Catholic and Enjoying It!
Some bulletins from the Country that Used to Be England.
First, of course, there is the absolute non-news that Phillip Pullman really really *really* hates the Catholic Church. Naturally, this deserves the total puff piece treatment from the Guardian.
Along with thie is the news that Rowan Williamson, as is his custom, bends over and offers lickspittle praise for Pullman’s silly book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It’s Food for thought. Contribution to dialogue. Blahdiblah.
Meanwhile, the only person to actually talk sense about the idiocy of the New Atheism and the loonies who are conducting this war on the Church is an atheist, evidently because he doesn’t care about being relevant. Brendan O’Neill at Spiked writes:
It’s worth asking why otherwise fairly intelligent thinkers get so dementedly exercised over the pope and the Catholic Church. What exactly is their beef? What are they objecting to? Very few (if any) of the pope-hunters were raised Catholic, so this isn’t about personal vengeance for some perceived slight by a priest or nun. And despite their current lowdown, historically illiterate attempt to equate a priest fondling a child with a state’s attempt to obliterate an entire people – under the collective tag ‘crime against humanity’ – the truth is that some of these pope-hunters don’t really think child abuse is the worst crime in the world. In 2006, Dawkins criticised ‘hysteria about paedophilia’ and said that, even though he was the victim of sexual abuse at boarding school, he would defend his abusive former teachers if ‘50 years on they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers’. Yet now he wants to put abusive priests on a par with genocidaires.
The reason this crusade is so hysterical is because it is not really about the pope at all – it is about the New Atheists themselves. The contemporary pope-hunting springs from a secularist movement which feels incapable of asserting a sense of purpose or meaning in any positive, human-centred way – as the great atheists of old such as Marx or Darwin might have done – and which instead can only assert itself negatively, in contrast to the ‘evil’ of religion, by posturing against the alleged wickedness of institutionalised faith. It is the inner emptiness, directionless and soullessness of contemporary secularism – in contrast to earlier, Enlightened and more positive secular movements – which has given birth to the bizarre clamour for the pope’s head.
Secularism is in crisis. In Enlightened times, progressive secular movements, those which eschewed the guidance of God in favour of relying on mankind to work out what his problems were and how to solve them, were all about having a positive view of humanity. Their vision was both terrifying and extremely liberating: that man alone could master the complexities of life on Earth and improve it for himself and future generations. Today, however, we live in misanthropic, deeply downbeat times, where mankind is looked upon as a greedy, destructive, unreliable force whose behaviour and thoughts must be governed from without.
This is what drives their war against religion: an instinct for ridiculing those who still, unlike contemporary secularists themselves, have an overarching outlook on life and a strong belief system. That is really what they find so alien about the Catholic Church in particular – its beliefs, its faith, its hierarchy. An atheism utterly alienated from the mass of humanity and from any future-oriented vision can only lash out in an extreme and intolerant way against those who still seem to have strong beliefs: the religious, or the ‘deluded ones’, as the New Atheists see it.
The Old Atheists of the 18th and 19th Centuries still had the future. The New Atheists have got nuthin’. Their own ideology, everybody realizes, points to Nothing and leads to mass murder–especially the ideology of the New Atheists which is all about calling for the utter destruction of faith in general and the Catholic Church in particular. They have no positive message, nothing to say beyond Pullman’s and Ditchkins’ “Ecrasez l’infame!” The Old Atheists could talk about the Great Rosy Dawn, the Triumph of the Proletariat, the March of Science and Progress because the Great Atheistic Slaughters of the 20th Century hadn’t happened yet. Now everybody knows that their Immanentized Eschaton is a great big steaming pile of crap–including them. So they are now reduced to bus campaigns, and dumb attempts to arrest the Pope. They are random and illiterate hecklers who kick the Church while she’s down, but have no positive program to offer.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. Give these people power and millions will die again. But they won’t really get the power they grave. Post-Christian Britain has opted for watery secularism with a few cranks like Doctor Bonkers on the sideline to kick the corpse of Christianity and applaud themselves for their raw courage. Meanwhile, here is a finger-lickin’ taste of the real future these guys are laboring to create.
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