religious based terrorism derailed his plans for Iraq.

The line Blair takes is that had it not been for 'the acts of terrorism...perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion', then democracy would have come to Iraq relatively quickly and it is they and not him who bears responsibility for the vast majority of the bloodshed.

'All over the region, and including in Iraq, where exactly the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future, such a campaign has to be actively waged. It is one reason why the Middle East matters so much and why any attempt to disengage is so wrong and short-sighted'.

Moreover, by maintaining that the sort of sectarian based religious violence is a 'growing' global threat, Blair can relativise the significance of the bloodshed in Iraq as one that is part of a wider trend that was just emerging at the time of his decision to invade Iraq to free it from a secular dictator.

The purpose of this propaganda is that Blair can absolve himself from the responsibility for the carnage in Iraq by trying to have it that this sort of sectarian violence was bound to break out anyway sooner or later. Just as governments have had to be 'engaged' over Syria, so too did he earlier with Iraq.

This way of 'framing' events in the Middle East over the past decade is meant to salvage Blair's reputation and it is motivated by vanity and egotism. All his efforts since being officially out of office are geared towards ensuring that he is retrospectively vindicated by History.

Even so, if that were the only aim Blair has, he could easily keep writing post ex facto justifications for the Iraq War and collecting vast amounts of money from his global lectures and speeches. But-and this is why Blair does have a conscience-he seems intent on promoting 'global harmony'.

Blair is obsessing with his 'place in history' because he does not want to be remembered only as the man whose decision brought widespread death and destruction to Iraq. So his 'TonyBlairFaithFoundation' is there 'to promote greater knowledge and understanding between people of different faiths'.

As a fairly recent convert to Catholicism, Blair can shift away from the Protestant idea of 'justification by faith alone' to one of atoning through a devotion to doing good work in the world by funding educational and exchange programmes and university courses to students across the world of faith.

Blair's message is that what happened in Iraq did not have to be that way. In fact, he was warned by numerous experts on the Middle East that an invasion to remove the secular dictator was going to lead to an outbreak of sectarian and ethnic tensions. Blair 'believed' it did would not happen that way.

So Blair is bound to blame violence on an 'abuse of faith' because his own decision to invade Iraq was based on a messianic faith based crusade to liberate the Middle East, one given impetus by the fact he had liberated the Muslim Kosovans in 1999 and the Afghans from the Taliban after 2001.

Blair is not going to cease trying to make up for-in his own way-the bad done in Iraq and that he blames on the evildoing of sectarian terrorists and not on himself because he believes he had the best of intentions. Blair knows all about faith based violence because his decision to go to war was based on it.

 

A Note on "New Atheists, Sam Harris and "Islamophobia"

There is no doubt that crude anti-islamic propaganda has been , in the course of the last decade, more than merely a crusade against religion as such. As Glen Greenwald writes,

"... the New Atheists have flirted with and at times vigorously embraced irrational anti-Muslim animus.
Sam Harris in 2005: "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."
Sam Harris in 2012: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

However, Greenwald is utterly wrongheaded and foolish to state,

"Perhaps the most repellent claim Harris made to me was that Islamophobia is fictitious and non-existent, "a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia". How anyone can observe post-9/11 political discourse in the west and believe this is truly mystifying. The meaning of "Islamophobia" is every bit as clear as "anti-semitism" or "racism" or "sexism" and all sorts of familiar, related concepts".

No it just is not.

"Islamophobia" conflates hatred of Islam with Islamism, and by extension Muslims. It has been use disingenuously by Islamists to insinuate that criticism of Islamism, of any of the various sorts that exist, with ant-Muslim hatred. The latter term could be used to describe Sam Harris's position.

A better term would be to use precise language depending on the context. As a catch-all term, "Islamophobia" has been used to conflate criticism of Islam as a religion or Islamism as a political set of idea with hatred of Muslims.The MCB and MAB specialise in using such Orwellian language.

The worst term used was "Islamofascism". The category error comes from linking all Islamist movements into one seamless continuum. The reason why those such asChristopher Hitchens used it was due to his leftist anti-authoritarianism and this idea of the USA and Britain as liberator nations in World War Two

This gave fake credence to the idea, peddled by Bush after 9/11, that the USA had suffered it "Pearl Harbour" and now "we" were embroiled in "World War Three". It seems both the self styled "liberal interventionist" left and the "anti-imperialist left" need to start getting a grip of their history.

A Comment on the Meaning of Faith, Belief and Religion.

