ATHEO-FUNDAMENTALIST COCKS

That man Victor at Apostate Windbag may only have written two posts on his blog in the last two years, but my my his latest is worth the wait. Witty, insulting and utterly on the money, the subject of this terrific post is Richard Dawkins.




BAD SANTA

What makes Dawkins so dislikeable is not his atheism. Far from it, I don't disagree one bit with his assertion that God does not exist. What is objectionable is that he makes no attempt to work out why some people do. This is objectionable for two reasons : firstly, because it is philosophically shallow, and secondly, because it delights in looking down on religious believers as irrational and outdated.

Victor quotes another famous atheist, who approached the subject of God from a rather more thoughtful, materialist stance :

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

Karl Marx does not treat religion as being discrete from the rest of human experience. As an "expression of real distress and [a] protest against real distress," it appeals to those who receive no support or protection from "the real world" and people who sympathise with their plight. And as such, it is far from irrational.

It has been suggested to me before that Dawkins is important in a USA whose opinion is stifled by fundamentalist religion. I did think this was a fair point, but on reflection I don't think it is. If he concentrated his media efforts on addressing exploitation, empire, material inequalities, unfairness - if, to word it in a faux-naif way, he suggested that we might make the world a better place - he might better rid the world of religion, for he would have rid the world of its need for religion.