Can you have the bells without the believers?

Richard Dawkins and I have something in common (almost). He considers himself a cultural Anglican and I consider myself a cultural Catholic. For both of us, a world in which there were no churches would be a world in which there were something important missing. At the very least, there would be an aesthetic loss, but there would also be a loss of a sense—he seems to be saying, and I would agree—of what the Western identity has been. 

I imagine I am a little more invested in my cultural Catholicism than Dawkins is in his Anglicanism. More than considering going into a church, I regularly go to the chapel near my office after classes and I engage in other practices rooted in my tradition. But that's not the point I want to make.

Rather, it is that being a cultural Catholic or Anglican or member of another tradition requires that there be committed members of the same tradition. Of course, Dawkins is in a slightly different situation, since his aesthetic comfort is state-supported. But, even in that case, and even if he is right that many Anglicans don't actually believe anymore, when there are no more believers, the churches will be just museums and the sepulchers—as Nietzsche's madman had it—of the dead God. That is not quite the same thing as a functioning church to which you have a cultural affinity, any more than an altarpiece in a museum is the same thing as an altarpiece in a church. Having been divorced from its purpose, it loses some of its meaning. There's no contradiction in being a non-believing, though culturally-entwined, member of a tradition. There might be something elitist about it, maybe it causes a tension, maybe it might even be bittersweet.

But my point is that being a cultural Anglican or Catholic does place a kind of restriction on one. Since what you love relies on committed others, they deserve respect. You can't run around with and cross-promote the work of people who claim that religion poisons everything, a la Hitchens; or, that those who pray are no more stable than those who believe God can be contacted by talking into a hair dryer, a la Harris; or, that all religion is a delusion, a la Dennett (and Freud); and, you can't claim that people ought to lose their jobs because they take their religion seriously, as Dawkins himself has—though that was with a person who believes a religion for which Dawkins has no affinity. 

That is, contrary to the program of many New Atheists, if you value what religion has given your society and even want to see it stick around, you can't deride the people who actually believe it—and create what you like.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10303223/Richard-Dawkins-admits-he-is-a-cultural-Anglican.html)

Secularists have to do better

There's a pernicious style of argumentation among many secularists. You see it in the works of the New Atheists, you see it in this piece by David Brooks justifying the coup in Egypt—and, if you do the right substitutions justifying every possible coup; Pinochet or the return of the Shah, anyone?—and, in a recent series of tweets from Joyce Carol Oates. These are only examples. I hear it from students. I hear it from people who take themselves to be educated and enlightened. It is very much in vogue among a certain set.

The argument—I guess it is really a claim substituting for an argument—is that religious believers are mentally defective, delusional, incapable of rational thought; or, that they are immoral, necessarily misogynistic, barbaric. And, because of this, one cannot trust them to teach or govern or take any other important roles. 

Sometimes this strategy is aimed at all religious believers indiscriminately. Sometimes only at those one particularly disdains. Usually, these days that means Muslims.

I have an interest in the survival of secular government. And, Islamists scare the hell out of me; I know what happens to me in their ideal state. Pace some particularly strident thinkers—Sam Harris and Niall Ferguson come to mind—I think that there is a difference between Islam and Islamism. But as an accused member of the Homosexual International, and as a philosopher, I have no doubt that Islamism and its parallels in Christianity and Hinduism and even in Buddhism some places must be opposed and defeated, not least because I get killed in many of those views.

But you can't do this practically or while maintaining intellectual honesty, by claiming that all serious religious believers are defective in someway. Secularism needs defending, but it needs defending on its merits, not through ad hominem or through a baseless assertion that secularists and atheists really just are better. 

Some thoughts about Dawkins' latest insertion of his mouth into his foot

Richard Dawkins has gotten caught suggesting that religious believers have such absurd beliefs that they oughtn't have respectable jobs. Of course, he has replied that it was all a misunderstanding, here.

Some thoughts;

1. He clearly did say that the journalist should not have a job because of his theological beliefs. That is the worst sort of witch-hunt thinking. As in, gays can't be hired because they will recruit or atheists can't because they will undermine morality. But when Dawkins does it, it's in the service of truth.
2. When he was called out for this, he claims that he must have been misunderstood. That is the classic non-apology.
3. He claims to be fascinated by the fact that people can hold irrational beliefs in one area and not in others. Perhaps, then, he should read some of the vast psychological and cognitive science literature on this very topic, or think about the way logicians adopt non-standard logics because of this phenomenon. Except that might be too much like the science he claims to like but can't be bothered to do.
4. He consistently confuses truth and rationality. Whether beliefs are rational or not is a different question to whether they are true. A belief set can be mostly false, but rational. Similarly, a belief set could be mostly true and irrational. He could learn about that, but it might be too difficult.
5. If he really wants to call into question the contributions of religious believers, he might want to give up on the Big Bang, too, since it is the result of the work of a Belgian priest.
6. He seems to believe that his belief set is both fully true and fully rational. Such self-congratulation is the very mark of the dogmatist, not the intellectual and certainly not the scientist.
7. His foundation is called the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He has put what he cares most about front and center.