When discussing the impact of religion, it is not only those who argue the case for atheism that make unquestioned assumptions by assuming that "religion" stands necessarily for something fundamentally opposed to certain values that can remain "meaningful". But the method of argumentation between atheists and those who are religious often is.

Canon Giles Fraser falls into the trap of that the so-called "New Atheists" and the religious often do, by bandying around abstract nouns and extrapolating vast claims and posing various arguments from them so as to win an argument. In The Guardian today Mr Fraser writes,

'As Max Weber explained, traditional societies regard the world as "a great enchanted garden". This is the world-view of The Tempest. In contrast, modern societies, through science and secularisation, have purged the world of magic and laid it out as a blind play of impersonal forces'

It has to be said that "societies" are not monolithic entities that can "regard" or "believe" in a certain world-view or reject it. They are made up of various mortal individuals who have had , and continue to have, the freedom to accept the claims made by authority or reject them. ( and so it should be ).

However, if 'impersonal forces' are at work in society here and now in 2012,  the given truths are no longer those of the clergy. That is a good thing. And yet the impulse towards blindly accepting a belief system or a system of accepted truths has not gone away. As Philip Larkin once wrote 'what remains when the disbelief has gone?'.

Indeed new forms of manipulation not even practised by supposed Christians are going to fill the void. Getting rid or repudiating the old forms of religion has seldom removed the need nor the impulse to believe in something. And something of that can be seen in the person and product that was Tony Blair.

As was clear from the debate on religion between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair on whether 'religion was a force for good', the actual question there was whether Progress was a force for good and to what extent religion is a form of progress. And between the two there was a consensus that this was how it should be so regarded.

Blair defined religion as "faith" or belief as if  all were interchangeable and saw that as a positive good when the correct form of motivation was present. Ironically, Hitchens held to that too on the grounds that the good things faith can achieve are only those consonant with the values of secular humanism. 

In which case "faith" is either obsolete or else dangerous as opposed to a force for belief that has always been hijacked by those wishing to shore up power over other humans  ( and nothing could be more human than that ). And belief in something is that which is liable these days to be manipulated.

The New Clergy are advertisers, spin doctors, PR merchants, media mongering demagogues and spin doctors. In some sense, this new class of the anointed are there to direct and channel the wants, needs and desires of the "flock" towards believing in the necessary myths that enrich and benefit those elites.

It could be argued that Money is both an impersonal God and consumerism, through identification with brands a new form of enchantment, that works like religion to cast a spell over "the masses". Yet that is based on a supposedly "secular" way of looking at human existence.

A more interesting perspective might be to regard Western Society as existing under a new form of irrational magic. And to see this as a continuity with the obscurantist aspects of religion in the past. In that sense organised religion, ideology and the admass society have something in common.

"The Pope is The Enemy of Humanity"

Judging from Protest the Pope yesterday, there is much in what Michael Burleigh wrote in Sacred Causes with regards Richard Dawkins that he comes across a a 'hotter sort of seventeenth century English Protestant'. That was evident from much of Dawkin's rhetoric and when calling Pope Benedict XVI an "enemy of humanity"

Dawkins thundered like this back in March 2010 when calling for the Pope to be arrested and, even if this were not possible, that it would be useful as "consciousness raising".

Should the pope resign?" No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly - ideally - qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.

No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

It is crude to suggest that the entire Catholic Church is institutionally given to child rape. Much of the loathing of maudlin kitsch can not be only the preserve of the Catholic Church in a consumerist age. Not all the Catholic Church is "evil" and "corrupt".

Indeed Geoffrey Robertson Q C started ranting about England being the land of the Levellers and who have always challenged Papal authority, there seemed at Protest the Pope to be a strong element of 'protestant' distaste at the nature of unjustified authority.

Robertson clearly must have known that the Levellers, as with all seventeenth century radicals whether Overton, Walwyn or Lilburne were trying to institute equality before the law as a Christian principle. Lilburne referred to 'the devil and the clergy and his agents' and the' black guard of Satan'.

The Protest to Pope ranters reaffirm what the Pope meant when he spoke of Britain as having "a history of anti-catholicism". Christopher Hitchens has termed himself a Protestant Atheist

Dawkins has the very protestant belief that by changing people's beliefs, that human behaviour can be changed and progress reaffirmed through destroying the Papacy as the worst embodiment of Christian dogma and faith.

His vision of the Roman Church crumbling to dust amidst the incense sounds akin to an apocalyptic vision in which deliverance from this Evil Yoke will free people from the burden of guilt and the centuries of oppression visited down upon those shackled to this decaying institution.

