I found a well written article that does a good job of tackling this issue.
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I find it odd that when I ask for your thoughts on
You tell me that a good place to find an answer is in an article which, from the looks of its title, is not on that topic. I asked about why secular humanists behave the way they do, not why evangelicals behave the way they do.
Yes, that is true, but you are missing my point; those humanistic movements, especially the Enlightenment, contained within themselves more of Christian sentiment than they were inclined to admit. Not at the level of overt doctrine, but at the level of gut instincts about how human beings were to be treated. Again, compare, say, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Biblical claim that man (Adam â all human beings, irrespective of âraceâ) is in the image of God, with the description of the origin of the classes in the Indian sacred texts. The Declaration of Independence, an Enlightenment document, holds that âall men are created equalâ â unthinkable in ancient India. Even if one holds that the writers were more Deist than Christian, Deism is clearly a cultural and historical product of Christian Europe. But many of them were Christian.
Scholars of the history of ideas have often said that modernity is secularized Christianity (and secularized Judaism), and there is much to be said for that view. Marx gives a secularized theology of history, but the whole motive for treating âhistoryâ as spiritually important comes to us from the Bible (and of course, later on, from Augustine and many others). Peter Berger, George Steiner, and many other sociologists and historians and cultural analysts, have written about this secularization theme at great length.
Again, that is just more proof that Christians have not always taken seriously enough the words of Jesus and other Biblical statements, but have substituted the worship of their own culture for genuine Christian doctrine. But on the other side of the ledger, it was a combination of zealous Quakers, Anglicans, and others who pressed for the end of slavery in Britain and its territories.
Yes, overt is the key word, with the substance of Christianity almost completely absent from hearts and minds of those regimes and individuals of which you speak. A dictator who can murder millions or terrorize millions in good conscience is no Christian, even if he reports dutifully for Catholic mass every week. You canât erase sins for which you donât sincerely repent by eating a wafer or having some words mumbled over you. And if you sincerely repent of the sins, you will stop murdering and terrorizing people. Note further that respect for human life and dignity was just as little, or even less, in regimes which were de facto (and sometimes also de jure) atheistic and materialistic. Ask the residents of the Gulag if they were better treated than the peons under a Latin American dictator. Ask the Russians kulaks if they were better off under Communism than under the Tsar. Totalitarian terror is not Christian, whether it has a Christian label slapped on it or not, and itâs equally wrong in Latin America as in Soviet Russia or Maoâs China.
You are speaking about the various cultural manifestations of Christianity, many of which are of course flawed, because Christians are human beings. I am talking about the deeper spiritual impulses of Christianity, which have informed Western culture at its best. Most of the indignant critiques of the Church and organized religion of the past few hundred years have judged the Church and religion by standards influenced by Christianity itself.
Give it a read.
Why do you feel persecuted because people express their opinions on online forums? Do you understand that someone can support religious freedoms while also disagreeing with the tenets of a religion?
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I notice you keep using US examples; yet in Britain, where the Church and Christianity have no comparable social and cultural presence (despite the formal shell of an established Church), the secular humanists (Peter Atkins, Richard Dawkins) utter the same angry anti-religious denunciations as their American counterparts do. Even when there is no plausible social threat to any Britonâs freedoms coming from religion, it seems to be a pastime of secular humanists to bash religion. I would suggest that while secular humanism in principle need not be preoccupied with anti-religion, in practice it has always contained a fair dose of that spirit. That is why, above, I made a distinction between the âismâ and the âistsâ. The attitudes of the âistsâ are what interest me.
Yeah, people express their opinions and beliefs. Whatâs wrong with that?
I would hazard a guess that you have a poor view of some other religions, but you also probably believe that they should have the freedom to worship as they please and not be discriminated against.
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I donât. Next question.
Yes. Next question.
I get the strong impression that you are conflating criticism with persecution.
I stated that secular humanism supports religious freedoms, and your immediate rejoinder was to point to secular humanists who are critical of religious beliefs and its influence in modern politics.
