Gunning for God (10 page)

At times Dawkins does appear to appreciate that there are real differences. Speaking of Islam, he says: “If you don’t take it seriously and accord it a proper respect you are physically threatened on a scale that no other religion has aspired to since the Middle Ages.”
⁵
At other times he warns that “even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes”.
⁶

There is a deep irony in the New Atheists’ failure to discriminate between religions; for they clearly expect everyone else to discriminate between atheists. They themselves, as self-confessedly peace-loving people, would not like to be arbitrarily classified with violent extremists of their own worldview persuasion, such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Why, therefore, do the New Atheists not warn us that mild and moderate atheism might provide the climate of faith in which extreme atheism naturally flourishes, as it did in the twentieth century? If we were to apply the New Atheists’ own oversimplifying technique to them, vehement protest would not be long in coming.

This rather blatant inconsistency, in expecting non-atheists to discriminate between atheists while the New Atheists themselves resolutely refuse to do the same with religious groups, does nothing to enhance the intellectual credibility of the New Atheist message. It even tempts one to apply Dawkins’ dictum to them, and ignore everything else they say. However, that temptation must be resisted; since many serious-minded people are, rightly, deeply concerned at the deservedly bad reputation some religions have for being involved in patently evil activities. It is therefore important to address the issue in a temperate way. As Keith Ward suggests, the right question to ask is whether “this particular religion, at this stage of its development, is dangerous in this social context”.
⁷

It should be noted, however, that Sam Harris appears to have grasped the inadequacy of his colleagues’ approach — possibly because he seems to have certain quasi-religious notions of his own. Consciously breaking ranks with Dawkins and the others, he calls on them to attend to the differences among the world’s religions, giving as one of his main reasons for so doing:

These differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists and the secular world generally balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbours, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretence of even handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake up to this fact. And they can….

Harris continues:

Atheism is too blunt an instrument to use at moments like this. It’s as though we have a landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment — with peaks and valleys and local attractors — and the concept of atheism causes us to fixate one part of this landscape, the part related to theistic religion, and then just flattens it. Because to be consistent as atheists we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally. This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues.
⁸

Quite so; and, if Harris’s co-belligerents do not take this on board and learn to discriminate, they will cut no ice whatsoever. As Harris says, they will simply be wasting everyone’s time and energy. Incidentally, it is quite something to see an atheist like Harris describe the typically atheist attitude as “a pretence of even-handedness”, even though Harris’s own visual metaphor of atheism, surveying “a landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment”, ironically and myopically fails to take into account the possibility that his atheism might just be part of that landscape.

In his lecture Harris went as far as suggesting that the term “atheism” is so unhelpful that the New Atheists ought to drop it completely:

We should not call ourselves “atheists”. We should not call ourselves “secularists”. We should not call ourselves “humanists”, or “secular humanists”, or “naturalists”, or “sceptics”, or “anti-theists”, or “rationalists”, or “freethinkers”, or “brights”. We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar — for the rest of our lives. And while there we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

His naiveté is wonderful. What Harris does not seem to realize is that he, in common with everyone else, has a worldview. There is no neutral default position, where he or anyone else can sit in splendid neutrality destroying bad ideas. If Harris thinks that certain ideas are bad, then that is because he thinks that certain other ideas are good; and the sum total of those ideas forms his worldview. That worldview is naturalism — the belief that this world is all there is. Harris, unconsciously and wrongly, assumes that his worldview is the default position, and that it will eventually triumph as long as we simply employ reason to destroy bad ideas. He is utterly convinced that atheism has nothing to fear from reason. It simply does not occur to him that his atheism might itself be full of bad ideas that need to be destroyed in the name of reason. Worse still, his atheism might be false.

Of course, one has to have some sympathy with Harris, in the sense that it is so much easier to hurl labels at people than to discuss ideas; except that in this case it is hard to see that the appellations “atheist” or “naturalist” are mere labels, since they accurately describe the beliefs of those people thus labelled. Perhaps, then, Richard Dawkins is more honest in wearing his lapel badge with its red capital “A” drawing attention to his public stance as an atheist. And some New Atheist websites offer such badges for sale.

Attacking religion as such is nothing new. In an essay entitled “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation?” Bertrand Russell wrote: “My… view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”
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Now, it would not make sense for me as a Christian to pretend to be able to speak on behalf of other religions. It is clearly up to the adherents of any particular religion, if they so wish, to give their own answers to the accusations made against them by the New Atheists. In any case, a great deal of New Atheist attention is given to attacking Christianity.
¹⁰
Dawkins says explicitly that his main target is Christianity;
¹¹
and Hitchens claims that his atheism is “a Protestant atheism”,
¹²
making him almost eligible to be an honorary Irishman. Furthermore, Harris calls one of his books
Letter to a Christian Nation
.
¹³
I shall therefore concentrate on Christianity.

