Monday 30 March 2009

John Gray and the secular fundamentalists

A nice article by John Gray on secularism.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

How to be an atheist: A lesson in Muscularity

I begin this post with an excerpt from an essay in Denys Turner's excellent book 'Faith Seeking', which occurs at the conclusion of the Yale philosopher-theologian's challenge to contemporary atheists. Turner writes as follows right at the conclusion of his discussion:

'So, 'How to be an atheist?' It is not easy; you need to work at it. Be intellectually adult, get an education, get yourself a discipline; resist all temptation to ask such questions as you do not know in principle can be answered, being careful to suppress any which might seem to push thought off civilized limits; be reasonable, lest you find yourself being committed to an excessive rationality; and have the good manners to scratch no itches which occur in intellectually embarassing places - at least in public...if you want to be an atheist, then, it is necessary only to find that the world is to be a platitudinously dull fact. But, I warn you, to be as resolute as it takes in the conviction of such cosmic dullness requires much hard work, not a little training, and a powerful mental asceticism. Anything less resolute, and you run the risk of affliction by theological itches...' [Faith Seeking, p.22]

Perhaps the thing I like most about this description is its stern focus on the drab conformity of much atheism, which consists in its sweeping under the proverbial carpet of life's big questions. The image which comes most readily to my mind in this context is the desire of Adam and Eve to 'hide' from God in the garden of Eden, post fruit taking, a desire which - Paul assures us (1 Cor. 15:22) - leads only to death. In Christ, meanwhile, hiding is unnecessary. Being made alive involves coming out into the open; it involves countering and reacting against the drab conformity which life in hiding demands.

However, when light comes into the world, to evoke an image from John's Gospel, some people prefer to stay in the darkness. The darkness is comfort in numbers, the realm of uncontroversy and macho back slapping; the darkness is a world in which deaths are plotted, and where the demise of the wilfully unrecognised light is hoped for. The darkness refuses to stretch out its arms to its deliverer and instead reaches to its own deliverance, which it finds confirmed in others doing the same thing. Johannine imagery, for all its worth here, only takes us so far.

What Turner's comment invites us to understand is that 'atheism' - conceived in its opposition to Christian faith - thrives in its contemporary forms on being 'civilized', staying 'rational', and refusing to move into 'uncivilized' or 'irrational' circles or trains of thoughts. The complaint owes its urgency, I think, not only to the author's Marxist sympathies. It also comes out of a genuine understanding of how the Pharisaic legalism which the Gospels can so strongly protest against can work. Not, you will understand, that I think Jesus was 'out to get' the Pharisees or to rebel against 'Pharisaism' per se: it is more likely, certainly, that he saw in Pharisaism much that was worthy of admiration, much to be commended - but also the potential for abuse, serious abuse - and this was something, I think, which certain Pharisees were themselves not particularly given to seeing. In a way, Pharisaism in its negative guises (the guises which Jesus protested against) and Atheism (that is, Muscular, Legalistic, Atheism with a capital A) are natural bedfellows.

They both start from principles of order and rationality, on the need for being civilized. And they take strong exception to acts of dissidence or words of complaint against them. And if we return to Denys Turner's words, they both require a stringent intellectual regime to support them, in which asking certain questions is ruled out de rigueur - on the basis of some unstated, hidden, a priori reasoning. Christian faith, and Christian lives, are best realised very often as acts of dissidence, as sustained attempts to break through barriers of order and rationality which are constructed in the name of reason, order and being civilized. Love, and loving behaviour cannot be relied upon to conform to these expectations; the holy spirit, the spirit of love, is too unbridled for the harness of pure reason, pure order, pure civilization, as they are conceived by Muscular Atheists. For their constructions - made apart from a political stance which finds its origin in the desire for love of God and neighbour (does love consist above all in its rationality??) - miss the mark very profoundly. And this is so even while the most collegiate support for the atheist worldview is available among friendly peers who would also sweep a certain kind of question under the carpet as part of the intellectual training in rationality and being civilized which Good Atheist Thought relies upon.

As for Christianity, meanwhile, the only wisdom, the only reason, consists in the love of God and of neighbour (which is like it). And here, a point which many Christians themselves miss needs to be made: to love as Christ demands is not to sit cosily in intellectual communion, with regimes of reason and order comfortably in place. For that is what the Pharisees and the Atheists do. To love is to believe, to be Christlike, and to pick up our crosses and follow: to love is to do what is right and to feel and think it throught doing it. And doing means challenging, overturning, reinventing, creating. This means, very often, doing what the legalists would have you not do: it involves overthrowing their tables, cracking the intellectual whip and breaking down the barriers of order and reason which they construct to maintain their communities of cosy control and peer support. God's love seeks people out: it won't let them hide. It's a lesson many Christians - myself included - need constantly to remind ourselves of.