Mick Hartley

Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton, John Gray – all in an article by Madeleine Bunting. This is what intellectual life must be like in hell.

She's talking, of course, about religion. What all these great thinkers have in common is that they find there's something, ooh, a bit lacking, a bit soulless, a bit problematic, about this modern secular age of ours. And they all hate those dogmatic fundamentalist atheists.

You thought religion was about belief? How wrong can you be, argued both Armstrong and Gray. Armstrong's argument – which she outlines in her book, The Case for God – is that the west has been obsessed with creeds and beliefs, but it has forgotten that belief was traditionally not so much an intellectual assertion of fact, but a commitment. Credo comes from "cordo", which is translated as "I commit".

And here's me thinking it came from "credo", I believe.

Some of the other profundities on offer. Eagleton :

 "We are divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little." By way of illustrating the latter, he pointed to young people who add "like" to modify all their statements, so sceptical are they of all forms of belief and certainty. Late capitalism is inherently faithless, he argued, and its rationalism conditions the way we think and speak. The result is that a "shallow, technocratic managerialism pushes all deeper questions aside and abandons them to the red-neck fundamentalists".

Gray:

"In an age of secular dogmatism, churches have become sanctuaries of doubt."

And again:

The final modern-day sacred cow to be demolished was the idea that western societies are now secular and have outgrown their Christian origins. Nonsense, argued Gray; many of the most powerful structures of our thinking continue to be Christian, as his recent book The Immortality Commission showed. Highly intelligent scientists at the start of the 20th century were intent on creating a messianic child who would redeem the world and immortality would be achieved through scientific breakthrough.

What??

But my favourite:

Existence is far too limited a human concept to apply to God.

Well, it made me laugh.