Politics, Religion

[spudtater]

There's a fantastic discussion with Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens (recording, mp3 format) on the Guardian blog. It's supposed to be about the proposed Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill, but as Stephen is stauntly atheist and Christopher describes himself as anti-theist, it descends at several points into a general bitchfest about religion. The religious among you may wish to give it a miss. (Though it's not nearly as vitriolic as the Dawkins stuff I linked to a while back).

My favourite part (this is Stephen Fry talking):

"Compare the Genesis myth, which had bedevilled our culture, the Western European culture, for a very long time indeed — 2000 years — it was essentially a myth in which we should be ashamed of ourselves. God says: "who told you you were naked" — what possible reason have we to believe that we are naked — or that if we are naked there is something to be ashamed of; that what we are and what we do is something for which we should ever apologise. Our dreams, our impulses, our appetites, our drives, our desires are not things to apologise for. Our actions sometimes we do apologise for and we excoriate ourselves for that rightly.

But that's the Genesis myth. The Greek myth is of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and gave it to his favourite mortal, man. In other words, the Greeks were saying we have divine fire — whatever is divine is in us. As humans, we are as good as the Gods. The Gods are capricious and mean and foolish and stupid and jealous and rapine and all the things that Greek mythology shows that they are. And that's a much better explanation it seems to me.

And for that, the Gods punished Prometheus and chained him to the Caucases and vultures chewed away his liver every day, as it regrew because he was immortal.

And Shelley quite rightly understood — and interestingly his wife of course wrote Frankenstein as the modern Prometheus — understood that that mythological idea, the champion of real humanity and real humanism as we've come to call it, is that we are captains of our soul and masters of our destiny, and that we contain any divine fire that there is; divine fire that is fine and great.

[...]

We understood that the fire was within us — it was not in some idol on an altar, whether is was a gold cross or whether it was a buddha or anything else — that we have it. The fault is in ourselves but also the glory is in us, not in our stars. We take credit for what is great about man, and we take the blame for what is dreadful about man. We neither grovel or apologise at the feet of a god or are so infantile as to project the idea that we once had a father as human beings and we therefore should have a divine one too."

But I take issue with one statement made in this conversation, and that is that all religious are inherently creationist; that they imply an argument from design. Even ignoring religions such as Buddhism, where the creation of the world is not discussed, and Taoism, which describes the how but not the why of creation, I think there is a large and oft-overlooked thread of spiritualism throughout most religions that considers irrelevent, silly or even insulting the idea that God has anything at all to do with the physical world.

In particular my thoughts turned to this article in the Scotsman a while ago: Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer. The theologist and astronomer of the title basically shuns the entire idea of a God that meddles in the physical plane, either now or at the beginning of the universe.

I guess what I'm saying is that outspoken atheists, and especially the more famous of them, tend to be exposed only to the evangelising and fundamental of theists. It's easy to forget that this vocal minority is outnumbered by their more reasonable and less literal-minded fellow worshippers. And it's easy to pigeonhole religious people as rabid and irrational, a stereotype that alienates more people than it helps.

There may be more on this tomorrow. For now, goodnight.