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Religion for Atheists results in a new moral certainty.
Alain de Botton has recently suggested a new kind of religion for atheists – one which takes all the best bits of religion such as community, generosity, creativity but leaves behind all the less desirable parts such as the rules and the actual beliefs. Ed West in today’s telegraph commented how this would always end up like an alcohol free lager – missing something crucial and something that doesn’t do much for anybody.
An interesting article – his last paragraph was this:
The real problem is that religion is always replaced by something else. The rise of fads such as homoeopathy is well documented, but more commonly people’s religious desires for certainty, morality and community are transferred to their politics; that is why there is this sense that those outside the communion of correct beliefs today are morally unclean, and new sins such as “racist” and “sexist” replace “heretic” and “sinner”. That is the real “religion for atheists”.
This struck a chord with something that we were discussing on Jon Marlow’s blog, about whether postmodernism was giving way to something else – a sense of ‘correct belief’ where everything outside of the prevailing view is not tolerated, shouted down or responded to with the refrain “You can’t say that!”. We called this ‘neo-conformity’. Interesting that this trend has been spotted by others and I wonder if it is really leading onto a change in era.
Thinking about Atonement
I’m preparing a sermon on atonement, and brainstorming what comes to mind with that word, one of the first things is the novel by Ian McEwan of the same name, which I read some years ago.
The shorter definition of the word ‘atonement’ is to make “satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury; amends”.
Set in 1934, McEwan’s novel, Atonement, follows an upper class family who are enjoying a hot day in their country house whilst being visited by their friends. The oldest daughter, Cecilia is back from Cambridge for the summer, as is Robbie, her childhood friend and the son of one of the estate workers. There is an attraction between them which grows on this summers day. Thirteen year old Briony is trying to prepare a short drama to perform with her cousins… and is feeling decidedly left out by the attention that Cecilia and her shortly-to-return older brother are getting.
That day Briony witnesses a number of things which she was not meant to see, and which she was not able to understand. First, she reads a letter from Robbie to Cecilia declaring his love – in a very brusque fashion. Then, she stumbles into the library interrupting a passionate embrace between them and thinks it may be some sort of attack. Finally, in the dim light of dusk in the garden, she sees the part of a sexual assault on her fifteen year old cousin, Lola. She did not get a good view of the perpetrator, but in her mind it had to be Robbie. That is the story she becomes convinced of and sticks to. Robbie is arrested and taken away, and Cecilia doesn’t talk to her sister again. This wrong conclusion, which Briony was only too happy to jump to, has dramatic implications for Robbie and Cecilia’s lives.
The book then jumps forward a number of years to narrate Robbie in the retreat from Dunkirk, and then further again when Briony has trained as a nurse and is looking after returning wounded soldiers – spurred on to do this by the memory of what she had done. Working for good can surely undo the mistakes of the past. This third section of the novel is dominated by Briony attempting to make amends for the hardship she has caused to Cecilia and Robbie. It is quite simply an attempt at self-atonement for her thirteen-year-old mistake. The novel ends with peace – Robbie and Cecilia on the banks of the Thames, war and confusion behind them, looking towards a happier future.
The twist in the tale comes in the epilogue when the story leaps forward to 1999. A now aged Briony is just about to publish her novel (memoirs?), with the Robbie and Cecilia story dominating. What he have been reading until that point is, in fact, not Ian McEwan’s prose, but the story written by one of his creations, Briony Tallis. Robbie did not survive the retreat at Dunkirk, succumbing to fever on the beach. Cecilia died in a bomb shelter in London during an air raid. Briony’s novel is the only way she, who has been battling guilt all her life, can come to atone for her mistake and give Robbie and Cecilia a happy ending.
“how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity of higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”
The irony is that there was no atonement either in the fictional story that Briony dreamed up, or in the real post-epilogue twist of McEwan. There can be no atonement as the only ones capable of giving it to Briony are dead, and she knows it. The atheist McEwan knows it too.
