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The militant atheism I am aiming at is that which attacks, in practice, normal mainstream Christianity as it is practiced today in the West.
The attackers can find no end of horrible examples of religiously-inspired or religiously-justified butcheries in the past, and on the part of various religions -- most spectacularly radical Islam -- in other countries today.
But they aren't doing history lessons, and they don't book toursto sell their books in Karachi and Baghdad. Their target is that little church down the street.
Now so far as I am concerned, those people worshipping there have chosen a very different method from me to acknowledge the existence of something besides matter-in-motion. I am sure not one in a thousand have even heard the word "ontology" and could care less, but they are expressing their belief in a transcendent order, and investing it with that sacred nature that humans seem to yearn for.
They have given their response to the enormous mystery of life by focussing on various events and writing about those supposed events that their ancestors saw as proof of Something More to mankind's existence than just eating and copulating and dying. I cannot join them in this, but I sure as hell am not going to try to get them out of their churches.
"Hey ... listen everyone ... if you rob my house and rape and kill my wife and you don't get caught by the police ... you know what'll happen to you? Nothing!! You'll skate! There is no meaning to life, nothing sacred, and no reason to restrain your appetites beyond whatever accidental and irrational commands your brain-stem sends you -- the remnants of a "conscience" -- and a rational calculation of probable consequences! So have at it!"
No thanks.
As for the social disintegration of the working classes in the United Kingdom. I am too much of a conservative to have a nice neat little explanation. Let me just say that making the government your alternative daddy-and-mommy -- or rather, your Mommy -- has not led to better behavior on the part of the people who take up this alternative. We have in fact the opposite of what the comprehensive welfare state plus severe restraints on the state's coercive functions, was supposed, according to socialist theory, to bring us. I won't, however, theorize a simple X-caused-Y relationship.
However, here is an anecdote. For about ten years, I taught in the Mathematics Department of a University of London College that was located in a poor area, where there were a lot of African and Afro-Carribbean immigrants. Naturally, there was high crime and welfare dependency. We had very few Black students apply to do a Mathematics BSc -- but we did have a few. There were five, and I knew them all well. It struck me as signficant that four of them were regular attenders at one or another little Protestant sect -- Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, that sort of thing.
Now I doubt that the doctines of these churches are "true" -- they cannot all be true since they contradict each other. But what these churches did was to give these young people a solid anchor in the moral chaos of the ghetto. They were given very powerful -- supernatural -- reasons to respect their bodies, to work hard, to conform to old-fashioned social norms about sex and drugs and immediate self-gratification.
Now Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens would have had me try to convince these young people that they were wasting their time, worshipping an illusion, believing in impossible things.
What madness -- the most important impossible thing that their religion gave them was the idea that you could be a Black kid in London and stay out of the gangs and off drugs and go to University and get a BSc in Mathematics. And it worked.
That's miracle enough for me.
On British patriotism. Believe me, it's dead. What you saw in 1982 (and I was living here at the time) was the twitch of a corpse.
The attackers can find no end of horrible examples of religiously-inspired or religiously-justified butcheries in the past, and on the part of various religions -- most spectacularly radical Islam -- in other countries today.
But they aren't doing history lessons, and they don't book toursto sell their books in Karachi and Baghdad. Their target is that little church down the street.
Now so far as I am concerned, those people worshipping there have chosen a very different method from me to acknowledge the existence of something besides matter-in-motion. I am sure not one in a thousand have even heard the word "ontology" and could care less, but they are expressing their belief in a transcendent order, and investing it with that sacred nature that humans seem to yearn for.
They have given their response to the enormous mystery of life by focussing on various events and writing about those supposed events that their ancestors saw as proof of Something More to mankind's existence than just eating and copulating and dying. I cannot join them in this, but I sure as hell am not going to try to get them out of their churches.
"Hey ... listen everyone ... if you rob my house and rape and kill my wife and you don't get caught by the police ... you know what'll happen to you? Nothing!! You'll skate! There is no meaning to life, nothing sacred, and no reason to restrain your appetites beyond whatever accidental and irrational commands your brain-stem sends you -- the remnants of a "conscience" -- and a rational calculation of probable consequences! So have at it!"
No thanks.
As for the social disintegration of the working classes in the United Kingdom. I am too much of a conservative to have a nice neat little explanation. Let me just say that making the government your alternative daddy-and-mommy -- or rather, your Mommy -- has not led to better behavior on the part of the people who take up this alternative. We have in fact the opposite of what the comprehensive welfare state plus severe restraints on the state's coercive functions, was supposed, according to socialist theory, to bring us. I won't, however, theorize a simple X-caused-Y relationship.
However, here is an anecdote. For about ten years, I taught in the Mathematics Department of a University of London College that was located in a poor area, where there were a lot of African and Afro-Carribbean immigrants. Naturally, there was high crime and welfare dependency. We had very few Black students apply to do a Mathematics BSc -- but we did have a few. There were five, and I knew them all well. It struck me as signficant that four of them were regular attenders at one or another little Protestant sect -- Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, that sort of thing.
Now I doubt that the doctines of these churches are "true" -- they cannot all be true since they contradict each other. But what these churches did was to give these young people a solid anchor in the moral chaos of the ghetto. They were given very powerful -- supernatural -- reasons to respect their bodies, to work hard, to conform to old-fashioned social norms about sex and drugs and immediate self-gratification.
Now Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens would have had me try to convince these young people that they were wasting their time, worshipping an illusion, believing in impossible things.
What madness -- the most important impossible thing that their religion gave them was the idea that you could be a Black kid in London and stay out of the gangs and off drugs and go to University and get a BSc in Mathematics. And it worked.
That's miracle enough for me.
On British patriotism. Believe me, it's dead. What you saw in 1982 (and I was living here at the time) was the twitch of a corpse.