The atheist delusion
John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong
Saturday March 15, 2008 The Guardian
Gray wrote:
Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. In the 20th century, when it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender totalitarianism. Today, the result is a climate of hysteria. Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.
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IMO, unlike sex, religion is not genetically driven; it's a social construction, as all ideologies are social constructions. I agree that religion should not be legally suppressed by secular/atheist dogmatics. I abhor theocratic States. I also have problems with Gray's assumption that humans don't change over historical epochs, kind of a variation on the old conservative mantra: the more things change, the more they remain the same. While humans retain many attributes which they had when they lived mostly in caves, they've also developed much further, especially along the road of attaining greater levels of reason e.g. we find slavery and cannibalism abominations today; but we accepted them and even justified them using ideologies in times going back to the beginnings of class society.
The problem I think Gray is getting at is the use of ideologies to justify inhumane, abusive acts.
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