Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

According to The Age newspaper online ”Monash University Professor Gary Bouma says people without a specific faith are fuelling sectarian conflict and cause division in society.” He essentially blames atheists, treated as one homogeneous group, for saying that theists are stupid and also saying that religious discourse should be driven out of the public space. As always with these silly generalisations, some do and many do not, especially when 1.1 billion people world-wide are estimated to espouse some form of religious non-belief .

Even with espousing anti-religious comments, atheists can hardly be held responsible for different religious groups fighting amongst themselves. History shows otherwise. Over the last 1500 years, during the dominance of Abrahamic religions, faiths have claimed exclusive access to God and salvation and condemned others as heretical and deserving eradication. A compounding feature of Christianity and Islam has been their insatiable desire for new converts. The resulting religious fervour fueled conflict and violence as European history will attest. During most of this time atheist views, as total non-belief, were rarely openly expressed: very few people held them and the personal repercussions were too serious for open dissent – death, imprisonment, social isolation, and job loss.

How about church behaviour today? Many Western churches are more tolerant, reflecting broader social trends rather than changes to sacred texts, essentially unchanged over 1500 years. But despite these improvements, church intolerance still persists, unacceptable to our wider social values. Apostasy, the crime of leaving the faith, can still be punished by death, imprisonment, and forced social and family separation in different parts of the world. “But that’s not in Australia.”  Many Australian religious officials openly discriminate against fellow human beings on the basis of their sexuality. Christian theology sees unacceptable sexual practices as ‘sinful’. They will reject homosexuals participating in religious services as well as leading services; women are excluded from positions of religious authority; and unmarried woman with children are barred from church administration. Our broader society in Australia is thankfully more progressive and humane than those churches. All this seems highly hypocritical when the Christian faith professes Jesus as the founder, a Jesus ascribed with progressive messages of acceptance.

So what is Bouma’s problem with atheist criticism of religions, particularly of Christian churches? There is another possibility. Churches have limited social and political privileges to protect them with external criticism, exceptional for the churches’ history. The Catholic church learnt an early valuable lesson with its appointment as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine after being treated as a marginised and despised religious sect. Church leaders realised they needed the support of the political regimes, no matter how oppressive, to ensure their on-going survival. Never again would the orthodox Christian religion – Catholic or Protestant – be an outsider of power. The plight of the poor, though important, comes second to the church’s survival to provide salvation and redemption for all. Our secular society creates an intractable barrier for religions seeking to impose their faith on others, no state sponsorship. Church apologists, like Bouma, will have to live with criticism – even strident criticism – of the veracity of their underlying beliefs as well as their practices. Unfortunately for atheists, though, special privileges still exist: tax-free statuses and exempted discriminary employment practices some to mind. We can only keep agitating no how much it irritates the faithful.

Alex McCullie

A Personal Rant

In a recent BBC Hardtalk interview with Stephen Sackur, Robert Winston, renowned British scientist and occasional Christian apologist, typecasts atheists as believing in the absolute and, therefore, unreasonable certainty of science. By implication many non-atheists take a more reasonable, nuanced view that scientific knowledge is probabilistic with some claims being more assured than others. Interestingly, Christians like Winston are quick to complain that critics generalise Christians as having a Middle Ages theology rather than acknowledge the ’new age’ Christian variants of today. Karen Armstrong has turned this claim into an industry.

Atheists typically reject beliefs in an ‘other’ (à la William James) reality extra to our physical world, especially one with ultimate influence or control. Also most atheists see science as our best shot at achieving reliable knowledge about our world rather than using the religious repertoire of personal revelations – imaginings, feelings, and guesses - and deference to traditional religious authorities. Scientists may admire Darwin or Newton but do not seriously use their data or conclusions as the basis for current research. This is typically not so in religious circles.

However being atheist does not mean being blind to the limitations of scientific endeavours: they are conducted by humans within social contexts and, therefore, subject to the same limitations as other human endeavours. However good science embraces attitudes of exploration; reproducible evidence and reasoning independent of personal faith; and welcomed public criticism and comment. Most importantly, unlike religious history, heretical namecalling should have no place in genuine search for knowledge. This does not mean accepting every new idea with substantial independent support from evidence and reasoning – not so open to new ideas that the brain drops out!

As a contrary example, most world-wide Christians, even today, accept the historicity of the physical resurrection of Jesus – reanimation of a dead body – and even apply that hope to the physical resurrection of all believers when God’s kingdom arrives in the future. All this is described in some clarity in the Christian bible. Remove the Christian faith – personal feelings and authority appeals - and its basis looks very shaky. In fact to non-Christians – religious believers or not – these claims, so fundamental to much Christian theology, look very fanciful and somewhat naive. Many Christians in western nations quietly walk away from these biblical claims though unwilling to publicly criticise these beliefs for fear of hurting fellow brethren.

So how do the claims of modern science look compared to religious claims of bodily resurrections?

Alex McCullie