The BHA need to understand some basic things about the census
The British Humanist Association is once again getting its knickers in a twist over the wording of the religion question on the UK Census 2011 – the question is optional. They need to understand the difference between religious affiliation and religious practice and to get used to the fact that religion is not about to be made extinct.
From the BBC today
The BHA has [once again!] complained the wording of the optional census question about religion encourages people to wrongly identify themselves as believers.
…
He said: “This poll is further evidence for a key message of the Census Campaign – that the data produced by the census, used by local and national government as if it indicates religious belief and belonging, is in fact highly misleading.
Misleading? Or is it? How about we ask the people who wrote the question…
The Office for National Statistics has defended the wording of the religion question.
A spokesman told the BBC: “The religion question measures the number of people who self-identify an affiliation with a religion, irrespective of the extent of their religious belief or practice.”
via BBC News – Many people ‘are not religious’, suggests survey.
Ah, that’s what the question is about. All sorted then.
Humanism and the Census
The British Humanist Association are making a big thing about the UK 2011 Census, in particular the question that asks “What is your religion?” They say that on the 2001 census, the first time such a question was asked, the question was a leading question added to the fact that the first option was ‘Christian’ and the option for ‘No Religion’ was at the bottom of the list. This year the BHA have come us with a huge campaign which includes, yes, bus adverts (seems to be the main thing they do), encouraging people to tick the ‘No Religion’ box. Some of their adverts were banned because they were deemed ‘offensive’ to some people. One of them , ironically, was preaching about how one person didn’t like to be preached at! They want people who do not subscribe to any religion to say so.
But it really comes down to what the question is asking. Sociologists agree that there is a difference between religious practice and religious affiliation. In the last census a huge proportion of the population ticked that they were Christian – a staggering 37 million people out of the 52 million census forms in 2001. Compare this to only 7.75 million people who ticked ‘No Religion’ and a further 4 million who did not answer the question. No-one is stupid enough to claim that they were all card carrying practising Christians because they are evidently seen in church not often or at all. But it is possible to feel affiliated to a religion without practising it. Every year thousands of couples get married in church despite the fact that there are plenty of beautiful country houses around that offer non-religious ceremonies. And thousands of couple bring their children to be baptised even if they are not regular church-goers. Why is this? It clearly doesn’t say much about their religious practice, but does say something about their religious affiliation. They obviously have some sort of link with the church or religion in question even if it stops short of regular committed faith.
So I ask, is it not legitimate for someone like this to tick the box ‘Christian’ because it is expressing their affiliation if not their practice? The BHA would like them to tick no because it would like us to think that atheism is more prominent than it is. In practise we have a lot of nominal belief around. People may be reluctant to go to church but it seems they are also reluctant to give up on the idea of God too. It will be interesting to see what this years census brings.
Richard Dawkins on truth
Dawkins defends scientific truth in the Times online.
A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.
But now a certain kind of anthropologist can be relied on to jump up and say something like the following: Who are you to elevate scientific “truth” so? The tribal beliefs are true in the sense that they hang together in a meshwork of consistency with the rest of the tribe’s world view. Scientific “truth” is only one kind (“Western” truth, the anthropologist may call it, or even “patriarchal”). Like tribal truths, yours merely hang together with the world view that you happen to hold, which you call scientific. An extreme version of this viewpoint (I have actually encountered this) goes so far as to say that logic and evidence themselves are nothing more than instruments of masculine oppression over the “intuitive mind”.
