Muddled Madeleine

An article by Madeleine Bunting for Comment is Free taking issue with the "New Atheism" of Richard Dawkins and his ilk has now attracted getting on for 1200 comments, a feat made more impressive by the confused and, indeed, incomprehensible nature of her remarks. Noting that in a recent poll only 22% of those questioned "knew" what Easter was about (correct answer - it "celebrates the resurrection of Jesus") she wondered "what other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity?" An interesting question, to be sure, but not one which she proceeds to answer (Soviet communism after 1989, perhaps?) preferring instead to blame it all - or some of it - on "the evangelical fervour and certainty of the New Atheists".

I suppose some degree of confusion is inevitable from someone who manages to be simultaneously a Roman Catholic and a Buddhist. I'm not entirely sure, even now, what Bunting was driving at, although Caspar Melville of the New Humanist made an excellent attempt at elucidation in a response put up today. Two main thoughts can be distilled from her argument. Firstly, she contrasts what she sees as the simplistic assault on religion by the "new atheists" with the subtlety evinced by a Karen Armstrong, an AN Wilson or a John Gray. Secondly, she hints that without the benefit of the "myths" derived from a living religious tradition human life becomes hard to cope with. As well as Gray, she draws from the work of the agnostic philosopher/novelist Alain de Botton who "argues that the decline of religious faith has left behind a real and widespread need for wisdom and insight". This is a much richer, more interesting line of enquiry but she hardly begins to pursue it, preferring to go after Dawkins instead.

Bunting evinces "a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume". She pins part of the blame on the media's desire for easily-assimilable, yah-boo debates in which God-botherers and those bothered by God talk over each other entertainingly for a few minutes. The media:

has been promoting the wrong argument, while the bigger question of how, in a post-religious society, people find the myths they need to sustain meaning, purpose and goodness in their lives go unexplored.

Do people actually need "myths" to sustain meaning and purpose in their lives? More to the point, can myths fulfil such a function for people who do not believe in their truth? Such a question would seem to be of little concern for a sophisticate like Bunting. For her, indeed, (taking her cue from Karen Armstrong's dubious claims about intellectual history) the main problem with the New Atheists is that they have too great an enthusiasm for certainty and truth:

Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths. What "belief" used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of "love", "commitment", "loyalty": saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles. Faith is something you do, and you learn by practice not by studying a manual, argues Armstrong.

Armstrong appears to deny that religions make any truth claims at all, at least in the sense that most modern people would understand it. Gray, for his part, is even more Nihilistic, claiming that "we forget at our peril that all systems of thought rely on myth". Like the myth of gravity, for example. As the American physicist (and bete noire of the postmodernists) Alan Sokal once put it, "anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the window of my apartment. I live on the 21st floor."

Like Gray, Armstrong, we learn, no longer accepts invitations to debate with atheists who, she thinks, display "egotism and arrogance". I can't say I'm particularly surprised. Her basic argument, that people in former centuries were not interested in the "truth" of religious doctrines, is self-evident nonsense and begs the obvious question of what (for example) the early Christian martyrs imagined they were dying for. The ineffability of the divine? Yet she states her case in so emphatic a manner, and with such an appearance of intellectual sophistication, that she has managed to erect an entire career upon it. It helps, I suppose, that she is so politically correct - not for nothing did Damian Thompson dub her "Koran Armstrong".

The Armstrong combination of waffle with good natured wishful thinking would hardly last more than a couple of rounds with the likes of a Dawkins or a Hitchens. That is not just because the arguments of the atheists are easier to follow than Armstrong's subtleties but rather because they have a much clearer understanding than Armstrong or her acolytes of what religion actually involves. In a Guardian podcast last year, Dawkins was pitted against Bunting in a discussion that turned out to be horribly one-sided. Bunting was unable to answer the question of whether Jesus had a human father, preferring to say that "there's some truth here that is not about evidence", and that "I'm not sure what belief is". Yet as Dawkins pointed out repeatedly, whether or not Christ was born of a virgin must be at least in some sense a question of fact. The vast majority of Christians throughout history would surely have concurred.

Of course religion involves practice as well as belief. But if religion is merely about "doing", then even atheists who "do" the things approved of by Armstrong are by definition religious. Perhaps that is what she really does believe. She has said that "All the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences". And what is the same thing that they are saying? That we should have "compassion". She is currently going around the world persuading religious leaders to sign up to her "Charter of compassion". But this begs a rather huge question: if religion is about compassion, how come whenever religion has found itself in a position of political power it has shown itself to be anything other than compassionate?

Wars have been fought in the name of religion - but of course that's not real religion, Armstrong wants us to think, but rather its antithesis. Women have been oppressed by men (and other women) quoting holy texts: is that simply because they didn't (don't) understand true religion as well as Karen Armstrong? Presumably. The fact that religious conviction has inspired great acts of self-sacrifice and compassion cannot excuse religion responsibility for the great evils that have also been perpetrated in its name.

In fact, the "golden rule" which Armstrong claims lies at the core of all true religion predates not only religion but humanity itself. Even vampire bats give spare blood to other, less fortunate, bats. Reciprocity emerges naturally from modern game theory. As a guide to behaviour, the principle that one should do unto others as you would have them do unto you is not even especially moral; the truly selfless person would act with a generosity it would be unreasonable to expect in return. Of course it is not the best that religion has to offer; it's telling, though, that the only principle Armstrong is able to get all religions to agree on is one that has nothing whatever to do with God, and would be assented to by agnostic and atheist moralists with equal enthusiasm.

It need hardly be said that the type of compassionate religion espoused by Karen Armstrong, for all its intellectual shoddiness, is not any sort of threat. If all religious believers behaved in the manner she thinks they should, then there would be far less negative coverage of religion in the world's media. It's unlikely that there would be any "new atheists" at all: there would be people who didn't find any particular reason to believe in the existence of a Supreme Being, but books like The God Delusion wouldn't become bestsellers. It is not the mere persistence of religion that has given Richard Dawkins his worldwide fame. The new atheism is a reaction to the resurgence of religion in the public arena.

And that means two things in particular: the American Christian fundamentalism that gives Dawkins et al their easiest targets (unless one includes crystal healing and Ufology) - but that is rather old hat now; and the modern, aggressive and politically-engaged version of Islam. Among the new atheists, only Sam Harris has been entirely upfront about the danger that radical Islam poses - especially in Muslim countries, many of which were until a few decades ago well advanced along the road to secular modernity. It is here that Armstrong's intellectual duplicity and faux sophistication ceases to be merely irritating and becomes dangerous. By glossing over the downside of religion in general and Islamic fundamentalism in particular she implicitly excuses the human rights abuses carried out in its name. For all her championing of compassion, she happily plays postmodernist games with other people's lives and freedoms. Here she is in February this year, for example, writing in the Times about the Iranian revolution:

Thirty years ago Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, man of the people and hero of Shia Islam, brought down the cruel and tyrannical regime of the Shah of Iran. This was not how we viewed the Iranian Revolution in the West. That mutual misunderstanding has led to 30 years of animosity, which once again threatens to boil over...

Far from being the rabid conservative depicted in the Western press, Khomeini was a revolutionary in Shia terms for suggesting that, in these dark times, a Muslim jurist should be head of state. Accustomed to the crowd-pleasing bonhomie of their own politicians, Westerners found Khomeini's inward-looking, unsmiling demeanour repellent, but Iranians recognised the traditional marks of a “sober” mystic, who had brought all his faculties under control.

You couldn't, as they say, make it up.