Blame 9/11, I guess

Pamela Bone in The Australian today writes about the current wave of anti-religious publishing, and notes that there new titles are headed our way:

Atheist Manifesto by French philosopher Michel Onfray; Against Religion by Melbourne philosopher Tamas Pataki; Have a Nice Doomsday by American writer Nick Guyatt. The one I am most looking forward to is Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Oh great.

Being an atheist or agnostic herself, her article welcomes the new wave, and she makes some valid points (that the faithful are often their own worst advertisement for their religion being the main one.)

This paragraph deserves some comment:

Non-religious people are fed up with all the talk about the emptiness, the barrenness and lack of meaning in "secular society". It may surprise religious people to learn that our lives are not empty. Some people might need to believe in an afterlife in order to find meaning in this one; others don't. Some might need to believe in a creator in order to be awed by the majesty of nature; others don't. Some might believe in something higher than themselves and call it God; others believe in something higher than themselves and call it humanity or nature. It makes no difference to how morally they behave. Everything good in religion can be had without religion.

As I noted when talking about Dawkins before, I reckon that there is bit of hidden elitism in this, in that a good education and opportunity to indulge an interest in science or philosophy makes it easy to think you are being deep and meaningful, but such opportunity is not available or inherent in much of the world.

The problem is not that the irreligious have no "meaning" in their lives, as you could argue that anyone who more or less happily gets on with living would be able to say something gives their life meaning. The issue is more with whether what they say gives meaning is really just a diversionary interest from facing the real existential questions of life.

Such diversionary interests become more widely available the richer a society becomes, which is a counter-influence to the other idea that increased riches gives more free time to be "deep". The way that better health has made death less of an obvious reality helps hide the existential issues too, of course.

Of course I don't want people to suffer so as force them to think philosophically; I'll leave that position to the quasi-religion of the Greens.

[In my first version of this post I mentioned "low brow" diversions, which made me sound too much like David Williamson. I should have been more even handed and noted that the rich have their empty diversions too. As do the ostensibly religious. I think that the romantic versions of environmentalism, which has a strong foothold across all classes in the West, mostly avoids the issue of the deeper meaning of humanity too, by concentrating on the rest of nature.]

Anyway, as it happens I agree with Bone that it would be ideal if moral values and ethics could always be agreed upon by arguments which do not rely on revelation. (This is why I like Kant, and John Rawls also made a decent effort. But then again, Kant thought masturbation was worse than suicide.)

But these philosophical exercises are all arguments made by creatures with no complete knowledge of their own true nature (there is, for example, presently a rash of articles arguing again about whether free will even exists) or that of the universe overall. Largely for this reason, purely rational philosophical exercises are never going to reach positions on morals that are self-evident and compulsively universal, as it were. Pure rationality is always going to have a problem with ultimate motivation for being 'good' too.

I therefore think it is better to stick with the not always easy task of trying to piece together faith in revelation and reason, and that the world would be a safer place if this attitude was widespread.

[I think what I have just done is more or less a summary of the Pope's recent controversial address that mentioned Islam. I wasn't really thinking about it when I started, though.]