Yet the protesters do have a serious point beneath the rant. The Pope has not yet acted sufficiently with those accused of child abuse and it was a serious flaw that for years these priests were moved around from one parish to another. The accusations of a cover up will not go away.

It is not enough for the Church to talk about the vaguely metaphysical stain on The Church which is suffering the sins of those who committed crimes: the Church needs to hand over those who have committed these crimes to the civil courts.

It was also curious that the Pope referred to the child molestations as "unspeakable crimes". Well, precisely that has been the problem. Far from being unspeakable, the victims plight should not be unspeakable but redressed by these priests being put on trials.

As for the argument over Hitler and Nazism and Catholicism, that will be dealt with later. Clearly, the "aggressive atheism" mentioned by the Pope does not necessarily lead to Nazism, a political religion, any more than Catholicism is the logical pathway to Nazism.

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.

Militant Atheism and Rationalisations of Resource Wars.

I could waste your time by pointing out that "new atheists" are not so different from old atheists....we still don't believe in God, for instance, and add that the charge of moral equivalence would be easier to substantiate if atheists planted bombs on the underground.

So said Nick Cohen who conflates the cause of atheism in Britain with the universal liberation of the globe from Britain to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fact is 'atheists' have planted bombs and Marxist-Leninist terrorists have a long connection towards rationalising cataclysmic tranformations in History in order to blast them into Utopia. A characteristic inherent in Cohen's support for the Iraq War.

Ex-Trotskyists share the stress on apocalyptic violence inherent in atheist Communism but use it to advocate support now for the global power that can vanquish the 'forces of reaction' and pretend, as Hitchens does, that only Stalinism was the pseudo-religious distortion of Lenin's legacy.

Those like Dawkins who remain ignorant of history and culture outside the nerdy milieu of certain academics in 1970s social democratic Britain had better learn about the irrationalism inherent in human nature as something not covered merely by established religions but innate in the human animal.

The 'new atheism' is certainly not 'new' , though it repeats the same predictable Christianity in its view of a rigid monotheistic God and the cultural idea of one overarching framework for humanity into which all other belief systems must be subordinated. One Global Order presided over the USA, at its foundation a revolutionary Enlightenment superstate.

This form of secular atheist liberal belief is inherited from the very monotheistic concept of Christianity that Cohen, Dawkins, Hitchens et al are so sure they are rejecting whilst retaining the thought patterns on which the Protestant missionary creed are based and which can be used to posit the Anglo-American powers as salvationist ones.

The entire segment above was removed by Comment is Free Censorship for no good reason when I wrote it last year.

I continued on this thread

People need to distinguish between secularism and atheism as the two are not at all necessarily the same thing. Which is probably why some think Islam has a necessary propensity towards violence which is disproved by history. Think of tolerant forms of Sufi Islam.

The current 'clash' is not so much about religion but about politics or 'political religion', the apocalyptic myths that those who have positions of power must have people believe if certain instransigent worldviews are to be held and towards the aim of advancing specific political goals.

The clash is not one of civilisations.

It is more one about the real stuff of the Western over dependence upon oil and gas. Those who care about the the future of peace and non-violence ought to give far more consideration to that than they do. Because Al Qaida is a result of that and being bogged down in Middle Eastern politics.

It's futile arguing that "Islamist extremism' arises from some new 'totalitarian threat to Western civilisation. The line of Cohen, Hitchens et al, ex-Trotskists who follow the Trotsky's own idea that with the spread of Soviet power 'the putrescent tissue of Islam will vanish at a puff'.

The West has continually meddling in the affairs of states dominated by Muslim majorities in lands where the West needs stable and declining oil prices whereas those living there need higher ones because of the huge growth in population in the Middle East.So gloomy Malthusians in the 1970s were right after all in the long term.

It is better to recognise two things. Firstly, religion is not going to go away and secondly that the dangerous and apocalyptic interpretations of Islam ( or Christianity in the USA or Zionism in Israel) are part and parcel of the same conflicts over resources and the effects it has on poorer lands.

Unless these issues are addressed everything "we" can do will be a mess. No matter how sincere "liberal" protestations about wanting to save the women of Afghanistan or the people of Iraq are, they will fail because of the necessary strains between Western interests and the interests of those living there.

The notion of Enlightened self interest has become a form of systematically rationalised greed and Iraq proves that. Militant atheists who supported this war did so through faith and not through providing evidence about why Iraq would be better off after an "essentially" liberal secular state had done so.

New Atheist Funk in the UK.

New Atheism' as expounded by Richard Dawkins et al is a belief that if people dropped God their lives would be filled with more potential to live life to the full before death extinguishes them for ever.

