Atheism is fashionable

Atheism has become fashionable. A number of books have been published lately whose aim is to rationally tear religion to pieces and put forward atheism as the only intelligent and honest alternative. Atheism certainly has much to commend it, so I set out to read some of those books and see what they had to offer. I started with Sam Harris's The End of Faith, and now I'm halfway through The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (1 million copies!). I have been halfway through it for about a month already, and that's because, just as it happened with The End of Faith, Dawkins' book leaves me cold.

Once it is established that religion has been the cause of millions of deaths throughout the history of mankind, that creationism is stupid, that dogma is an intellectual suicide, once you realise that God's existence doesn't solve the mysteries of the physical universe while good old science does, once all the well-constructed arguments for atheism have been laid out and I perhaps have agreed with many of them, atheism still seems unconvincing. It's not that religions as a whole is much more convincing, but there are shades of grey, aren't there?

That is one of the weaknesses of these atheist books: that they consider religion as a whole, not doing any justice to the actual diversity of religious experience. It reminds me of those people for whom environmentalists, pro-Palestinians, weed lovers, Basque separatists, anti-arms campaigners and Amnesty International are all one and the same: communists. "These communists." What communists? "Religion." What religion?

In their seeming unwillingness to distinguish between the innumerable varieties of religious experience Harris and Dawkins show a complete lack of empathy towards that very experience. I don't think religion is ultimately about dogma, brainwashing, Islamic terrorists, sexual repression and laughable cosmologies. I think it's about men needing to find meaning to their lives, full stop. On top of that, layers of nonsense have solidified down the centuries and across different cultures, but that doesn't invalidate the primordial need for meaning, but, if anything, shows us how inherent it is to human nature. Science is the perfect antidote for much of the nonsense involved in much of religion, but cannot possibly be an answer to my deepest existential concerns. If you set out to convince people that religion is stupid, you should, if not tell them what to do with those existential questions, at least acknowledge their legitimacy and show that you understand what it feels like to be tormented by them. If you think that knowledge of the structure of the atom and the theory of natural selection will soothe my angst, you don't understand the first thing about religion.

(a week later)

Having now also read Cristopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (extremely interesting book, by the way) and the comment cheekily posted by my friend Álvaro before I'd finished writing this post, my point remains the same. I admit that religion is usually perverse (thirteen years in a Catholic school gave me some first-hand experience I'd rather have not had), but does that mean it is inherently perverse? Going back to politics, how many millions have been killed in the name of political ideologies? How many millions have been indoctrinated or had their most basic freedoms taken away from them? And yet nobody with their feet on the ground suggests discarding politics altogether. In response to some totalitarian ideology, many turn to another totalitarian ideology, like those that, as a reaction to America's global abuse of power, align themselves with all things anti-American: communism worldwide, poor Arab nations, anarchy, you know, the whole lot. Others, more sensibly, reject wickedness (what a lovely word) in politics wherever it occurs, be it right-wing wickedness, left-wing wickedness, Western, Eastern, rich or poor. And then some are apolitical (to the extent that is possible), which is fine by me. But, again, all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of political ideologies don't seem to lead anyone to the conclusion that we should reject politics as a whole. Why do they when it comes to religion?

I know, I know, you can only take this comparison so far. I know politics is an aspect of social reality whether you like it or not. But let me continue with the argument. Despite overwhelming evidence seeming to point to the contrary, politics is not intrinsically about mass murder, nor about manipulating history, nor about bank accounts in Switzerland. It is about ... er ... I don't want to dig myself into a hole here ... it's about something else, something which is good, or neither good nor bad. Likewise, religion, unless you chose to define it thus, is not intrinsically about child abuse, bride burning, foreskin removal, sexual repression, revealed truths, however many virgins at one's disposal in paradise and bloodthirsty gods performing miracles when they are in an interventionist mood. It's about something else, which is good, or neither good nor bad. For me it's about a human being looking at existence, the universe, life, death, and then asking "What is this all about? What am I supposed to do now? Why? How? Who? What?", and setting out to find the answers.

So then religion is not a concept describing a clear-cut reality. You have to decide what you mean by it. Talking of which, there's something that irritates me about Dawkins:

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason

(The God Delusion, page 19)

He concedes that what he calls "Einsteinian religion" is intellectually sound -- "In this sense I too am religious" (ibid) -- but then he disallows the use of the term "religion" to describe that sort of experience on the grounds that it is confusing. What he's saying then is that religion, by definition, is nonsense, and if there is some religion that isn't, we mustn't call it religion because, as previously stated, religion is nonsense. I mean, please ...