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Just because you found some examples of secular humanists who bash religion doesnât mean they all do that. By that reasoning I am entitled to say that Bible thumping seems to be a pastime of Christians. How would you personally take that statement?
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âChristianâ sentiment that over a millennium of Christian hegemony had somehow failed to instill? I would suggest that these sentiments have less to do with Christianity than you are inclined to admit.
Again, compare, say, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Biblical claim that man (Adam â all human beings, irrespective of âraceâ) is in the image of God...Or instead we could look at the Curse of Ham, the Old Testament's endorsement of chattel slavery of non-Israelites, of sexual slavery, of genocide, and of the death penalty for minor crimes (e.g. "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death") and its forbidding of religious pluralism.
Letâs face it, the Bible is a sort of Rorschach Inkblot Test, from which you can derive just about any âsentimentâ you can think of.
I would also note that Democracy was not a Christian invention, it was a pagan Greek one.
What do the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Deism, and the American Constitution have in common? They all disestablished Christianity. You may argue that it was in some way âChristianâ sentiments that led to that disestablishment. I donât agree with you, but even granting this point, it was the disestablishment of Christianity that garnered these benefits, not its establishment or hegemony. Thus we might, if we agree with your argument, give a brief historical âthank youâ to Christianity for this piece of apparent self-negation, before we work hard to make sure it never gets its hands on power again (power that the resurgent Christian Nationalist movement is working so hard to regain).
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It is a pastime, of some Protestant Christians. That is an accurate statement.
I didnât say they all did. I was merely asking why it is such a common motif in the writing and public presentation of some of their most prominent members. If no one here wants to give me any thoughts on that, I wonât press the question.
I would suggest that this is false.
Most of the people that I know are secular humanists. And I almost never hear them bashing religion.
For sure, Dawkins bashes religion, as do a few others. But donât take a few loud voices as representative of the whole group.
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Really? You are aware of who the head of the Church of England is? A nice old great-granny by the name of Elizabeth Windsor. Hardly a non-entity. Thereâs also the Archbishop on Canterbury, a very public, and frequently outspoken, figure. And you frequently see Anglican bishops popping up and making a very public ruckus over things. Mervyn Stockwood, the then Bishop of Southwarkâs complaints over The Life of Brian were so memorable that Not the Nine OâClock News did a sketch about it.
I would further point out that Religious Education is still a compulsory subject in the English state school system, as are daily acts of collective worship.
And Iâd be very much surprised if the âsocial and cultural presenceâ of the Anglican church wasnât far greater in the ruling Conservative Party than in the general population.
Also both Dawkins and Atkins are around 80, meaning that their formative years would have been in the 1950s, when religion had a far greater hold.
Addendum: it also wasnât that long ago that all Anglican bishops were automatically members of the House of Lords.
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In your original post you wrote â the secular humanistsâ. Now you qualify that as âsome of their most prominent membersâ. That is an improvement. If you had written this in the first place I wouldnât have seen a need to push back. Can you understand this?
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I said nothing one way or the other about whether disestablishment was good or bad. I was speaking about themes and motifs in modern Western thought that owe something to Christianity, even if they represent a modified or secularized form of it. Those themes sometimes influenced Western culture during times when religion was established, and sometimes during times when it was disestablished. The West created the first universities and the first hospitals during times of religious establishment. It created other things during times of pluralism. Medical missionaries were sent out to poor countries both from countries where religion was established (e.g., Britain) and from countries where it was disestablished (USA).
My contention for the thematic influence of Christianity on Western culture, including the culture of secular humanism, is hardly original or off-beat; itâs quite a common claim in scholarly literature, and has been for decades.
Yes, such things are found in the Bible, but rough equivalents to them are found in many other religious and cultural traditions. The things I pointed out from the Bible are the ones that are strikingly different from other religious and cultural traditions.
I was not claiming that everything in the Bible led to things that modern secular humanists respect. But some of the things that they do respect, seem not to be found in traditions other than the Biblical/Jewish/Christian.
