Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

The UK arm of the Alpha organisation has a poll on its website’s home page – does god exist? And when I visited the site, the response was pretty overwhelming: 96% of the 87,602 voters had said … NO.

And that’s surprising, because Alpha is a Christian organisation dedicated to getting people to believe in god. It’s an evangelical outfit with a soft voice, which uses low-key indoctrination techniques to suck in the vulnerable and credulous. It’s love-bombing for the iPod generation.

I’ve no doubt that, soon, the poll will be taken down or, um, ‘adjusted’ somehow. But just so you can enjoy what I experienced, here’s a screengrab (I’ve enlarged the relevant bit to ensure it’s readable):

Meanwhile, the ‘Belief’ section of The Guardian newspaper ran a poll (due to close on 22/10/2009) which asked the question, ‘Can you be good without God?’. With one day to go, the results were that 93% said ‘Yes, of course. You don’t need religion to be morally driven’. So much for ‘no morality without religion’.

Update 23/10/2009: The number of votes is up to 154,500 and the percentage of No votes has increased to 98%! Looks like the Alpha people have their work cut out…

The BBC series ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths’ has come to an end, and it seems like it was not a moment too soon.

Not that it was a bad series. Far from it. As a whirlwind tour of all varieties of mankind’s credulity, it was highly entertaining. The problem was that it was (perhaps necessarily, given the number of faiths) disappointingly superficial.

The presenter, Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones, seemed to do his best to engage with each faith, though it was easy to see how he was predisposed to like some more than others. However, it was hard to shake the impression that this was little more than religious tourism of the most shallow kind.

Even when Owen Jones seemed to attempt to pursue a more profound question, it was usually done and dusted within a couple of minutes of airtime. Take, for example, his acknowledgement in the last programme of Martin Luther’s vile anti-semitism – a model that the Nazis referenced and on which they built. Owen Jones made a show of being guilt-ridden by this dark and shameful part of his own faith, because he was, that evening, to share a meal with Jews. When he brought up the subject over dinner, his Jewish host gave a generous response – that acknowledging the problem was the first step to solving it. This was, perhaps, more indicative of traditional Jewish hospitality than a highly developed philosophy. Owen Jones’ response was to treat the camera to one of his trademark gormless smiles and a statement to the effect that ‘that’s alright then’.

This was typical both of the programme’s superficiality and Owen Jones’ tendency to be easy on both himself and spirituality in general. He never really asked tough questions or delved with any seriousness into the causes or motivations of the faiths he briefly visited.

As the series progressed, he seemed in more and more of a rush. Perhaps his year-long odyssey was exhausting him, but by the last episode he seemed to be doing little more than name-checking faiths, with little attempt to explain their significance. His coverage of the Sami people in Finland, for example, amounted to little more than sitting in a tent with a shaman, grunting a little and banging a drum. He seemed unaware that joiks, the Sami’s unique musical form, is far more complex and rich than the simple chanting in which he momentarily indulged himself. Ray Mears covered this fascinating culture in far greater depth and with much more empathy, and did so as just part of a single programme.

The last programme was also marred by a naked display of prejudice. Predictably, the target of this bias was atheism.

In a series about faith, presented by a priest, I wasn’t expecting to see much coverage of atheism – let alone to see it presented as one of the 80 ‘faiths’. The only mention I’d seen so far (I missed one episode) was a rather sneering reference in the first programme which made the mistake of assuming that atheism is inherently reductionist and hostile to a sense of wonder. It is, of course, quite the reverse: but shedding the blinkers and restriction of religious dogma, it gies one the freedom to enjoy the full splendour, complexity and mystery of the universe.

Atheism, of course, is not a faith in that in does not require the suspension of rationality to believe in something for which there is no evidence. So counting it as one of the 80 faiths was, at best, a misrepresentation – one is tempted to use the word ‘lie’, and I’m not sure that I shouldn’t. Worse, Owen Jones decided to represent atheism by conflating it with communism, or more specifically, Stalinism.

