I thought I would draw attention to an article in the Guardian which is worth a read.
The article is here:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1440680,00.html
It's written by Dr Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney and Dr William Whyte, Fellow in History at St John's College, Oxford. They point out that while the religious right and the secular right have been acting ever more in concert and becoming ever more authoritarian, the secular left has continued even more to mock and castigate religion, citing the religious right as its reason for so doing.
I've certainly experienced a lot of this in the great secular left establishments we call 'universities', where you can get into a lot of trouble for mentioning the old 'God' word or even for suggesting that spirituality may not have been explained once and for all by BF Skinner and his observations of supersticious pigeons. This all makes it increasingly easy for the religious right to caricature the liberals as Godless cultural relativists who are nonetheless extremely authoritarian in their own politically correct orthodoxy.
The religious left was once a very powerful group, especially in England, responsible in part for many great deeds including the abolition of slavery, the Welfare State, the National Health Service and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. And no, I'm not saying that they were the only group involved, and I'm not forgetting for a moment the great role that Bertrand Russell, a great humanist, played in CND. That's the point - there used to be much greater alliances between many groups who made common cause in favour of world peace, social justice, combatting disease and poverty. And we need to get our act together again, for we have greater challenges before us than ever before.
The secular left needs to realise that, if religion really doesn't matter, then get on with doing the things that do matter and if this means joining forces with religious people who share your values, well, what's so bad about that? What's your problem? Don't tell me that you can't work with anyone who believes in God, that's just plain religious discrimination.
And the religious left needs to roll its sleeves up, and stop apologizing to the secularists for being spiritual and stop apologizing to the religious right for being progressive. The power-hungry, war-hungry, socially, economically and environmentally irresponsible right wing of our society needs to be challenged firmly, for its moral values are tolerant of exploitation, repressive of freedom, and deeply flawed.
1 comment:
east_man is right to point out that religions are sources of hatred and discrimination. They are also sources of great humanitarian efforts.
Similarly, science is the source of technology that destroys life and of technology that promotes life. Are you going to say "As a matter of fact, science is the source of tremendous evil ... if you don't renounce science, I don't see how I can work with you."
Suppose you take up the ultimate challenge of defining right and wrong. Can you come up with a serious argument that being motivated by religion is wrong, but being motivated by a passion for science is perfectly respectable?
In practice, if I did believe in a God whose religion I would defend "at the cost of all values", then it wouldn't be much of a God, would it? Many religious people don't believe this and don't behave like this.
But if a good and loving God is the source of someone's values, what is so wrong about that?
If you're principally worried about defining and doing right instead of wrong, and choosing who to work with in this, I'm not sure that the question "What is your God like?" is even important. Shouldn't you be asking "What are you like?"
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