Book Review

Dangerous Utopias of godless religions

The New Atheists

The agenda of the new atheists is disturbing: they embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinist and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists, proposing a route to the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason. The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving towards collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of fundamentalist Christian faith (once it is shorn of the wisdom of original sin) and the Enlightenment. Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress. They turn their particular good into a universal good. They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil not for evil's sake but to make a better world.

Tina Beattie in The New Atheists is one of the few critics who grasp the danger of this ideology and how it replicates the fundamentalist mindset. She dismisses the facile attacks that new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens make on a form of religious belief we all hate. She unmasks their childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs, as well as their demonisation of Muslims. She points out that while scientific rationalism shapes our view of the world, "it also has the capacity to delude its followers with its utopian promises and claims to knowledge beyond the scope of its own authority".

These new atheists have found a following among people disgusted with the chauvinism, intolerance, anti-intellectualism and self-righteousness of religious fundamentalists. Beattie, reader in Christian Studies at Roehampton University, shares this disgust. She dislikes the same people as they do, writing that she probably has "more in common with Dawkins and Polly Toynbee than George W. Bush and his Christian supporters". But she does not dislike them for the same reasons. This is not a small difference.

The institutional Church has often used religious authority to sanctify cruelty and exclusion. The self-righteous piety of many religious leaders, along with the habit of speaking on behalf of people they never meet, are characteristic of many Churches, conservative and liberal. The liberal Church is a largely bourgeois phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialisation, the American empire and global capitalism. They often seem to think that if we can be nice and inclusive everything will work out. It also buys into the myth that we can morally progress as a species. It too accepts, along with atheists and the fundamentalists, the Panglossian vision that we live in "the best of all possible worlds" and that if we have faith and trust in the forces around us "all is for the best".

It is this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our inherent capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit, which is the most disturbing aspect of all of these belief systems. Beattie zeros in on this rosy utopianism as a plague that has beset the new atheists who, in their self-delusion, offer up a godless religion. The danger, as Beattie understands, is the human heart and its lust for violence, which can be couched in the language of religion, atheism, nationalism or a host of perverse ideologies. "The division today is not between believers and non-believers," she notes correctly. "Rather it is between those who see violence as the solution to the world's problems, and those who recognise the urgent need for a more just and peaceful international order."

There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression and economic exploitation, and to accelerate environmental degradation. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving towards a glorious Utopia. We are not moving anywhere.

Religious institutions, however, should be separated from the religious values imparted to me by religious figures, including my father. Most of these men and women frequently ran foul of their own religious authorities. Religion, real religion, is about fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, finding empathy and defying the powerful. It is about caring for the other.

Spirituality is not defined by "how it is with me", but the tougher spirituality of resistance, the spirituality born of struggle, of the fight with the world's evils. This spirituality, vastly different from the narcissism of modern spirituality movements, was eloquently articulated by Martin Luther King and the Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was imprisoned and put to death by the Nazis.

Beattie comes out of this tradition. If her fine book has a failing it would be her reliance on "postmodernists, post-colonialists and feminists" to "embrace the present as a moment of opportunity and potential liberation". She holds out hope that through postmodernism "individuals and minority groups can claim rights to self-expression and self-determination rooted in particular judgment of outsiders". It is not that I do not support these aims; I do. But in this she too falls prey to the idea of moral progress, albeit on a smaller and more humane scale.

The forces of darkness, our human capacity for evil, our lust for violence and will to power, are too strong to negate or crush, especially in times of fear and crisis. Evil will always be with us. Each new day we will have to rise to fight it again. Ecclesiastes got this right. There really is nothing new under the sun.

But this is a minor complaint in a smart, thoughtful and needed book that gets to the core of why the new atheists are not only self-deluded but ultimately dangerous. These new atheists are a secular version of the religious Right. They misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology to argue that we can evolve morally, a conjecture never made by Darwin, just as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible.

They too are anti-intellectual. And while the atheists do not have much power and are not a threat to the democratic state as they are in the United States, they engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism of the fundamentalist Christian Right. They sell this under secular banners, but this does not excuse it. They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise; for them a state of human perfection made possible by science and reason. They argue, like these Christian fundamentalists, that some human beings, maybe many human beings, have to be eradicated to achieve this better world. They see only one truth - their truth. Human beings must become like them, think like them and adopt their values, which they insist are universal, or be banished from civilised society. All other values, which they never investigate or examine, are dismissed as inferior.

These atheists and Christian fundamentalists have built belief systems in the service of themselves and their own power. They urge us forward into an unreal world, where force and violence, self-exaltation and blind nationalism are an unquestioned good. They seek to make us afraid of what we do not know or understand. They use this fear to justify cruelty and war. They ask us to kneel before idols that look and act like them, telling us that one day, if we trust enough in God or reason, we will have everything we desire. Beattie's book is a thoughtful call to reject simplistic utopian visions and accept the limitations of being human.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...