By MAGNUS LINKLATER, TIMES ONLINE
Added: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:00:00 UTC

Reposted from:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/magnus_linklater/article2388129.ece

Thank God I'm an atheist. It's a big step to take, but it was becoming difficult to cling to the agnostic fig-leaf any longer. As Lloyd George once said, if you sit on the fence too long it means that the iron enters your soul. Now, however, I am reassured by Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, that I can "stand tall to face the far horizon". Atheism, he says, "nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind, and indeed a healthy mind".

I'm a bit worried about that "nearly always" — an uncharacteristically fuzzy phrase surely, from the master of certainty; but at least I can stand shoulder to shoulder with the new president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toynbee, who announces that by embracing atheism we are resisting religious zealotry, "because the here and now is all there is, and our destiny is in our own hands".

I suppose I agree with that. The notion of a life hereafter, the rewards of Heaven or the punishment of Hell are fantasies that I find it easy to dispense with, while the alternative — to seek the spiritual life within the confines of one's own imagination — is a far more challenging proposition.

I wonder, then, why I find the militant convictions of the anti-religionists so chilling? Far from converting me, I find myself repelled by the way that Professor Dawkins so expertly picks off each and every argument put up by those who cling to their faith, while the virulence of Toynbee's attacks on the evils of state-sponsored religion is unattractive, at best. They may be intellectually rigorous, but they do not win me over.

They seem, however, to be having a wider effect. A poll in The Sunday Times, carried out for John Humphrys, the broadcaster, whose book In God We Doubt is published this week, revealed that nearly half of those questioned — 42 per cent — think that religion has had a harmful effect. This may stem more from the current suspicion of Muslim extremists than a flight from faith, but it does suggest that we have entered a new and increasingly intolerant era, for which the God-assailants must accept some responsibility. "Perhaps we are having an effect now," comments Professor Dawkins. And perhaps "we" are.

I cannot, however, share Professor Dawkins's contempt for what he sees as the vacuity of those who proclaim their doubts about an external God, but still cling to the traditions or the comfort of organised religion. Nor do I warm to Toynbee's visceral hostility to the idea of an established Church. I stood, earlier this week, at a funeral where the bereaved family — not themselves believers — took deep solace from a Presbyterian service, with hymns whose lines were rich in language and faith. We listened to words from Proverbs about the virtuous woman who is "a crown to her husband", and felt that the surroundings of an ancient church were perfectly in tune with the messages of love and remembrance that ran through the service.

By the end of it, my atheism was still intact, but I was very glad to have been there. I cannot, like Professor Dawkins, think the less of anyone who takes pleasure from a familiar liturgy, nor deride those who fall back on a Church whose central tenets they reject. Professor Dawkins is expert at exposing, with pinpoint precision, the inconsistencies of this position. He compares those who take comfort from traditional religion to people stuck for the night on a bare mountain, who warm to the appearance of a large St Bernard dog, "not forgetting, of course, the brandy barrel around its neck". Death, he says, is something to be approached without hope or fear. It is far more invigorating to face "the strong keen wind of understanding", which comes with a complete absence of faith, than to cling to "the security blanket of ignorance".

Methinks the Professor takes a little too much satisfaction in the eloquence of his own metaphors and too little account of the richness of the alternatives. As for Toynbee, I cannot quite follow her contempt for the evils perpetrated by our established religion. She cites the damage perpetrated by faith schools, the absurdity of a constitution that allows bishops into the House of Lords, and the extremism of Christian organisations that campaign against homosexuality, abortion and stem-cell research. There are arguments to be had about all of these, but I shrink from the shrill language with which she deploys them.

Do we really think, like her, that public services are "held to ransom by the weird sexual fantasies of unelected service providers", or that faith groups are responsible for the "homophobic bullying" of young boys who are driven to kill themselves in our schools, or that religious leaders, "given an ounce of power . . . abuse it to deny basic liberties"? All this she ascribes to the overweening influence of our established religion, by which she must mean the Anglican Church.

Yet never in our history has that influence been so weak, its doctrines so torn by doubt, its preaching so uncertain. Listening to the Toynbee tirades one might imagine that this country was in the hands of a latterday Torquemada, or that Thomas Cromwell was once again sending heretics to the rack. Instead, we have an Archbishop of Canterbury who agonises, publicly, over the complexities of the Christian faith, and a Church that is on the point of tearing itself apart because the liberal argument on homosexual priests is becoming unstoppable.

What unites both Dawkins and Toynbee is their absolute insistence that we sign up to the fixed and rigid agenda they have set us. For one, it is a case of choosing between rationalism and stupidity. For the other, it comes down to the liberalism of the secular life, or the red-necked fundamentalism of state-sponsored religion.

All this leaves me feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Despite my new-found position, I still seem to be on the shifting sands of uncertainty. Is there, I wonder, something called an atheist heretic?

TAGGED: ATHEISM, COMMENTARY, RELIGION