This fantastical creed has no evidence to back it up: it is a faith position that has many different consequences. For Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen it is the necessity of using military force to destroy 'Islamofascism'.

For Dawkins it is is a call to try and remove the influence of organised religion from interfering in politics in a way that is mean minded and nasty or protecting its privileges. But he really does want to deconvert the world.

Now the disestablishment of the Church of England is also worked for by Tony Benn with whom Dawkins sat on Breakfast with David Frost show recently when he admitted cheerfully to being a 'cultural Christian'.

The intricacies of theology and the role of science in explaining the creation and evolution of the world are less important that the progressive myths that underpin Dawkin's creed. As John Gray points out Dawkind claims only humans can defy the imperatives of their own genes.

Gray asks pertinently, that if this is so, then where could that freedom of the will come from ? Answer, it derives from Christianity and is not found in Atheist religions of the Orient like Taoism.

If religion poisons everything as Hitchens claims it does, Gray poses the devastating but simple counter argument that where could this poison come from? The Devil ? The simple fact is that religion is an enduring human need for a frail and often insecure species of animal.

John Gray is right to state that these are myths that the New Atheists never interrogate because their militant faith is based on a Protestant culture of Christianity minus God. It gets rid of God but retains the "thought patterns" of Christianity.

Nothing could be more in the proselytising tradition of Protestant Christianity than holding that deconvertion will cause one to cast off the 'mind forg'd manacles' of religion and make themselves more loving, more sane and more reasonable.

Dawkins emphasis upon 'consciousness raising' is what Protestants have emphasised throughout history-it's a low key form of the direct encounter between Man and God for the soul.

Dawkins line is similar to that of Bertrand Russell: the scientific evidence down here on earth is conclusive enough not to believe in God and if 'He' asked 'Why ?' it would be on that basis. "Not enough evidence, God"

That has little to do though with the idea that by getting rid of 'Him' that the world would necessarily be made a nicer place. The theology of protest is still there only without God who does not matter anyway.

If so, there is no need to bang on about it. Most people hold some kind of belief that is irrational; that if they meet the right person they will be happy for ever or that one day all diseases will be cured or they will be remembered.

Much of the passivity of Britain in the post-war epoch was due to the rise of consumerism, TV and pop music, as well as football. When this prosperity and complacency collapses people look for rationalisations for a more stressful existence.

And the woolly old Church of England is better for people to join than people adopting US style fundamentalism, so that Dawkins ought to distinguish between harmful religion and harmless creeds that really do not do that much damage

At least far less than messianic tub thumpering Protestant Atheists like Hitchens ( yes, he terms himself that ) did in supporting the Iraq War and strongly insinuating "extraordinary interrogation " methods were one way of getting barbarian Islamofascists to confess to secrets.

Now proving the non-existence of God or the absurdity of believing in God as a set of logical propositions is very different from making vast assumptions about how his accepted non-existence would affect life on earth.

People have an innate drive to believe in something beyond death to make sense of life: with the progressive myth of Dawkins, Grayling etc something akin to heaven is something we can more readily create on earth through material abundance and living like Men as Gods.

After all, for people living in seventeenth century England, the twenty first century would be some kind of heaven compared to the suffering and poverty and early death people lived with on an everyday basis.

Yet then as now the myth is that the truth is considered something that can set people free forever once accepted by all thinking people. There is a continuity deep within English protestant culture here.

For Protestant Christianity has the idea that doing things, striving to change the world and by going direct to the people free from the sterile worship in ornate Churches and discussion about dogmas.

That's why Joyce Cary once wrote in the 1950's 'The less the British go to Church, the more preoccupied they become they become with religious problems and moral conflicts'. Think of CND, Bruce Kent or the Quakers ( what harm do they really do ! )

The decline of Church worship is a logical consequence of the belief in England that right belief leads to righteous actions and not merely sitting about saying things and not doing anything. That's progressive activism.

Protestantism has been watered down to a vague religiosity that life just must have a purpose and that the main thing about being a Christian is behaving decently to others.Now that just means the bland but decent desire to be "nice". Like a certain Mr Tony Blair seemed.

This is little different from what the boring and monomaniacal AC Grayling puts forward; though an atheist, his general outlook is pure Church of England minus God who is to be rejected for being too mean and nasty to people.

Yet it has nothing to offer those who see the world being pushed towards destruction by global heating, nuclear proliferation, and so on with its smug little milk and water humanist certainties.

Grayling and Dawkins get squeamish about religious inspired wars without seeing that the invasion of Iraq was a resource war for the oil that underpins the consumer comfort of Western nations like Britain.

