All the hornets
Anthony Grayling considers the squawks of the offended believers.
To the annoyance of many, the alarm of some, and the satisfaction of others, the half dozen books recently published that powerfully set out the case against religion and religious beliefs – books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Michel Onfray – have all sold in large numbers…The appearance of these books shows that the immunity of religion to forthright questioning and challenge is over, and with it its claim to automatic respect, privilege, sensitive handling and a place at the high table of politics and public life….The hard truths spoken about it in these books and the public debate surrounding them are as genies freed from the bottle: they cannot be put back.
I do hope he’s right about that – and it does seem like the kind of thing that’s hard to put back. Once it’s out, well, it’s out. It’s hard to unknow it.
A trawl along the shelves of any major bookstore is enough to reveal the vast output of every conceivable specimen of religious view, though admittedly much of it consists of saccharine would-be uplift merely. There they are in their dozens and score and hundreds, where is the outrage, the condemnation, the complaining about this? Non-religious people simply ignore such books…Yet a mere half dozen anti-religious tomes have stirred up all the hornets in their nests, have offended and outraged the devout, and between them have exposed religious claims and beliefs for what they are.
It is quite funny when you think about it. It’s not as if Dawkins and Dennett and Grayling himself have been pitching huge fits in the Guardian for decades at every single religious book that is published. It’s not as if they’ve been screeching that theists are cowardly and pretentious and jowly and ageing all this time. But six measly anti-theist books, and my god you’d think they were advocating child porn spiced up with a spot of priest-murder. In short, there’s a major double standard in operation here. The books packed full of bullshit get a free pass, the ones pointing out that it’s all bullshit are treated to a chorus of screams and imprecations. Uh – it should be the other way around, you know?
I wish C. Grayling’s predictions were true.
Unfortunately, the religious believers are going to kill, torture and oppress many millions, yet (especially if they are female …..
I think the religions will “lose”, but the aftermath might be more like Europe in 1945, not 1990.
“the religious believers are going to kill, torture and oppress many millions, yet”
‘Militant atheism’ clearly doesn’t fit the bill here… Hmmmm… ‘Millenarian secularism’? ‘Apocalyptic manichean atheism’? ‘Rationalist armageddonism’?
(Note to G. Tingey: there’s a certain intellectual trap of ditching Christianity but keeping all the bad parts).
“But six measly anti-theist books, and my god you’d think they were advocating child porn spiced up with a spot of priest-murder.”
Priceless!
Merlijn,
Remove the definite article. Put a comma after ‘torture’.
Seems like a reasonable seven-day forecast.
Merlijn’s got a point though. Those overconfident predictions of Tingey’s always make me roll my eyes.
Given the track-record of the religious believers so far, all I’m doing is predicting more of the same.
Why should this be “overconfident”?
Because you don’t preface your predictions with “I predict that”; you just say “X will”. That’s very overconfident – you don’t know what will happen.
Well, on a Bright note, the squealing may mean the pig has felt the knife point.
Why does the media always get outright god botherers to review these books?
Just to keep it fair, can we arrange for theologically and philosophically literate atheists to review religious books from now on? After all, we have to be fair. And balanced. Teach the controversy and all that.
I think ACG is betting a bit over-excited. Dawkins’ survey of the fallacies of religious thinking is brisk and entertaining but there won’t be many people who are interested in these ideas who have not already come across them, I think. The most interesting bits to my mind are the speculations about evolutionary psychology, but these are very, very specuilative areas and easily ignored by anyone who is unsympathetic to their conclusions.
I do agree, though, that the overreaction to these books in some quarters is a bit strange. Dawkins irritates me with his rent-an-atheist pose sometimes, but his book is amused, intelligent and urbane, not at all the crude mugging it is sometimes characterised as.
The only aspect that makes me bridle a bit is the lament that there is no coherent atheistic constituency that can exert the same sort of political and social pressure as the religious lobbies. I think a general resistance to that sort of grouping is important to many people who consider themselves atheists.
I think it’s time to develop theist-reviewer bingo.
Five rows of five, any line across, down or diagonal is bingo;
Strident. Fundamentalist. Shrill.
Aggressive. Militant. Naive. Ignorant.
Conceited. …
I’m sure we can fill the card.
Going OT to an earlier topic, my State has a new first:
“The legal adoption of a child by a gay couple in Western Australia, believed to be Australia’s first, has been hailed as “groundbreaking” by the state government.
The adoption by the two men follows 2002’s changes to the state adoption act.
http://www.thewest.com.au/SearchResults.aspx?Keywords=gay+adopt&Option=WEST
My conclusion (after being against this) was that its none of my business.