Author: Ophelia Benson

Karen Armstrong says God is like a melody.

Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof…Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology.

If you say so (and of course ‘at its best’ covers a multitude of sins – at my best I am a paragon of wit and virtue, but my best is oddly elusive). But that is (I can’t help assuming) because the ‘the’ in ‘theology’ is so flexible, so adaptable, so shape-shifting, so all things to all people, that it makes just as much sense to say that theology at its best aspires to the condition of poetry, or rock climbing, or cookery, or sex, or being drunk. In any case theology at its less than best seems to aspire to the condition of a strange combination of story-telling and scholarship. It makes stuff up but uses scholarly-looking language to talk about the stuff it makes up. If Armstrong wants to think that’s a kind of art form…I’m not going to send her a telegram urging her to stop.

A modern sceptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond Man’s word is eloquent of God”. But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God.

Right…because God is neither this nor that, neither here nor there, neither short nor tall, neither immanent nor transcendent, neither animal nor vegetable (I can go on like this all day) – God is not something that can be pinned down by our puny words nor grasped by our tiny little minds – God is not a toaster nor my left foot, neither is God Chekhov nor is it J K Rowling. God is not a lug wrench, nor a rainy afternoon, nor a blue whale with a headache, nor a petunia, nor a song, nor a sneeze – yet God contains elements of all those – and then again –

In other words it is always possible to spin words about God (or to be silent about God and consider that a branch of theology) – but we live in the real world, where people think God is a literal person who makes rules that we have to obey (no condoms – flog that woman for showing some hair at the edge of her hijab – kill all the infidels – no stem cell research for you – don’t do any work on Saturday and that includes flipping a light switch – slaughter that goat by cutting its throat in the approved way and no other). The world would be a much better place (which is not to say it would be perfect – no, the “new” atheists don’t think everything would be perfect if religion vanished) if the Armstrong idea of God were the only idea of God – but that’s not how it is. She seems to be telling us we’re confused about what God really is – but that’s a mug’s game. Nobody knows ‘what God really is’ – whatever anyone says is made up, so it seems futile to try to say one version is right while another is wrong.

The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion.

No they don’t. They insist that the God that makes rules and answers prayers and prefers one set of people to another set of people and hates atheists is the God that most people mean by the word ‘God’ and the one that the rest of us have to deal with. They insist that pretending that real religion is really something much more sophisticated and ethereal and poetic and music-like and loving and compassionate is just delusional. They insist (to the extent that they insist anything) that it is the bossy intrusive punitive kind of religion that causes problems and so it’s no good trying to pretend it out of existence.

Because “God” is infinite, nobody can have the last word.

See – there you go: how does she know God is infinite? How does she know God doesn’t expire in 357,941,826,098 years plus a week? How does she know God isn’t the size of ten universes laid end to end and not one bit bigger? How does she know God isn’t smaller than a bread box? She doesn’t – but she says things as if she does (and putting scare quotes on “God” won’t save her – we can still see that she’s saying things).

But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West.

Well if Armstrong can persuage people to go back to that there deliberate and principled reticence about God – I for one will send her a big thank-you letter complete with coupon for a large pizza with 3 toppings for $8.99.

We’re in luck – we have a whole new barrage of clichés to set us straight.

David Adams Richards is angry. The acclaimed novelist and essayist is raging at atheists, the self-righteous ones. The writer with the tough New Brunswick background believes anti-religious people are as bad as fundamentalists in their fashionable absolutism.

Does he! How exciting! How novel, how original, how refreshing, how ground-breaking.

Not that I can talk – I don’t break new ground. I think there’s a place for saying things that have been said before, because the mere fact that something has been said before doesn’t mean that everyone knows that, so there is always room for popularizers to help circulate that which has been said before – but there is a limit. Helping to circulate is one thing but people saying the exact same thing nine thousand times in one week is another.

Richards is adamant about what he considers the intellectual laziness behind so much religion bashing today. People who like to attack religion think they’re being risqué, Richards said, but most of their arguments are just “conformist” and “insipid.”