Let me give an analogy from somewhere completely different. Suppose there were a book from the middle ages that contained a lot of stuff about four humors and curing patients by bleeding and so on, but that about 10% of its pages contained strikingly modern medical insights. Now suppose we found some hitherto undiscovered writings of several of the founders of early modern medicine, Harvey or Vesalius or whoever you want to name, and found that all of them had clearly read and been inspired by the 10% of the pages that were âmodernâ. We would then say, not that everything in those medieval books was good medical science, but that modern medical science in its beginnings was inspired by them. This would be a totally reasonable assessment of the situation.
What Iâm saying is not that everything in the Bible or Christian tradition was perfect, but that parts of the Bible and Christian tradition (and Jewish tradition) went into shaping the spirit of the Western world, even the spirit of secular humanism. Both Christianity (at its best) and secular humanism have a high regard for human autonomy and dignity, a high regard for religious freedom (Jesus and the early disciples preached, but never used state authority to spread their beliefs), a greater respect than most past civilizations have had for women, for the economic and social underclasses, etc. Indeed, in much of the rhetoric of secular humanism against conventional religion, I hear a modern secular version of the impassioned cry of the prophets for social justice.
I already covered that. I donât think you were here when we had a similar discussion many months ago, but as I pointed out to someone then, âdemocracyâ as it existed in ancient Greece (mainly in Athens) was not âliberal democracyâ of the modern type. It was crude majoritarian democracy, with no safeguards for individuals or minority groups from the action of the majority. Now, where does our moral sense that the individual, the smaller group within the larger group, the less popular groups, deserve protection from the will of the majority, come from? Not from Athenian democracy. And not from Roman democracy either. What focused our attention on the weaker members of society, the underclasses, the women, the children, etc.? What caused us to think and feel that the just society was not merely one in which all adult males had the vote and counted up their votes to decide things, but one in which the unheard voices of the less powerful were taken into account? I would submit that this is the Biblical influence on Western culture. And I would say it is a good influence. And I would say that if it had not been present in Western culture (even if it was often enough buried by conventional politics and culture), then the sentiments that produce pluralism, feminism, universal suffrage, universal charters of human rights, etc. would never have emerged. If Europe had been conquered by Islam during the Middle Ages, I donât think there would be any Declaration of Independence, or any feminism, or any improved treatment of women, and I doubt very much that slavery would be ended even today. And I donât think any society ruled over by Genghis Khan or Tamerlane â or their great, great, great grandchildren, if they continued in the same mentality â would have produced any Voltaires or Rousseaus or Marxes or Bills of Rights.
It is hard for most modern people, especially those who have been raised as secular humanists and have had little intimate contact with religious people and religious life, to grasp how powerful an influence the Bible was, whether in pure uncut form, or filtered through ritual and art and theology and sacraments, in the life and thought of the West. The Enlightenment was born in an era when three hundreds years of printed books and pamphlets had steeped the minds of all educated Europeans in Biblical and Christian themes and ideas. And even the critique of existing Christian culture during the Enlightenment often owed much to the criticsâ deep inspiration by that culture. And 19th-century âprogressiveâ philosophies of history are filled with prophetic zeal for social justice, a zeal that takes the side of the underclasses against the mighty and the powerful, just as the ancient prophets railed against the kings and the priests in the interest of the widows, the fatherless, the poor, etc. Even today, at large union gatherings, when a thousand employees fill the rafters with passionate songs about fighting for the rights of the working man, guess what the nickname for that singing is, a nickname used by the workers themselves? âGospel.â And of course the connection of all of this with the movement that was called âthe Social Gospelâ should be too obvious to need much elaboration.
It deserves much more than that. It has contributed to the best things in the modern world, whether that contribution is acknowledged or not. Generally speaking, those who are immersed in the history of ideas are more likely to acknowledge the contribution; those whose main interest in religion is contemporary culture-war polemics, less so.
Itâs obvious that you did not pay attention to the parenthesis in my original. In fact, your three dots above have cut it out. Was that deliberate on your part, so that you could make me out to be in the wrong, or did you just read too quickly to catch the qualification in the parentheses? Either way, I have your point covered.
