‘New’ atheism chapter 27,439
Madeleine Bunting takes a minute to remind us how stunningly predictable, how jaw-droppingly selective, how risibly but irritatingly woolly she can be and pretty much always is.
Increasingly, one hears a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume, and how it has drowned out any other kind of conversation about religion.
Does one? Does one not rather rush about attempting to create such a distaste one’s very own self? Much of this putative distaste comes from Bunting herself, so it’s a little sick-making to see her pretending to be too modest to mention her own energetic campaign. And then of course the drowning out is completely ridiculous – witness Bunting herself, and all the people she quotes, and Tony Faith Foundation Blair, and the archbishops and bishops filling the Telegraph with their complaints and the apologists of Islam filling the Guardian with their rationalizations – ‘drowned out’ indeed! Apparently she confuses addition with drowning out, and not being silenced and closeted any more with ‘foghorn volume.’ Apparently she thinks that religious conversation about religion should have undisputed monopoly of the discussion and thus interprets any disagreement as Much Too Loud and Drowning Out. Excuse my bluntness, but that is stupid.
Ask a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong and they are simply not interested in the debate; they bin the invitations to speak on platforms alongside New Atheists. Gray dismisses them as offering “intoxicating simplicity”; Armstrong is appalled by their “display of egotism and arrogance”.
So she doesn’t mean a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong, she means John Gray and Karen Armstrong – but putting it the way she did conveys an impression that there are lots of philosophers like John Gray and historians of religion like Karen Armstrong, without having to offer any. But the views of John Gray and Karen Armstrong are highly contested; neither is typical, and both are considered exceptionally tendentious.
Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths…”We need to get away from the endless discussion about wretched beliefs; religion is about doing – and what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion,” she argues. To try and shift the debate about faith into more fruitful territory, Armstrong came up with the idea of a global Charter on Compassion for all faiths (and none), which she is drafting and planning to launch later in the year.
Yes, she argues that, and thus we can see how and why her views are so contested. That would be because it is nonsense, and vicious nonsense at that, to say that ‘what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion.’ She can’t say that without simply blowing off what is happening in (you know the dreary list) Swat and Afghanistan and Brazil and Iraq and Nicaragua and Somalia and the list goes on. It’s just not true that every faith makes clear that the doing is about compassion.
At times of crisis – such as the economic recession – the brittleness of a value system built on wealth and a particular conception of autonomy becomes all too apparent, leaving people without the sustaining reserves of a faith to fall back on.
That’s interesting – she talks a lot of wool about compassion but when it comes to practice she resorts to insult, claiming that non-believers build their value system on wealth. That is both stupid and rude.
The problem with Bunting’s line of thinking can be summed up pretty simply: she’s suggests that it is the broad principles and ethics in religion which are important and central to believers’ lives and not so much the beliefs themselves, the sort of obfuscation we are used to hearing from CofE bishops and the like (and neatly summarised by Bunting’s own reference to ‘apophatic’), but surely religious beliefs are defined not by what religious people do – which isn’t dependent on religious belief to be enacted – but on what they believe, and it’s what they literally believe to be true which is the whopping great sticking point, because it is impermeable to argument despite the complete lack of evidence for its supposed truth.
There are innumerable other issues with the article: the predictable Dawkins-bashing (and isn’t it interesting how we constantly hear about the ‘tide’ of New Atheism swamping us and yet only the same relatively tiny handful of voices are used as examples, when the list of religious idiots is so much longer…?); the equating of atheism with general amorality; the implication of atheists’ apparent ‘complete certainty’ and comparing them to fundamentalists, when most atheists are quite reflective, just simply not willing to molly-coddle beliefs they see as lacking foundation; and of course ‘there are only so many times you can argue that religion is a load of baloney’ – yes well the argument probably wouldn’t need to be put so often if people would actually listen, and stop trying to assert that their beliefs ought to have special status, would it?
I must confess myself a little heartened, because a quick skim of Bunting’s piece gives me the impression she’s running rather scared (“What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity?”). As with many similar reactions to our finally raising our heads properly (e.g. the small library that has emerged to do nothing other than counter TGD) it’s the clearest evidence one could want that we’re achieving something. Times like this I remember that we’re not the side that has to worry that bibles and Korans might fall into the hands of our impressionable youth; they can read them all they like and see for themselves what’s wrong with them. It’s the other side that has to worry that its youth will be exposed to extremely well-hyped, clearly reasoned literature on a level accessible to anyone that points out what’s wrong with all religions and the idea of faith itself. Let’s hope all Bunting’s worst nightmares come true soon. From the way it figures in the first paragraph, it seems Dawkins’ publishing success can be checked off as Nightmare #1.
Caspar Melville also succeeds in making her look silly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/apr/06/religion-new-atheism-bunting
It’s not that Bunting doesn’t want any debate on questions related to religion. She just doesn’t want it against anyone whose voice can be heard and whose arguments are unanswerable and she most especially doesn’t want such a – highly-desirable – debate without a guaranteed victory for religion. On second thoughts, I take that back; Bunting would love nothing better than for all non-religious voices to be stifled, just as her female one would be if society ever got religious enough to suit her taste.