The only criticism Grayling made of the Iraq War was that Britain's General Dennett proclaimed himself a Christian soldier: that and not 1 million dead Iraqis got this sententious waffling man into a strident polemical mood.

When most people are satiated materially they need not think too hard about religious problems and moral conflicts. Yet the decline of organised religion has not got rid of the 'need to believe'.

That can be seen with the shallow cult of progress, the career of Blair, the projection of messianic fantasies on to Iraq as a war of liberation, New Atheism, Islamist political theology and other consequences of evading facts and agonistic choices that present themselves.

That is outside the privileged ivory tower that Dawkins and Grayling inhabit: if Dawkins was against the Iraq War because Bush was a Christian fundamentalists, he might have at least looked at the resource war angle.

Religious struggles have always been motivated by political manipulation, greed for resources and "up the ante" as Malise Ruthven puts it in his A Fury for God, a highly sophisticated analysis of Islamism as a political phenemenon.

-AC Grayling and Islamism.

AC Grayling wrote in the Guardian over a year ago that,

Facts speak for themselves. Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, 29, a journalist and blogger,has taken his own life in Evin prison in Iran, where he was serving a two-year sentence for "insulting Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei", and awaiting further trial for "insulting sacred values", which would have meant more years in prison.

He was a sensitive man, who blogged mainly about music and the arts, and imprisonment was a hellish experience for him; he was reported to be profoundly depressed and anxious.

Safayi is yet another victim of religion.

Safayi's fate was atrocious and all humane people should deplore it.

Yet Grayling's view of 'religion' killing Safayi comes from the same propaganda mould deployed by Nick Cohen and other missionary atheists who belive that there is some monolithic 'Islamic fundamentalist' threat to 'the West' and the spread of its supposedly always superior values across the globe.

Not least with regards its universalist ideas of freedom of expression and speech, human rights and tolerance of ethnic minorities and that this sinister global Islamofascist threat is co-ordinated by a rogue regimes, terror cells, and radical Imams and 'appeased' by spineless woolly minded thinkers

That is those who have forgotten a history of inquisitions and exterminations and so on.

No doubt the OIC is trying to push the 'defamation of religion' issue but there is hardly any real chance that this is going to lead to

'....a universal gag on free speech, blocking the right of anyone to criticise the too frequently negative effects of religion on individuals and society'

Grayling comes close to Cohen, who wrote during the furore over the Danish cartoon of Mohammad, that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman was 'appeasing' Islamism when he commented that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly and in a way that respects all religious beliefs'.

The UN Assembly has only moved towards formulating declarations respecting religious beliefs and then Grayling fulminating about the potential for a 'universal gag order' whilst Cohen uses somewhat hysterical phrases like 'universal blasphemy law' or even 'super-blasphemy law'.

Missionary atheists of this ilk thus reveal themselves as grotesque invertions of those who want to convert the world to one universal religion and with others subsumed within its framework of dominion. For there is for Grayling only 'the Enlightenment' on the one side and 'religion' on the other.

This belief system derives from very Protestant ideas of Progress and Providence which have over time become secularised in Britain and the USA but hold that the world will converge towards the destiny mapped out over the past 400 years by the Anglo-Saxon democracies. It's a pure Whig version of History.

Grayling opines,

The OIC has yet to appreciate that if it succeeds in its effort to protect Islam from legitimate challenges to its less attractive doctrines and practices – to say nothing of Islamism with its murderous extreme –the relentless antisemitism from its own side of the street will have to stop too.

Yet the OIC is not 'Islam'. Again Grayling writes as though Islam were as monolithic as one singular totalitarian creed with Islamism as merely the far extreme end of a spectrum of belief defined by some organised body of scholars or protectors who could just reign in the fanatics if they chose.

Islam does not act in a way where less attractiveand repugnant interpretations can not be condemned by any corporate body such as 'the Church'' ( which is not to say that prominent clerics should not condemn terror in the name of Islam ). There is no 'it' that can do so.

But Grayling shows he is incapable of distinguishing Islam from Islamism where it matters: Islamism is a politicised interpretation of certain parts of the Qu'ran adapted to modernistic Western revolutionary ideologies. Islamism is a product of the West and of increased contact with it.

Nothing the UN has done has appeased some barbaric global 'Islamist' threat. The position of the UN General Secretary and many of those attempting to frame its declarations on toleration is that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly' and not that it 'must'. In short no law or gag order has been passed.