In their vehemence against God and the Christian faith, the New Atheists noticeably echo Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote in
The Antichrist
:

I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.
¹⁴

HAS CHRISTIANITY SPAWNED VIOLENCE?

As a Northern Irishman, I am all too familiar with a certain brand of sectarian violence where a religious history has been used to fan the flames of terrorism (on both sides of the divide); although, as historians point out, a whole additional complex of political and social factors has been at work that makes analysis in terms of religion alone far too simplistic.

What, then, have I to say about this evil aspect of religion?

The first thing to say is that I roundly condemn and abhor it, every bit as much as the New Atheists. I do so, be it noted, as a Christian. For, although the New Atheists’ charge against Christendom for its violence may well be justified, their charge is not valid against the teaching of Christ himself. Christendom is not the same as Christianity, as the Danish theologian and philosopher Kierkegaard pointed out. Christendom’s violence was not Christian, for the simple reason that it was diametrically opposed to what Christ himself taught. People who engage in violent and cruel activities at any time, in Northern Ireland or the Balkans or anywhere else, while invoking the name of God, are certainly
not
obeying Christ when they do so, whatever they may say to the contrary. After all, the name “Christian” means a disciple or follower of Jesus Christ. Following Christ means obeying his commandments. And one of those commands was the explicit
prohibition
of the use of force to defend Christ or his message. That command has been very well known since it was issued at a point of high tension in the Gospel narrative, the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus taught his followers not to hate their enemies but to love them; and he acted accordingly when the armed crowd came with Judas to the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest him. In that historic encounter he specifically
forbade
his disciples to use violence. Jesus rebuked one of his disciples, Peter, who, untrained in swordsmanship, swung wildly with his sword and cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant, Malchus. “Put your sword back into its place,” Jesus said, “for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
¹⁵
He could not have made it more plain. To take the sword, gun, or bomb in Christ’s name is to
repudiate
both Christ and his message. He will have none of it. Gunning for God, in the sense of taking a weapon into one’s hands on God’s behalf, is a contradiction of and an affront to the Christian message.

Pressing home this crucially important lesson, the historian Luke records that Jesus’ reaction to Peter’s attempt to defend him with a sword was to act at once to repair the ear that Peter had severed. Luke (a doctor) tells us that Jesus used his powers
¹⁶
to heal the man. Peter’s sword slash had impaired the man’s hearing. Christ gave that faculty back to him.
¹⁷
As always with Christ’s miracles, the physical miracle is not arbitrary. It points to a deeper, yet very obvious, truth. Whenever people have taken to physical violence to defend Christianity (as they imagine), they have succeeded only in cutting off people’s ears in more ways than the physical, so that Christ’s real message is not heard. Clear evidence of this is the sad fact that New Atheism’s intellectual elite are deaf to Christ’s words, at least in part because of the behaviour of those disobedient to Christ.

So let it be said loudly and clearly — it will have to be loud to be heard above the caterwauling of the New Atheists —
Christ repudiated violence
. He would not allow force to be used to save him from false accusation, suffering, and even death.
¹⁸
He allowed himself to be arrested and led away to trial. To be charged with what? With fomenting acts of anti-state terrorism! It is indeed a strange irony that the very charge levelled against Christ is identical to the New Atheists’ accusation against Christianity — incitement to violence.

One could wish that the New Atheists were as canny as Pilate. He did not take long to see how inconsistent and false the charge against Jesus was. As Roman Procurator, Pilate was ultimately responsible to Rome for civil order; and he was fully aware that the Jewish festivals in Jerusalem, particularly the Feast of Passover when thousands of pilgrims swelled the local population, were times of political tension. He feared rebellion, so he took very seriously the charge of sedition brought against Jesus by the religious authorities led by the High Priest. Indeed, Pilate insisted on investigating the case himself. The accusers alleged that Jesus was inciting the populace to regard him as the Christ, the messianic king of the Jews; and that he was intent on fomenting a popular uprising against the imperial power of Rome. In their opinion, therefore, Jesus was guilty of treason against the Roman emperor — a capital charge under Roman law.
¹⁹

The Christian apostle John gives us the detail of Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.
²⁰
The first thing Pilate wanted to hear from the prisoner’s own mouth was whether he considered himself to be the King of the Jews.

This question could not be answered with a simple yes or no; for the terms “king” and “kingdom” meant different things to different people. If “king” and “kingdom” were the labels that, left to himself, Pilate was putting on Christ — on his teaching and activity — then Pilate would understand the terms in a political sense. In this sense, Christ must deny that he was a king. Christ was not in political competition with the emperor Tiberius in Rome.