Listen, anthropologist. Just as you entrust your travel to a Boeing 747 rather than a magic carpet or a broomstick; just as you take your tumour to the best surgeon available, rather than a shaman or a mundu mugu, so you will find that the scientific version of truth works. You can use it to navigate through the real world. Science predicts, with complete certainty unless the end of the world intervenes, that the city of Shanghai will experience a total eclipse of the sun on July 22, 2009. Theories about the moon god devouring the sun god may be poetic, and they may cohere with other aspects of a tribe’s world view, but they won’t predict the date, time and place of an eclipse. Science will, and with an accuracy you could set your watch by. Science gets you to the moon and back. Even if we bend over backwards to concede that scientific truth is no more than that which enables you to pilot your way reliably, safely and predictably around the real universe, it is in exactly this sense that – at the very least – evolution is true. Evolutionary theory pilots us around biology reliably and predictively, with a detailed and unblemished success that rivals anything in science. The least you can say about evolutionary theory is that it works. All but pedants would go further and assert that it is true.
For the most part I agree. However, what Dawkins has done is simply defend the use of the word ‘true’ in scientific thinking. He has argued that if something can be shown to scientifically ‘work’, we can call it true. This is mere semantics. What he hasn’t done is equated ‘truth’ with conclusive proof as he would like us to believe.
What a lot of fuss an ad can make
Yes, there’s more on the Atheist Bus Campaign, which went live this week in several UK cities. Now, it seems, the debate is going to be opened up even more, with the Advertising Standards agency looking into it. Not sure Clifford Longley’s is the best approach, but the debate will certainly be fun.
Clifford Longley is quoted on The Times blog.
Scientists believe in God
According to the Daily Mail, scientists believe in God. Not all of them, I’m sure, but Jonathan Margolis wrote an interesting articlejust before Christmas – I’ve only just been passed it. He interviews several eminent scientists about their beleif in God. Not a definitive article by any means, but interesting nonetheless.
Similarly, Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox argues: ‘This misapprehension that faith is a religious thing not involved in science is simply false. I see the two as belonging together.’
The softly-spoken Ulsterman added: ‘But science is limited. That’s no insult to science, but as I recently told Richard Dawkins, I could dissect him, run his brain through a scanner, reduce him to chemicals and tell a great deal about him. ‘But I’d never get to know him as a person. For that, he must reveal himself to me.’
Professor Lennox said that God has revealed himself at several levels, in the universe and creation.
‘Science gives us pointers towards God, but you don’t get proofs; you get evidence. And faith is evidence-based – not based on lack of evidence, as Dawkins says.’
Christians respond in the bus campaign
Following on from adverts being placed by atheists on buses in London and Washington, in DC some Christians have decided to launch a pro-God campaign of their own.
from AdFreak:
“My name is JoEllen. After a friend forwarded me an article about the AHA ad campaign, I thought, ‘Enough!’ I am so tired of God and religion being attacked that I decided to start a counter ad campaign.”
If it gets people to think, I guess it’s a good thing. The original atheist adverts on London buses were responding to 
advertisements for the alpha course, which gives a short introduction to the claims of the Christian faith. Alpha adverts pointed the reader to a website which lists the churches which are running the course. This advert does not direct you anywhere.
Interesting, but maybe money could have been used better. God doesn’t really need advertising. He’s managed without it for ages. There is really no substitute for the witness that comes out of a genuine Christian friendship – this is how people have become Christians for centuries – one friend telling another, telling another etc.
U.S. getting its own atheism bus campaign
Further to a recent post of mine about atheists advertising on london buses, the American Humanist Association has decided to get in on the act.
Atheists seem to have a thing for buses. We recently wrote about the bus ads in London which proclaimed, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Along these same lines, Washington, D.C., is now getting its own atheist bus campaign, headlined, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” The advertiser is the American Humanist Association, which is putting $40,000 into the holiday campaign. An AHA rep says the group is running the ads now because “there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion.” (Can’t they just comfort themselves with some rampant consumerism?) For its part, the American Family Association was typically eloquent in denouncing the effort. “It’s a stupid ad,” says a rep there.
via AdFreak: U.S. getting its own atheism bus campaign
Interesting that they decide to take morality as their theme. From where does morality come?