There is no sense in which a legitimate criticism of a a political interpretation of religion that is illiberal or tyrannical could not be made but merely that there should be no demonisation of people who hold different religious beliefs because the condition for toleration and co-existence would be destroyed if it were.

Sensible and sophisticated political philosophers in the Western liberal tradition such as Thomas Hobbes knew that when he wrote Leviathan in the seventeenth century, at a time when intractable political conflicts were exacerbated by religious fervour, the feelings of collective persecution and self righteousness.

That kind of mutual atavistic hatred we see today with Hamas and the Israeli Likud over the issue of Palestine.

That principle of universiality is presumably one that is meant to be at the heart of the UN's view of the world and defence of the notion that one should be free to have one's religious beliefs and not, as Cohen does, to conflate them with an enforced political affiliation or some brainwashing which clearly does not refer to all forms of religious belief.

Islam like all world religions is 'multi-vocal' and contain very many contrasting traditions and strands within them, no less than Christianity did in seventeenth century Britain when the modern idea of human rights and liberal democracy began to be developed in its nascent form from the Bible.

Different interpretations of religious scripture and authority can produce very different political doctrines and ideas about political order, the basis for sovereign power and legitimacy. Islam is no exception, though Grayling never bothers to look into it because the Progress of the West has made all religion a redundant relic of modern mankind's prehistory.

Grayling should stick to Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein because his grasp of political philosophy is weak and his view of religion a vulgarised one that can only see Muslims as benighted people capable of civilisation but as yet incapable of throwing off their mental shackles.

A Rejoinder to A C Grayling.

The public debate about the role of religion in British society has not been so heated for a long time. For some, such as the philosopher A C Grayling, the battle against primitive superstition is never won and the prominent space given to Islam in the media since the Salman Rushdie Affair of 1989 has re-ignited passions about religion.

One thing that secular atheists seem to hate more than anything else is the claim that their outlook is, actually, somewhat similar to a belief system, as opposed to a simple statement of rational facts against which those who disagree have had their minds perverted and shackled by religion.

The following exchange is typical of the tedious and somehow parochial nature of these spats by people who can't see clearly the connections between religion and politics or who conflate terms like 'atheist' and 'secular' to defend a particular worldview from having its underlying assumptions challenged.

For example in the Guardian, Andrew Brown wrote about,'

I was listening on Friday morning to a confused debate in the Conway Hall among atheists and secularists about what to do about Islam. Although it was billed as organised by the Council for Ex-Muslims, the crowd of about 300 was overwhelmingly white and middle-aged and looked to me more like long-standing members of the British Humanist Association'

Brown then went on sarcastically,

On the platform were a couple of Iranian refugees who really have been threatened by a fascist theocracy; there was a Dutch defender of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who thought she had done entirely the right thing in moving to an American rightwing thinktank; there was A C Grayling of this parish, who called her a friend but doubted her wisdom in going to America. From the sporadic clapping and counter-clapping, it was obvious that sentiment in the hall was deeply divided over whether home-grown fascism was a greater danger than religion.

Grayling retorted tartly like a C of E vicar with his knickers in a twist,,

What a travesty of a report, Andrew; perhaps meditating what tendentiousness you could muster in response to the extraordinary courage of some dozens of people there who had chosen to think for themselves and free themselves from the superstitions that oppress so many of their ex-coreligionists - and at considerable personal risk to themselves.

You are a perfect example of a person whose zeal to defend fairy stories makes you dishonest and mean-minded. Once upon a time your sort did to those who think for themselves what the mullahs would like to do to the brave men and women at that conference: confined now to snideries, your essential poverty of outlook is on magnificent display here.

The florid hyperbole of this is so wonderfully fruity and over the top that I had to respond, though I usually stay clear of atheism debates which are dominated by splenetic middle aged men how are still stuck in some mindset from the high point of secularism and liberal social democracy from the 1970s.

Rather like Francis Wheen they seem to think the world as they knew it somehow ended from around 1979-1980 and that reason has been on retreat, instead of on a steady advance, since the Thatcher and Reagan came to power and Islamic fundamentalism was kick started by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

My response to this nonsense this morning was,

Secularism should not be conflated with atheism. Yet secularism itself is part of a Christian cultural inheritance and started off with the need to seperate political and religious authority that began in Britain in the seventeenth century.

The flaw in AC Grayling's thinking is turning secularism into some progressive crusade of militant Enlightenment that can become very puritanical, squeamish and intolerant.

The fact that Grayling takes secularism as the starting point with which atheism is must be the historical end point and that this must be accelerated at all costs is bound to create conflict because it conflicts with deeply held needs.

