HEART OF DARKNESS

As promised, herewith some thoughts on Childhood, Abuse and Religion from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion:

The chapter comes after three hundred pages in which Dawkins believes he destroys summarily and wittily any argument for faith or any benefit from it, and so by this time the reader is invited to assume that all religious parents are unbalanced to begin with and that any religious teaching or authority is oppressive. There is matter and biology, and that is pretty much it. From these self-evident truths, Dawkins argues that the teaching of religious observance of any nature to children is abusive ipso facto. He never actually proposes that religious parents should have their children removed from them–he is much too English for that–but that conclusion is unavoidable. Instead, he uses sneering contempt, of which he is a master, to instil general visceral anger at religious parents and an inchoate sense that their children merit our protection as much as they would if they were being starved, and obviously much more than the children of non-religious parents. Presumably to avoid being forced to do something nasty to the local Ladies’ Church Auxiliary, he is prepared to grandfather general public acceptance of religious belief, but only for a generation or two.

The arguments Dawkins uses are familiar to anyone used to popular secular attacks on religion and they hinge on certain unstated assumptions that really make any reply at this level impossible. The first is that people believe because they have been either persuaded by some intellectual logical fallacy or had the faith beaten into them as children and were too stupid or uneducated to escape. Not only is he oblivious to the fact he represents but a tiny sliver of humanity past and present, he shows no understanding of other bases of religion and no evidence of having read, let alone pondered, accounts of conversions from non-belief. According to his logic, the young should be much more religious than the elderly. The second is that all religions (and by extension all cults) are equally erroneous because there is no material way to validate or disprove or dictinguish any of them through objective evidence. The third is that a material explanation for a phenomenon, even a hypothetical one, overrules rather than complements a religious one. And the fourth is that eternal truth just happens to correspond to the tenets of today’s scientific establishment, which cannot be doubted, except by scientists

Dawkins seems to be under the impression that he needs to tell everybody that religion can be a powerful and destructive force. One after another, he hands down horror tales everybody who watches cable television already knows all about--sexual abuse by the Church (about which he is rather sanguine), female circumcision, Ted Haggard’s Hell Houses, victims of oppressive convents, etc. but protests to him about cherry-picking or exaggerations would be useless. As he defined faith as a seamless web that offends Truth equally many chapters ago, the time has long passed for introducing objections based upon historical accuracy, causal connections or really any notions of critical judgment.

Dawkins opens with an account of the notorious case of Edgardo Mortara, about which he is so tormented that he neglects to mention its inconvenient conclusion. But he adds a new rationalist twist to the tale. Not only is he, like most Catholics, appalled by the Church’s kidnaping by a few sprinkles of water, he is equally impatient with the Jewish community for risking their children by employing Catholic servants so they can observe the Sabbath and with Edgardo’s parents for not converting (again, just sprinkles) to get him back. Give him credit, his bile is never sectarian. At this point, one starts to becomes thankful for finally realizing there is no point in arguing with the man, who is clearly lost in a rationalist enchanted kingdom.

It is more than a little amusing to watch Dawkins try and square his missionary zeal with politically correct tolerance of diversity, which he does by trying to apply weird subtlety to a history he obviously has no sense of whatsoever. The result can be hilarious and shows him at his most foolish. Here he is on why 21st century modern liberals have every right to be impatiently with the sacrifice of Inca virgins:

Humphrey’s point–and mine–is that, regardless of whether she was a willing victim or not, there is strong reason to suppose that she would not have been willing if she had been in full possession of the facts. For example, suppose she had known that the sun is really a ball of hydrogen, hotter than a million degrees Kelvin, converting itself into helium by nuclear fusion, and that it originally formed from a disc of gas out of which the rest of the solar system, including Earth, also condensed. Presumably then, she would not have worshipped it as a god, and this would have altered her perspective on being sacrificed to propitiate it.

The Inca priests cannot be blamed for their ignorance, and it could be thought harsh to judge them stupid and puffed up. But they can be blamed for foisting their beliefs on a child too young to decide whether to worship the sun or not.

And foisting beliefs on young children is something Dawkins would never, ever do.

It is when he discusses the Amish that one begins to understand Dawkins’s agenda transcends religion and that he really has bigger fish to fry. Clearly disapproving of the 1972 case that allowed the Amish to teach their own children (and completely ignoring the explosion in home-schooling since then), Dawkins weighs in with uncommon bitterness against America’s most respected traditional sect and reveals his problem isn’t at all with what they believe; it’s that they think and live differently than he:

“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of “diversity” and the preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture. A small part of me can see something in this. But the larger part is made to feel very queasy indeed.

After several hundred pages of these sickening, feigned last-second efforts to temper his totalitarianism with some sort of English version of intellectual fair-play, one almost yearns for a good, honest continental rationalist to propose we send them all to re-education camps.

By this time it is clear that Dawkins is really too far removed from any religious sensibility to reasonably hold the visceral revulsion towards it that he claims, or even to understand it. He is more like a rabid and possessed temperance activist living in an alcohol-free building. (In fact, he betrays his remote naivite by concluding the chapter with a quixotic call for all children to be compelled to master the King James Bible on literary grounds.) Not a fresh voice at all, he is just the latest and loudest embodiment of self-righteousness on the march, and an heir to all those cardinals, Jacobins, commissars and Gauleiters who convinced themselves they were repositories of an absolute truth they were born to "share" with everybody in the world. Like they, Dawkins will restrict himself to persuasion only on the easily persuaded--tougher cases demands tougher measures. He is really an advocate for a compulsory materialist universalism more than a critic of anything, and it matters little to him what the details of what anyone believes are, or whether those beliefs stem from religion, culture, tradition or whatever. If they don’t share his, that’s enough for him.