Are you telling me that Jewish students, Hindu students, etc. in Britain have to listen daily to Christian prayers? Please be more specific about the details of the âcollective worship.â As for religious education being compulsory, whether that is a violation of rights depends on the contents. If the purpose of the course is to teach students about the various religions of the world, and to get them thinking about various religions options, rather than to indoctrinate, there is nothing objectionable about it, no more so than offering a philosophy course that surveys the various philosophies. It could be a valuable part of a general, well-rounded education.
First, Iâm told that only something like 6 to 10 percent of Britons attend church weekly. So even if your Conservatives attend more often than others, they donât represent a big chunk of the population, do they? And besides, are you seriously talking to me as if the British Anglican Church represents some sort of culturally conservative force? If so, youâre fooled by old buildings and ancient worship styles, and are paying no attention to contents. Anglicanism in Britain is pretty near as vapid and wishy-washy liberal as Anglicanism is in the rest of the âadvancedâ nations. (The breakaway Anglican groups are more conservative, but they have almost no presence in British religious life, as far as I have heard; they are, however, strong in places like Nigeria.) And in any case, the ruling party in Britain changes every so often; it wonât always be the Conservatives. The Conservatives arenât a structural part of the British constitution! So your point is, to put it gently, not at all strong.
But since most of those Bishops had nebulous commitments to historical Christian faith, and spent more time flirting with theological and moral liberalism than reading Hooker and Cranmer and Augustine, it made no difference to the religious tone of the country. It was merely an archaic, formal hangover from an earlier era.
This is more to the point. If they were raised in a Britain that was religiously repressive, itâs understandable that they would react. And as I didnât live in Britain then, I canât say how repressive it was. But I have watched a great number of British films of that period, and I would not say that the portrait of postwar British society presented in them was anywhere close to the puritanism found in some parts of America at the time. And in fact the undergraduate university years of Dawkins and Atkins, if they are 80 now, would have been in the late 1950s to early 1960s, a very liberal period of British culture, when â as is quite obvious if you watch the films or listen to the music of the time â the Church certainly exerted very little repressive power over what filmmakers and artists said or did. Comedies about adultery, for example, where quite common. The Carry On films were a major draw from 1958 on. Iâm sure the odd Bishop or priest frowned, but the artists carried on (pun intentional) as if the Church of England didnât exist.
Yes. Now, using my qualified statement, do you have any theory regarding why so many prominent secular humanists like to spend so much time denouncing religion? And why they seem to have so many followers in that habit, as you can easily see if you read the comments sections on Coyneâs blog, Pandaâs Thumb, here, on BioLogos, and in many other places? Itâs clearly not just Dawkins, Atkins, Coyne, Krauss and a dozen other famous writers that have this strong dislike for religion. How many thousands of people bought âGod is Not Greatâ or âThe God Delusionâ and cheered as they were reading? Do you admit that there are a considerable number of people who would describe themselves as secular humanists who strongly dislike religion in general, or Christianity in particular? What do you think is the cause of this?
Why donât you ask them? Are we supposed to read their minds?
Why donât you go over there and ask them?
I donât strongly dislike religion, but I have disliked what I see as harmful influences Christianity has had on culture. I am also deeply troubled by people who ignore their own sense of morality in exchange for blind obedience to dogmatic religious edicts. I also dislike attempts to create laws that unconstitutionally force religion onto US citizens.
Am I allowed to have these opinions without you feeling like you are being discriminated against? Am I allowed to voice these opinions without evoking feelings of persecution within Christiandom?
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Lots of questions here, but I think the root cause is that they take the opposite view to you as to the impact of religion on progressive ideals (and in some cases, science): they think that much of religion opposes, and historically has opposed, such ideals (and sometimes, science), and in doing so spills over into the political arena. What they do is push back against religious ideas and influences that in their view are damaging the overall good.
Just my musings - if you really want to know the answers you better ask them instead of me.
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Iâm glad to hear this.
Fair enough, but see my note to faded Glory: there are more than just a few leaders bashing religion; there are many commenters on blog sides who pile on. So sure, itâs not everyone, but itâs more than just a dozen prominent authors.