Religion is more than simply a set of superstitions but reflects the human need for myth and to make sense of human experience. No less than Grayling's faith in secular progress which acts in the same way to an extent.

Now it is absurd to push this too far and suggest Grayling is some secular equivalent of a religious fundamentalist because he does argue from the standpoint of reason and evidence.

That's why Brown's piece comes across as silly because, as Grayling points out correctly, people are being tortured and killed in the name of religion in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

However, the crusade for militant Enlightenment can also dovetail with a belief in liberating people from the tyranny of theocratic totalitarian regimes, where politics is religion, by invading nations such as Iraq.

Grayling will, no doubt groan at this and wave it aside as of marginal relevance when compared with the intentional and brutal killing that goes on in the name of religion.

Yet it cannot be because it was opposition to some seamless totalitarian religion that led Christopher Hitchens to support the invasion of Iraq and to believe that all conflicts in the Middle East are caused primarily by religion.

God is not Great How Religion Poisons Everything is a statement of such a belief that if the toxin of religion were cleansed away then somehow conflict stricken zones would be far less likely to exist.

Yet most conflicts are political in origin to which end fundamentalist strains of religion simply 'up the ante'. Sophisticated writers on politics and religion like Malise Ruthven in his A Fury for God can take that on board.

To suggest all religion is just inherently prone to corruption ignores the fact that humans themselves are inherently corrupt. Any belief system can be used to rationalise killing if taken too far.

Secular atheist progressivism is merely yet another example where those who are so barbaric and deny human rights are so demented that we need not stick exactly to the UN conventions on torture.

This is essentially the position of Christopher Hitchens whose book Grayling regards as the 'definitive' and most 'comprehensive' treatment of the 'anti-religion' case.

The inhumanity done in the name of religion by fundamentalists makes the case for the seperation of religious from political authority. That case needs to be pressed against Islamists and their 'political religion'

What it does not do is make the case for trying to cleanse public life of religion entirely and to do so on the false premise that this will remove conflict rather than inflame it further.

The Atheism Debate in Britain-The Bigger Picture.

There are so many misconceptions and conflations of different things whenever atheism and the role of religion in society or politics is discussed.

Atheism is not a religion but it is imprinted indelibly by the Christian monotheistic God that it denies. Pushed too far it can lead to atheism underpinning 'secular religions' like Communism.

The very notion of Progress is a view of history not as a cyclical process but of a linear ascendancy in which humanity will become more perfect and less degraded by primitive superstitions.

The current trend of secular fundamentalism is based firmly on such beliefs and have a religious aspect because the idea is that by getting rid of all religion people will become wiser and saner.

This is why secular fundamentalists from Grayling and Hitchens are always ready to deny the atheist credentials of Soviet Communism and to blame it only on traditions of Russian despotism.

It should be remembered that often the staunchest atheists in the past such as Thomas Hobbes, at a time when religion was all dominant, still understood the natural desire of man for religion as a rationalisation of human experience and a quest for order.

The religious impulse is dangerous but it is, in reality, ineradicable and to pretend otherwise is a Utopian illusion worthy of the most shallow considerations of religion harboured by fundamentalists.

This is why Dawkins and Grayling are useful when it comes to deflating the messianic nonsense of Christian fundamentalists, though they generally don't give that much time to the Islamic kind which is just another fanaticism.

However, the thing to bear in mind is not to see Islamic fundamentalism or Islamism just as a religious phenomenon but as a political one with complex causes.

The failure to deal with the political causes of Islamism, as well as the conditions of social atomisation and anomie that currently incubate it here in the West too, only intensify the perception that 'Islam' is being 'demonised'.

In turn, that simply confirms to those who see Western hypocrisy over Iraq and the propping up of dictatorships to procure the oil that underpins Western prosperity that secular atheism is part of that 'decadence'.

Religious impulses exist because people want to rationalise their experience of the chaos of life caused by the perennial problems of human greed, selfishness, hypocrisy, and meaninglesness.

One of the main reasons this urgency went away in post-war Britain was the consumer boom and the temporary success of liberal social democracy and secularism which reached its high point in the 1960s and 1970s.

With the return of economic crisis, scarcity, looming resource wars and global insecurity, the placid virtues of that period will soon yield to the threat of political religions as they did in the 1930s.

The secular atheist humanism offers no solution to these problems, no even the beginnings of a solution, simply because secularism and the decline in the belief in God was due to it becoming irrelevant where pleasure became the pursuit of humans.

This please and the divertions it has allowed through consumption have, however, placed severe limits on the environment and the belief of secular humanists, that just by getting rid of religion there could be less poverty and more security for all, runs up against the reality.