No, people who like to attack religion don’t think they’re being risqué, we just think we’re saying things that have been marginalized for no very good reason and need to be brought back into the public realm. Most of the arguments may well be conformist (see above) but they still (in our view) need to be re-circulated. I don’t think any of the “New” militant lazy atheists think they’re/we’re saying anything new, much less risqué – but it’s a little foolish to pretend what we’re saying is completely bland and conventional given all the outraged shouting and name-calling it’s received.Surely Richards himself wouldn’t be ‘angry’ about mere insipid milk-and-water.

Richards has always been blunt and cranky. So he starts off the book by throwing Josef Stalin in the face of proud atheists. Stalin, the world’s most famously egregious atheist, was a nihilist of the highest order, Richards says. To the Soviet dictator, murdering people was a thrill.

Blunt and cranky perhaps, but not what you’d call imaginative. Apparently it would come as a surprise to him to learn that every atheist-hater brings up Stalin – in order to refute the claim that all atheists are perfect. If only we had never made that claim, we would have total world domination by now!

…when Richards habitually refers to his rhetorical foes and friends only as an “intellectual,” or the “physicist,” the “academic,” a “feminist” or the “CBC host,” I want to know who he’s actually talking about.

Ah yes – the Chris Hedges problem – the wild accusation accompanied by a total lack of citation or quotation. Yeah that is a bit of a drawback.

…as Richards cheerfully testifies, the so-called secular world has nothing to be smug about when it comes to human frailty. Academic and literary circles, he says, are also full of annoying, “pious” people.

Therefore God exists. Or something.

Often, when one cites Millian views on liberty, open discussion and the like, it emerges that people think Mill was talking only about legal rights. He wasn’t.

The fourth paragraph of On Liberty:

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant–society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it–its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

What does it all matter? I’ve been engaging in a couple of blog discussions of that question – about why people get so riled about Mooney and Kirshenbaum, what’s at stake, whence comes all the heat. (I’ve also lost a friend over it, a price I resent paying.)

One way of explaining is to quote a little of the preface to The God Delusion. It starts with Lalla Ward’s misery at school and her parents’ asking why she never said she wanted to leave and her reply: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’

Lots of people don’t know they can, and it is worth letting them know: you can. (You can even invoke ‘Yes we can’ if you want to. Why not?)

Dawkins goes on to talk in particular about the US and its religiosity:

There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word ‘atheist’ has been assiduously built up as a terrible and frightening label…The status of atheists in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago…The reason so many people don’t notice atheists is that so many of us are reluctant to ‘come out’…Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them. [pp 3-4]

There: that’s part of why. It’s because of that. It’s because of social pressure, majoritarian pressure, the pressure of public opinion and rhetoric and ‘framing.’ It’s easy for me to be an atheist, but I’m a nerd living in a big coastal city; the fact that it’s easy for me doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone. It’s not. It’s hard for a great many people – it’s not a live option – or if it is it’s one with a huge price tag attached. And that’s bad because there is nothing wrong with being an atheist. It’s not a crime, not even a thought-crime. So Dawkins is right – people in the US at least need to know they’re not weirdos marooned on Planet Theism, and the only way for them to know that is for it to be true, and the only way for it to be true is for more and more atheists to be openly atheist as opposed to bashfully apologetically silently atheist.

This has started, partly thanks to Dawkins’s book. Sure, there’s a lot of irritating bluster along the way – but that’s not the end of the world. There is also a fair amount of worthwhile discussion of what we know and how we know it, and that makes a nice change from legless chat about what ‘God’ wants us to do. M&K have a fixed idea that all this will cause Americans to hate science, or to fail to stop hating science, or to hate science more than they already do, or something like that – but M&K have yet to offer a coherent argument for exactly why they think that and why the rest of us should think it too. Nothing daunted by the lack of an argument, they are trying very hard to persuade everyone that they are right and that atheists should go back to being bashfully apologetically silent. But we don’t want to do that. That’s the whole point – we want to stop doing that and do the other thing instead. We think M&K need a much, much more compelling argument than anything they’ve offered yet to convince us to go back into our little pens.

So that’s what it all matters.