Religion
In reply to the discussion: Feisty entry into contentious field of atheist manifestos [View all]struggle4progress
(118,034 posts)Apocalypse now.
By Bryan Appleyard
Published 28 February 2013 14:09
... There is also an irritating and highly self-serving argument that appears in various forms throughout the book. This seems to be an attempt to delegitimise all religious discourse. Atheism, Grayling writes, is to theism as not stamp-collecting is to stamp-collecting. In other words, not to be a stamp collector denotes only the open-ended and negative state of not collecting stamps. Equally, not being a theist is not a positive condition; it merely says this person does not even begin to enter the domain of discourse in which these beliefs have their life and content. The word atheist, therefore, is misleading; the phrase militant atheist doubly so.
This is silly. First, militant atheist is a phrase that Grayling justifies by his talk of comrades and causes. If he really believes this argument, he shouldnt have written this book. Second, this is a transparent ruse to get the four (or five) horsemen off the charge that they write about religion while knowing nothing of theology. If religion is treated as a child-like superstition like the belief in fairies then there is no need to understand it in detail and, of course, this particular superstition is also dangerous and should therefore be exposed as well as refuted, if not in detail.
You may agree with this but consider the implications of where Graylings argument leads. He writes that the respect agenda the tolerance of religious beliefs is at an end. Is that really where atheists want to go?
At this point, the book needs discussing in a wider context. Western humanism in its present incarnation is a very small sect in the context of global beliefs and world views. The idea, advanced in this book, that it could and should become a world ideology is both wildly improbable and extremely dubious. Like it or not, religions are here to stay. Grayling sort of gets round this by ignoring the primary argument for their continued existence that religion is a beneficial adaptation. He argues that religion is kept in place by, in essence, political power. This is altogether too weak and too inconsistent to explain the prevalence of religion and most thinkers accept some sort of evolutionary explanation. If you do accept at least some version of the adaptive argument or, indeed, if you are a believer then the study of religion becomes an obligation. Religious faith is not remotely like the belief in fairies; it is a series of stories of immense political, poetic and historical power that are again, like it or not deeply embedded in human nature. Seen in that light, to dismiss all religious discourse as immature or meaningless is to embrace ignorance or, more alarmingly, to advocate suppression. It will also make it impossible for you to understand the St Matthew Passion, Chartres Cathedral and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky ...
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/02/apocalypse-now