Not least, where Islamic fundamentalism is strong because since the post-war period Western nations have supported nasty regimes so as to get the cheap oil that has underpinned Western prosperity.

A C Grayling's Missionary Atheism.

A C Grayling has written yet another misconceived polemic about the necessity of regarding religious belief as some kind of disease of the mind that brave people are prepared to overcome by renouncing their Islamic religion despite the charge of apostasy and death threats.

I responded to his Guardian piece Free to Think for Themselves ( Guardian October 16 2008 ) with the following response.

Yet again Grayling is conflating the political and the religious in the same way as fundamentalists do because he regards Islam as essentially fundamentalist when the Qu'ran does not demand the death penalty for apostasy.

This does not mean that Grayling is wrong to speak out against this and he makes it clear that being against the 'crime' of apostasy is also part of a broader struggle against the death penalty.

What Grayling is terminally incapable of realising or recognising is that all the world's religions are multi-vocal and not one rigid monolithic force representing the continued existence of dark barbarism versus the sweetness of enlightenment and reason.

Indeed Grayling himself belongs firmly in the militant Christian and Enlightenment tradition of believing that 'the truth will set you free' no less than Dawkins who also shares this form of humanism.

The earnest proselytising tone when lauding the unshackling of Muslim minds from superstitions and the healing process, presided over by the tender and wise guardians is very characteristic of C19th missionary Christianity .

The problem with propaganda for the Council of ex-Muslims and the worthies of the National Secular Society and British Humanist Association is that it condemns Islam whilst remaining in ignorance of the political conditions that have been crucial in the rise of Islamism.

Within Britain there is a problem with the cultural pressure to remain within Islam and the law of the land must be enforced against those who issue death threats for apostasy.

Yet the contradiction is that liberal democracy, in Grayling's view, depends on the free choices of the autonomous individual. So for Grayling if Muslims choose to support 'Islamism' then it just can't be a 'real' choice but depends wholly on social conditioning.

The problem is that increasingly it is and this has nothing to do with the widespread hold of sinister clerics over the minds of the young but more to do with the 'information age' where the sight of Muslims being oppressed and killed in their own lands leads to a burning hatred of 'Western' hypocrisy.

The problem is primarily political with forms of politicised religion upping the stakes. Given that Grayling's brand of militant Enlightenment can be used as a justification for invading Muslim majority nations, to spread civilisation to the benighted natives, then missionary liberal beliefs are another example.

One need only look at the propaganda of a Christopher Hitchens for that. True, not 'every' missionary liberal agreed with Iraq but not 'every' Islamist believes in in the death penalty for apostasy, even though like Tariq Ramadan they are mealy mouthed and craven when trying to rationalise their creeds.

Denying that choosing to be an Islamist can ever be truly rational as Grayling does is bound to irk those for whom it is the apex of personal subjective committment to 'the cause' of liberating the Middle East from secular tyrannies that the West has backed in order to procure stability and cheap oil.

Many Islamists are militant progressives who want to get rid of false forms of statist Islam that uphold tyranny and injustice. Islamism is a political ideology that can incorporate many trends from within Islam and Western revolutionary ideology.

Progressive Islamists like Ramadan or Ghannoushi remain dismissive of atrocities committed in the name of Islam because they will just see it , rather like Marxists did with any 'really existing socialist regime', as not real Islam that is being propagated.

The reason is that actions chosen consciously and in full realisation of their significance, from wearing the hijab to joining militant political groups, is seen as a revolutionary action.

The personal is political and Western identity politics has been embraced by those who value the potential for global solidarity against the US power regarded for long as the Great Satan by very secular Westerners who saw is Enlightenment fundamentalism as a way of imposing Empire.

Grayling needs to think outside the parochial mindset of nineteenth British liberalism and not just rehash Bertrand Russell's arguments without the lucidity or even the humour. At least, Russell back in 1920 understood the connection between 'Mohammedanism' and Bolshevism.

Most of the problems looming ever more ominous in the relationship between 'the West' and the lands of Islam are geopolitical in origin and concern the struggle to appropriate resources like oil and gas which are essential to underpin consumerism, the great car economy and tourist travel.

For Muslims and non-Muslims alienated by the hypocrisy and greed of 'the West' the potential for them to embrace psychopathological ideologies is becoming greater and this is mirrored on the mssionary liberal left with Hitchens conflating all Islamists necessarily as 'Islamofascists' and Bin Ladenists.

The consequences could be truly tragic and catastrophic.

The Illusions of Evangelical and Militant Atheism

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.

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