This is a cheap trick, not uncommon among believers. Yes, Stalin both espoused and enforced atheism. But that does not make his actions or beliefs atheist. They were Stalinist. Stalinism was a totalitarian regime that, to aid its own survival, had to stand in conflict with other totalitarian regimes – notably, religion. Stalin’s repression of religion was ideological – and that ideology was communism, not atheism.

To use the excesses or characteristics of Stalinism to describe atheism – to equate the two – is not just logically and intellectually absurd, it is deeply dishonest. One might just as easily characterise and represent Christianity by the burning of witches.

Atheism is a philosphical (not religious) viewpoint – it is not a ideology. (And it should be noted that the richness of humanism, its history and philosophy, received only the curtest of passing mentions.) The tawdry trick employed by Owen Jones was the most obvious example of his prejudices coming to the fore. Of course, he wasn’t always called to the cloth: he is, in that respect, a convert. And it is typical of converts to turn their hate on what they may perceive as their own former inadequacies and on what they fear most.

Owen Jones also raved about the resurgence of spirituality in Russia (though not necessarily the old established faiths) without ever really questioning why this should be so. As presented, the implication was simply that, once the enforcement of atheism was lifted, people naturally return to religion. His interview with the token atheist went a very small way to suggesting an alternative – but not far enough.

Religion feeds on fear and uncertainty, and there has been plenty of both in post-communist Russia. People crave the stability of ceremony and community, and churches are happy to provide both. Hence people turn to the church – whatever church – not because the religion is offering something that is right or profound, but simply for the protection and comfort it provides. In this environment, an invisible pink unicorn or Flying Spaghetti Monster will function as well as Christ or Mohammed.

It would have been interesting if Owen Jones had thought to question the political and sociological forces at work. But his brief was very narrow and, being a believer, he is deeply biased towards believing that the embrace of supernatural ideas and submission to religious dogma are natural and right and trump everything else. This unwillingness to look further is a characteristic of the fundamental problem religion has with truth.

This series would have been so much more interesting, so much more valuable and profound, if Owen Jones had made his voyage alongside a humanist, or scientist, or psychologist. Then we could perhaps have had some answers to the key question, ‘why?’. But I don’t think Owen Jones would have had either the courage or honesty to do this.

I’m watching the BBC series ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths‘ with great fascination and enjoyment. Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones is an engaging, entertaining and (up to a point) honest guide to the world’s rich variety of spiritual wackiness.

Peter Owen Jones

Owen Jones ‘heard the call’ 15 years ago, having previously spent his time running discos and advertising campaigns. According to the BBC’s website, this rustic padre feels that the Church of England “is too much a faith of the head and not enough a faith of the soul”. This televised journey, then, is a search for the pure spirit of the divine and how it manifests itself in so many ways.

As our guide, Owen Jones is remarkably willing to immerse himself in beliefs and practices very alien to the genteel rituals of an Anglican service. Sometimes he is moved, sometimes bemused and (so far – I’m three episodes in at this point) only once really disgusted. A voodoo ceremony at which animals – including a kitten and a puppy – were bloodily sacrificed left him very disturbed. His revulsion, it seems, was not on theological grounds but simple humanitarian ones and was easily shared by atheists like me. Believe all the hocus pocus you like, but leave the kitten out of it.

Naturally he has his limits. As a believer, Owen Jones is rather too willing to see people – and feel himself – moved by the holy spirit where a more neutral observer might witness hysteria, hyperventilation or simple credulity.

On the whole, though, Owen Jones is accommodating and open. Indeed, the only note of disdain so far was reserved for atheists. He said something to the effect that we infidels would regard all these manifestations of the divine as a “form of disease”. I’m not sure if Owen Jones is aware of the variety of attitudes towards religion among atheists, or whether his generosity of spirit simply stops short of those who don’t share his belief in the divine. Either way, it’s worth noting that not all of us consider religious belief per se to be a disease or shared dementia. In fact, I believe that a predisposition to spiritual experience is a natural result of evolution – a subject to which I will return in a future blog.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, keen to know if Owen Jones will address the one big question that so far he has avoided. There seems to be a implication, from what he has said, that the prevalence of religion across the world means that there is a common phenomenon behind it – no less than the divine itself. This is an argument that crops up often: if so many people believe in a divine spirit, it must be there.