“What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity?”
Well, let’s see: racism, sexism, discrimination against GLBT people and disabled people, the belief that childhood abuse is best brushed under the carpet, beliefs in patriarchal family structures, beliefs that the environment we live in isn’t tremendously important a thing to worry about, the death penalty, “lock ’em up and throw away the key” policies towards non-violent drug offenders, and the belief that women who get abortions are evil immoralists. Just off the top of my head, these beliefs would seem to be falling about as quickly as Christianity in Britain. There may even be a connection. And a good thing too.
Couldn’t similar things be said about women’s rights? “Subtler discussions of the role of women are being drowned out by the foghorn of the radical suffrage movement.” etc.
And, well, she wants us to believe in myths. What a blithering idiot. We’ve had some myths that have got us into various pickles that we are in today, and they’ve been pretty resilient against the actual evidence. We’ve had the myth that all we need is “growth” every quarter and everything is tickety-boo. We’ve had a whole bunch of dangerous myths put out there by industry that have coaxed us into inaction on environmental issues. We have modern mythmakers: some governments and large corporations (and a large proportion of the interactions between those groups) are where myths come from. But myths eventually get shattered. No good lefty like Bunting would say it was wise to believe the lies – sorry, myths – of the oil industry. Why is religion any different?
“Use Suchandsuch-brand soap, it makes you sexy!” is the same sort of claim as “Believe in Jesus and you get to go to magic-land” (regardless of whether ‘believe’ is Bunting-Armstrong-believe or ‘believe’ as it is in normal conversation – when I say “I believe Paris is in France”, I am not expressing a statement of commitment, I *am* expressing my holding of a dispositional attitude towards the acceptance of the proposition “Paris is in France”). In fact, asking for people to Bunting-Armstrong-believe things is just as dangerous if the people who then come to represent the target of the loyalty are dangerous. And, well, if this inner loving commitment to that person is so strong, it can override one’s rational faculties. This is the same kind of thing we see when people get abused by their spouses but don’t accept it because the “Love” button kicks in. Even if we want people to believe in the love-commitment-loyalty sense, they should be grounding that rationally, and that this kind of belief should be amenable to reconsideration if the situation changes. I love my family, but that doesn’t mean that if they go out and do something heinous that my love for them would be unconditional.
I’d take the Bunting-Armstrong-belief advocates a lot more fucking seriously if they would step out and condemn all the bad stuff that’s going on with religion at the moment: with the Pope’s condom remarks, with female genital mutilation, with stoning rape victims, with throwing acid in the face of schoolgirls and with turning the classroom into a place of ignorant faux-tolerance and foolishness rather than a place of truthful scholarship and science. But they don’t.
And as for the thing about “the media”? The media has been distorting the New Atheists (still don’t like that term) positions for some time, and leading the pack has been people like Bunting.
When it comes to religion, the fact that Dawkins et al. are pissing off Madeleine Bunting proves they are doing something right.
Why do they print this airhead? Bunting discovers a new word–apophatic–and, having no idea what it means or implies, decides that since it’s her idea of the day, it’s everyone’s. The fart, Madelaine, is in your brain, not blowing in the wind. Yes, the dominant form of religion is still all about magic. Real apophatic theology is vanishingly rare; it is actually agnosticism on steroids–there might be something remotely like God, but any idea you have about it is wrong, so you can’t even talk about God. Even the word is meaningless, and all religion is a form of idolatry, a claim to know what humans cannot.
So, you stop talking about God, focus on only the things you can know, and you have absolutely no use for religion. A truly consistant apophatic theologian would look and sound just like Richard Dawkins. Way to get it wrong, Madelaine.
Shes just wrong. Belief is the foundation of it all.
If it’s all about compassion, what does it matter what event Easter is supposed to commemorate? It’d be nice if the so-called religious moderates would confront and dispose of their own extremists before turning their angry attention to those who have chosen to live their lives free of such nonsense. Don’t people like Bunting, who seem to have a good word for any faith, as long as it’s faith, ever get angry at the people oppressing and killing in the name of faith? Angry enough to actually say so, name names and say what they think ought to be done about it in print? Why is writing and speaking out against the evils of religion so much more worthy of attack than the evils of religion? Maybe it takes religion to give one values as skewed as Bunting’s. Reminds me of this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/the_amorality_of_the_faithful.php
“Religion is about doing” quotes poor Maddy. What rubbish. One of the things most Christians do is recite every week, more or less shame-facedly, what they actually call a Creed. And Muslims are defined as people who say they believe that Mohammed’s recycled bible stories and blatant inventions are the complete perfect word of the only deity in business. And how dare the appalling Karen Armstrong pretend that compassion needs a charter, or that it has anything whatever to do with the oppressive and tyrannical big religions?
Apophatic theology – just say no!
Thanks, I’m here all week…
Am I the only one who had to look twice to be sure she wasn’t talking about apathetic tradition instead of apophatic? I mean hey, if I can’t really know god, why bother?