Since Norm has taken the trouble to respond to my post from last Friday about his criticism of the polemics of A.C.Grayling, and religion as a force for good, I should really try to spell out more clearly what I was trying to say.
There’s a general on-line sentiment, I think, of which Norm is probably the most eloquent proponent, that while religion can indeed be a force for evil, the current crop of religion-bashers go too far with some of their criticism, especially when it descends to mockery. I used to think this to some extent myself, and certainly the Brights movement started by Daniel Dennett a few years back was a deeply off-putting moment in the history of atheism, with its smug implication of superiority. Dawkins himself, probably the heaviest hitter, as it were, of the anti-religionists, has an unshakeable air of arrogance about him.
But having read some (not all) of the literature, I don’t think that’s true anymore. Generally, Dawkins and Dennett (not so sure about Christopher Hitchens), despite their reputations, manage fairly successfully to avoid gratuitous offence. It’s because religion has been given an easy pass for so long that their books may seem shocking. In the few interviews that I’ve seen with Dawkins about his “The God Delusion” he’s been effortlessly polite and courteous to his religious opponents.
And so to A.C.Grayling. I actually like most of his stuff. I think he’s always worth reading. The CiF article in question may not have been his finest hour, but it had good points:
It would have been enough to read aloud from the day’s newspapers to make the case that religion is, overall and by a large margin, a force for ill in today’s world, but these general points merit statement and constant iteration, in the hope that as water wears away stone, it will conduce to a desirable effect: first, that religion will recede into the private domain where it belongs if it belongs anywhere, and secondly, that the business of freeing the mind of mankind from its distorting and imprisoning absurdities can begin; to start with, by protecting small children from the abuse of brainwashing and proselytisation in “faith-based” institutions and the legal requirement for “acts of worship” in every school – remembering that children are not born Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Jew, despite what the first and last of these would say, but have to be manipulated into becoming so by conditioning and lies.
In terms of anti-religious polemic, this is, I suppose, on the extreme side, but there’s nothing there that I’d disagree with. There’s no call for religion to be banned, just for it to “recede into the private domain where it belongs if it belongs anywhere”. He also mocks “the pleasant folk who shake hands with each other in an English country church on Sunday mornings – a much dwindled and still dwindling rump of folk, true, but harmless and even admirable for the cakes they bake for the Saturday fete, raising money for developing world children and other good causes”, which may be taking on an easy target, but as far as polemics go is pretty mild stuff.
Norm criticised Grayling thus:
Once again, however, I am taken aback at how so ardent a partisan of reasoned argument and the careful weighing of evidence – this precisely in order to recognize the evils, as he sees them, of religion – fails to apply to the case at hand the standards he commends to us. For the post of his that I’m referring to is about religion as a force for evil; and yet the most elementary requirement in considering this issue, for any proponent of rational examination and disputation, he himself simply bypasses. Put baldly his case is that ‘religion is, overall and by a large margin, a force for ill in today’s world’. Now, if that is what you think and want to persuade your audience of – I mean persuade by reasons, not merely sway by rhetoric – then you have to give the fact that religion has also been, and is, an influence for the good due recognition. If you don’t do so, if, to the contrary, everything you say in this regard is designed to minimize any beneficial influences of religion, then not only will it not persuade the sceptical, it might also create the impression that your belief that religion is a force for more ill than good is merely that – a belief, a prejudice rather than a conclusion based on conscientious weighing of the evidence.
My point was that this was unfair to Grayling given the context: a brief article at CiF – a polemic – rehashing what he’d said at a debate the previous week. Why should he be expected to rehearse all his opponents’ best arguments every time?
Norm disagrees:
A polemic needs, precisely, to be able to meet the strongest arguments on the other side. The idea that you can simply leave them out, because the other side will be making them anyway, doesn’t help you. You want an answer of some kind, beyond poking fun at English churchgoers and their cakes.
Well…I’m not sure how much of a substantive disagreement there is here, beyond Norm’s dislike of Grayling’s approach and my failure to see quite why he should so dislike it. I thought there was more there than simply “poking fun at English churchgoers and their cakes”. I’ll admit though that my “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut” of Norm’s approach wasn’t a happy choice of phrase.
For what it’s worth, on the subject of religion as a force for good, while I’d agree that any serious discussion would need to deal with that, I suspect (without any evidence – how could you get evidence?) that those who claim religion as a motivating factor in their good deeds would generally speaking be good people anyway. As Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion”.
Mick Hartley 
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