This, of course, is poor logic. There is an obvious counter argument which hinges on the fact that the very nature of religious belief is exclusiveness. Religions are not mutually compatible. You cannot accept more than one. You must, by that token, believe that all the others are wrong. And yet there are thousands of separate religions and, within each faith, many variations of the type. The divisions between them are so hotly debated that the supremacy of one over another is often expressed violently, at the cost of many lives and much suffering.

And it’s self-evidently true that they can’t all be right. At most, there could be only one true faith. Therefore, even if you are a believer, you must believe that the vast majority of faiths are … well … nonsense. No matter how fervent your faith in your god and your prophets and your mythical tales, you have to contend with the simple fact that the majority of people in the world – even the religious ones – think that what you believe is rubbish.

How would we recognise the true faith? For me, a key test would be reliability. If a faith is real, it should work – not now and again, not in strange and oblique ways, but reliably and repeatedly. And yet we know that no faith matches this criterion. Prayers and imprecations are, at best, a hit and miss affair. Even the most extreme piety, the most self-abasing unctuousness, only rarely seems to deliver results. And if a faith really was the genuine article, then surely it would seem self-evident. Everyone would flock to it. All others would fall away.

The faithful, of course, get around these problems with a blinding array of excuses and prevarications. Chief among these is the idea that we are being tested. Yes, even supposedly loving gods, who are keen to bring us to their ethereal bosoms, enjoy tormenting us – to an extent, in fact, which means that most of us will fail.

Now try applying common sense to this situation. If even the faithful insist that the vast majority of religions are wrong – indeed, all but one of them – then it stands to reason that there is a very good chance that all of them are. As we’ve already seen, if you pick any one faith you’ll find most of the people in the world are against it. You can do this for every religion.

So, if all the religions are demonstrably wrong, and they all have the divine as their common thread, the inescapable conclusion is that the very concept of the divine is itself wrong. It might be a delusion. It might be the ‘misfiring’ (as Dawkins would put it) of part of our psyche (which is kind of where I’m heading with the evolution thing). It might simply be that we poor mammals are simply not up to the task of comprehending the entire universe and must weave stories to accommodate what we can’t fully grasp.

Whatever the explanation for our tendency towards superstition, if we are honest we must at least acknowledge the possibility that at the heart of the world’s religions lies … nothing. That the divine is merely a common and rather simple device employed by the other thing we all share – our brains. So far, this is what Owen Jones has failed to do. Oh well, just sit back and enjoy the wackiness.

Alleged actor Tom Cruise, while busily promoting his latest movie, is claiming that he has been forced into hiding following death threats from opponents of Scientology. According to ‘sources’, Cruise has called in the FBI to provide him and his family with protection.

The Mail on Sunday reported that Cruise and his wife, Katie Holmes (also a Scientology cult member) now live separately and go everywhere in bomb-proof vehicles.

Quite what the FBI can do for them is a moot point. The grotesquely overpaid Cruise can afford much better protection than the cash-strapped Bureau could provide.

Of course, Cruise is in need of some publicity for his movie, Valkyrie, which has come in for some considerable criticism. And paranoia is not unknown among fabulously wealthy actors. As Hemingway put it, “Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.” As YouTube videos and appearances on Oprah have confirmed, Cruise isn’t always in full control of his emotions.

The people who allegedly have Cruise wetting his pants are the members of Anonymous – the net-based loose association of anti-Scientologists notorious for extreme acts of … well, wearing masks. Maybe a bit of hacking. But, of course, if you want to crush opposition in these paranoid times, one effective method is to brand your opponents as terrorists. This is, undoubtedly, what the Scientologists are up to.

The Church of Scientology is not known for its honesty, ethics or morality when it comes to those who oppose it. As the Religion News Blog points out, if the stories of ex-members are to be believed, the cult itself isn’t above savage, vindictive and illegal acts.

So, it would probably be safe to treat Cruise’s claims as: a) publicity; b) paranoia; c) an attempt to silence the opposition with lies; d) pure fantasy; or e) all of the above. Unless, of course, Cruise can produce any evidence. But then, evidence doesn’t play a strong part in the lives of religious cult members.