Mick Hartley

After yesterday’s ridiculous article by Stuart Jefferies:

“We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

comes this article by Larry Siedentop:

Europe is in the midst of an undeclared “civil war” – a struggle that has been boiling away since the 18th century. It is a war between religious believers and secularists.

The French Revolution was the decisive moment in this clash between Church and anticlericalists. It created two hostile camps across the whole of Europe – pitting the followers of Voltaire, who sought to ecraser l’infame, as they described the Church, against those who saw the separating of Church and State as an insurrection against God.

Over the past hundred years the religious camp has come, by and large, to accept civil liberty and religious pluralism. The anticlericals have – with the exception of hardline Marxists and writers such as Richard Dawkins – given up on the attempt to extirpate religious belief.

The main thrust of his argument, that secularism isn’t the same as atheism but is “that belief in an underlying moral equality of humans” which “implies that there is a sphere in which individuals should be free to make their own decisions”, is unexceptionable. Similarly his point that this belief has its roots in Christianity: that it’s “also the central, egalitarian moral insight of Christianity”, seems plausible to me – or at least I wouldn’t feel confident in trying to argue against it:

Enforced belief was, for Paul, a contradiction in terms. Strikingly, in its first centuries Christianity spread by persuasion, not by force of arms — a contrast to the early spread of Islam.

I’d dispute his point that this is still relevant, though. However much the concept of individual rights owes historically to Christianity, it’s now become independent, up there as a principle which can survive perfectly well on its own, even among us atheists.

That’s not my main point though. It’s that ridiculous swipe at Dawkins which is annoying – and dishonest. Where has Dawkins ever advocated that religion be extirpated? The poor man’s just written a book arguing, basically, that religion is so much nonsense, and suddenly he’s a fundamentalist, a totalitarian, up there with Stalin and Mao. The difference between reasoned argument, as practiced by Dawkins, and force, as practiced historically by all religions, including Christianity, is central to the very concept of secularism and individual rights which Seidentop is trying to defend.

If anything the reaction to Dawkins’ arguments show how much such arguments are needed. As I’ve quoted before, “the wonderful thing about offending the religious is the self-calibrating nature of the activity: the degree of offence taken is directly proportional to how much the offended person deserves it”.