Now I only just said last week that we don't "do religion" on this blog - except where religion clashes with the cherished idea of secular democracy. I should have added one other category - where believers try and smear the character of us non-believers.
In the Guardian on Saturday was a column by someone called Nicholas Buxton which so infuriated me, I need to sound off a little. If I can crudely paraphrase Buxton, he wrote that there is no such thing as reality, just different social constructions and discourses, and that Christians like to construct life with special meaning whereas secularists and atheists are all in favour of globalised markets and the commodification of life.
It's a load of badly argued tosh, but contained within this text is the subtext that always drives me mad, that somehow Christians are better people because they've got "souls" and the rest of us are lesser members of society. I don't make any assumptions of the personal qualities, good or bad, of another human being purely based on their religion, or lack of. I thought it would be quite obvious that we should judge people on what they do and not on which belief they publicly ascribe to. But if a religious person wants to move way from that common sense and make personalised attacks on all non-believers, then we must retain the right to bite back.
I have always suspected that a number of theists would eventually abandon their centuries old claim to know The Truth after having just about all of it shredded by scientific advances, and instead resort to cultural relativism. You have your truth, I have my truth, and it would be unfair and aggressive to submit someone else's truth to any kind of scrutiny, or heaven forbid, demand evidence and rational argument to back up that truth. And this is exactly where Buxton is coming from.
Of course as soon as you use evidence to evaluate Buxton's arguments, they come crashing down. The non-religious are more likely to vote for left wing and social democratic parties than Christians. Social democrats, believe the markets should be made to work for people and not the other way around. The biggest force pushing global markets, trampling over democratic control, and turning every aspect of social life into a commodity - are the current incumbents of the White House - who just about all happen to be...Christians. Today, Regent University,
founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian
leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates
working in the Bush administration.
Buxton tries to claim that human life was in some way valued more before the decline of Christianity:
"Where once we were souls, we are now consumers"
Well I wouldn't fancy being a peasant in Europe when the church had its way and strongly supported for centuries a system of feudal bondage and slavery. Hardly a profound point to make, but the Buxton article is a gross re-writing of history. Quaequam blog attacks the article on similar grounds:
"...the Church was a political body which was perfectly happy to treat the hoi polloi as so much fodder to work on its land and fight and die in its wars. Trendy lefty though I may be, I’m much happier being a post-Enlightenment ‘consumer’ than a pre-enlightenment ’soul’.
You also only have to look around you to see that there are plenty of Christians who are perfectly happy to treat us as consumers. Brian Souter is hardly the poster child for corporate social responsibility. Thatcher, the vanguard of neoliberalism in the UK, was hardly famous for her atheism: Reagan and his spiritual heir George Bush are famous for their faith."
This article was published in the Guardian on the same day the newspaper lead its front page approvingly with a quote from Gordon Brown and his concern about celebrity culture: "It is a remarkable culture where people appear on television and are famous simply for the act of appearing on television." I don't think it's being too harsh to say that Buxton may have some talents, but writing insightful opinion pieces isn't one of them. It seems his only apparent qualification for getting prime space in a national newsaper is, ahem, that he
appeared on a TV "reality" show called The Monastery.
Buxton previously wrote for the Guardian that a life without religion would
give us no reason to get up in the morning and instead we should just
give up and jump off the edge of a cliff. Hmm, interesting insight into his state of mind!
Update:
Unsurprisingly Buxton has been well and truly trashed in the comments section on the Guardian web site. It was also good to see the philosopher Stephen Law join in the "debate":
"Buxton is here more or less quoting from Rowan William' Dimbleby Lecture in which Williams claims that only a religious tradition makes "possible a real questioning of the immediate agenda of a society, the choices that are defined and managed for you by the market." Buxton would have us believe only the religious ever really question our shallow commercial culture. They alone are the "free thinkers".
As an atheist philosopher who has spent half a lifetime asking such questions as whether there’s a God, whether life has meaning, what makes things right and wrong, whether there may be life after death, and whether there is anything beyond the material, I find it surprising that Buxton and the Archbishop would pretend that it’s only from the perspective of a religious tradition that such questions ever get asked.
The great religious traditions do not have a monopoly on addressing the most fundamental and challenging issues. They share that honour with the secular, philosophical tradition (which is of course, also older than theirs).
And one advantage of a more philosophical approach to such questions (which certainly doesn’t rule out religious answers, of course) is that it doesn’t prejudge the issue. Rather than approaching such questions in a genuinely critical, open-minded way, religious enquirers have often already made up their minds: they’ve already decided that only a religious answer will do. In the hands of the faithful, questions like “What is the meaning of life?” may be asked, not in the spirit of sincere, open-minded enquiry, but merely as the opening gambit in an attempt to recruit more true believers.
Let's have more philosophy, not more religion."
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