"Man is by his constitution a religious animal." - Edmund Burke
As a world-weary agnostic who tries to take people as they are, rather than I would like them to be, its gets tiresome listening to the latest wave of atheists call for one final intellectual jihad to finish-off fuddy old religion. Particularly annoying is when an atheist suggests that the religious cruely brain-wash children into religion against their will, as if it's somehow possible to raise children in an ideological vacuum where they are totally free to chose what to believe in.
For the last 150 years or so atheists from Marx to Dawkins have been predicting that religion will soon be relegated to the good old dust bin of history, yet over this time the number of devoutly religious people in the world has been relentlessly increasing.
You don't need a masters in philosophy to see the arguments of anti-religious atheists are floored on multiple levels. For one thing, if religion really is useless, as the anti-religious atheists claim, then it will soon pass away of its own accord. There's no need to go on a crusade to stamp it out in the "interests of humanity." Find something else wrong with the world to get worked up about.
They claim that religion is irrational, yet if that is the case, then there's no point trying to sway the religious against religion with rational arguments.
Then their's the liberal assumption that everyone is biologically wired in favour of rational atheism. If people are mentally diverse about spiritual issues, as many Darwinian scientists claim, then why can't they consider the possibility that atheism may not work for everybody and that religion will always have an attraction for a sizeable segment of the population -particularly in light of the fact that the religious seem to be out-breeding their secular cousins.
Given that even in the most secular and scientifically advanced countries, the majority of the population claims to be religious, or at least spiritual, then it seems that religion must play some significant evolutionary role in human behaviour.
Of course some anti-religious atheists may be closet anti-Muslims who feel that all religions must be stamped out, so as not to be prejudiced against any particular race or culture, but I'm assuming most atheists aren't likely to be that devious.
In contrast to the Dawkins and Hitchens crowd, realist atheists and agnostics may not particularly like religion, but they are honest enough to admit that it isn't going to disappear anytime soon, if ever. In Straw Dogs, post-liberal thinker John Gray, declares that atheism itself is something of a has-been philosophy, which had its high water mark, in an intellectual sense, in the 19th Century, and that as its mother ship HMS enlightenment crashes onto the rocks of reality, it's taking anti-religious atheism down with it.
One thing that's noticeable about secular realists like John Gray is they tend to have a pretty negative disposition. Admittedly this tends to be a trait of most realists, including many traditional conservatives, but its particularly noticeable among honest atheists.
Life's tough, living without religion is even tougher, so don't trust an atheist who looks at the world through rose-tinted glasses.
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3 comments:
Samuel Skinner
You can't be an agnostic. Agnostic is about knowledge. Religion is about belief. Either you have belief or you don't.
No it isn't possible to raise children in an ideological bubble. The goal is to raise children who think and who don't take things on faith.
The number of religious people have been decreasing.
Religion is useful; so is rape and genocide.
They get angry because religious beliefs threaten their lives, freedom and the continued existance of man on the planet.
Not all followers relize it is irrational.
I am anti-Muslim; I have this thing with people advocating holy war- I consider it evil. I don't like the Christians because they seem to be emulating the Muslims. I don't like the rest because they are insane.
Living without invisible friends is tough but we can get used to it.
As for the comment "it isn't going away"... have you even heard of the continent of Europe and Japan? You know the incredibly atheistic countries where most of the population are nonbelievers (not all of Europe: Scandanavia and Albania and some others). Apparently they managed to do something you find quite impossible for people to do.
I do like people who contradict accepted wisdom, but not when they write complete and utter drivel. Use books or google so you don't make an idiot of yourself again.
Anon,
You are most definitely wrong. The religious population is growing. In the US, the correlation between TFR and estimated IQ is .43. On the international stage, it's a(n even) strong(er) .71.
The trumpeting of smug atheists, especially Richard Dawkins, gets under my skin. The irritation is caused primarily by the media hosts, not the committed atheists. Dawkins, held up in these pieces as a rogue iconoclast, goes from fawning venue to fawning venue, where he is asked soft questions that allow for him to be portrayed as a relentless seeker of the truth.
Wow, you mean a Man-God didn't descend to the earth's center to spar with the Devil for a few days before rising back up through the crust and into a kingdom in the clouds? It's ignorant to maintain as much? Oh, how perspicacious, how erudite Dawkins truly is! I doubt Dawkins watches TV--he probably doesn't even own one (atheists aren't necessarily materialists, after all)!
Maybe next time he'll make mention of what ignoramuses blacks and women are compared to white guys, since both groups express higher rates of religious belief. A Rottweiler isn't afraid of an unctuous feminist with an audio recorder, is he?
In the typical interview, it is insinuated that a belief in God reveals idiocy. Idiots might believe in the Celestial Teapot, which is the same as believing in Zeus, which is the same as believing in the Trinity. There's the obvious issue of staying power, strongly suggestive of some evolutionary benefit of the nature of the belief, which Russel's item is mostly devoid of, Zeus had some history of, and the monotheistic God of the Levant has tons of. But maintaining their existence is unempirical and unnaturalistic.
Much more courageous, however, would be for Dawkins, a self-described skeptic, to turn his high-pressure jaws on the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming or Zero Group Differences dogmas that these same fawning media outlets defend so religiously. Especially with regards to the latter, the stack of evidence piles to the sky.
Mr Skinner,
My own, admittedly ill-thought out beliefs on the existence of God etc, aren't really that relevant.
I only mentioned the issue to indicate I don't have a religious axe to grind. Perhaps I would be better just to refer to myself as irreligious until I get around to thinking about my own views on religion more deeply.
This post was not meant as an attack on atheism per se. I am quite open to the possibility that aetheists may be right in believing the religious are delluded in believing in the existence of God.
I also strongly defend the right of atheists not to believe in God, especially since so many atheists are good scientists and vital to society.
However, thinkers like John Gray have a strong argument in claiming that religion may be necessary to help the majority of the world's population deal with reality.
Sure, some parts of the world are becoming more secular, but overall, as Audacious points out, the religious are more numerous and are having more children.
Futhermore, when you weed out those atheists who have faith in utopian ideologies like communism and anarchism, the number of level-headed atheists is relatively small.
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