Maxine Clarke sends along this link to Robin McKie's review of Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Is it all piety in the sky?.
I found this interesting:
" ... what really troubles us [doubters], and what is not really tackled by either author, is the fact that a belief in the existence of deities invariably comes with an intense urge to shove that conviction down everyone else's throats and to proselytise."
Invariably? I don't think so. And the urge is not confined to believers in the existence of deities. Apparently Robin has never got the sort of proselytizing emails from atheists that I have. (Think it's hard to deal with a Jehovah's Witness? Try dealing with one who has discovered there is no God.) Nor does Robin seem to notice that Dennett and Wolpert are themselves proselytizing. (That said, it remains true that people of faith would preach it better if they spent more time practicing it.)
Well, the atheistic ideologies may not have come into their own until the 20th century, but in terms of death and destruction, they sure made up for lost time.
ReplyDeleteAnd no one is going to tell me that believers have any monopoly on either intolerance or self-righteousness. Unless, of course, you want to place atheists in the category of believers (which I think would be accurate, actually).
Well, Melville, maybe I've known more atheists than you have. I certainly seem to have got enough emails from them from time to time trying to dissuade me from believing.
ReplyDeleteAs for atheism being a belief, of course it is. If not, what is it? Verifiable, demonstrable knowledge? It can only be categorized as a negative faith statement.
Now it's true - and it's something we can be most grateful for - the atheists don't go around proselytizing IN THE MANNER that the Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons do (I can't think of any others who actually knock on doors; actually only the first have knocked on mine). But that's not the only way one can proselytize. And I say that Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett thump tubs with the best of them.
Read those comments on that link I mentioned. It takes very little to hear the same kind of smug self-righeousness there that one hears among many of those who think they've been washed in the Blood of the Lamb. I do notice that quite of few of the doubters hail from a background of - what shall I call it? low church evangelism? Well, that is not my background. I was raised on the likes of John Henry Newman, Ronald Knox and Francois Mauriac.
Things ought not to be judged by their least sophisticated and least-informed manifestions and there are far more sophisticated and better-informed manifestations of the religious sensibility than Elmer Gantryism. As John Berryman put it, " millions agree ... or mostly do / and have done ages of our human time / among whom were & still are some very sharp cookies." To proceed on the assumption that all believers are bigoted ignormauses and that the worst examples among believers are somehow representative of believers in general simply will not do.
I can't say anything useful here but to agree that nobody has ever tried to convert me to athiesm!
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Frank that some people have a condescending or patronising air about their unbeliefs (or beliefs). Some don't and are more reasonable. I basically couldn't care less what someone's beliefs or unbliefs are, so long as they don't try to persuade me of them in an unreasonable or forced way (and go away if I ask them to).
I guess we just have to ignore those who irritate us about their beliefs, whther religious or (as I have often been subject to) scientific "crankism" where beliefs outweigh any evidence -- such beliefs are areas where I lack the intellectual equipment to contribute in a meaningful sense, and the same goes for most other people, yet when it comes to beliefs, opinions are thrown around without much thought or restraint.
I sometimes forget, Maxine, that in your job you must hear some of the goofiest stuff around. I got the atheist pitches when I wrote religion stories for the paper - or have reviewed books like Steven Unwin's The Probablility of God. But I'm like you: I don't really care what anybody believes or doesn't so long a they leave me in peace. I do like talking about beliefs with people, because you can learn a lot from people who have beliefs different from your own. I may be a Catholic, but I've learned a lot from Lutherans, Anglicans, Buddhism and Taoism. I can't help feeling that the late John Blofeld was right and that Kuan Yin is real. A psychiatrist friend once accused me of magical thinking. I replied, "Why, of course. I like magical thinking." It's fun, as long as you don't take it too seriously.
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