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Richard Dawkins and the book what he wrote (apologies to E. Wise)
Richard Dawkins is undoubtedly one of modernism's greatest champions of rational, scientific atheism. In developing his hard-hitting two-part documentary "The Root of All Evil?" for television and this companion piece for print, he has read more widely on this subject than I could ever hope to do. From a wide variety of angles, he tackles the issue of "faith" and its persistence in the face of an ever expanding and deepening scientific understanding of "life, the universe and everything" (to quote his friend and fellow atheist, the late and great Douglas Adams, to the memory of whom this book is dedicated).
And yet it is important to understand this book and Richard's limitations, as well as my own. We shared what could be characterised as coming "from an affluent upper-middle class background" and "a normal Anglican upbringing" [1]. And while Richard's parents sent him off to Oundle public school [2] from where he went up to Balliol College, Oxford University, to study zoology, some years later I commuted to a state grammar school and moved east to Sheffield University to study architecture. Richard has distinguished himself in a career spent wholly in academia, gaining a BA degree in zoology in 1962, followed by MA and DPhil degrees in 1966, and a DSci in 1989; in 1995, he became Oxford's Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science [3], a position endowed by Charles Simonyi with an express intention that Richard be its first holder; and he's been a fellow of New College, Oxford since 1970. If there's an analogous thread running through my life, it's to become the best revolutionary marxist I can be; and along the way, I've read, assimilated and enjoyed all the books Richard has previously written.
Richard and I are both appalled at the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, both in the Christian neo-con heartland of the state-terrorist American Empire, and in its corollary and nemesis, Islamic-inspired jihadi terrorism. Indeed, if the former hadn't colluded with the latter in staging the 9/11 massacre, a new Pearl Harbour for the "New American Century" [4], this book may not have been written. But if anything, Richard is even more appalled by the rise of the Christian right, in the USA and the UK, and specifically by its assault on the subject of his life's work: evolutionary theory in general and neo-Darwinism in particular. The attempt to get Christian fundamentalist creationism [5], and its disingenuous bastard son "intelligent design" [6], taught in science classes in schools in both countries has probably been Richard's greatest motivator, as well it should be. And the New Labour government's craven support for "faith-based schooling" in the UK only adds insult to injury [7]. Richard continues to be a vociferous critic on both these issues.
So while the book lays out many sound arguments against the more generally debilitating and deleterious effects of "faith" on the individual, on society, on our collective and universalist human morality, and in particular on the intellectual vitality of academic and civil society, Richard reserves the majority of his writing time for combating Christianity, and to an only slightly lesser extent its fellow bronze age sky god religions Judaism and Islam. His coruscating attack on the Old Testament old-man-with-a-beard-in-the-sky archetype as "the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" [8] is well backed up by copious examples from the scripture that all Christians, Muslims and Jews call sacred and holy. For militant atheists like me, it's a joy to behold such a towering intellect laying into the nasty aggregation of superstition, xenophobia and intellectual cowardice that passes for religion and theology. And I can only hope that his redefining of the religious indoctrination of children by parents, teachers and clerics as child abuse will catch on as a meme [9] whose time has come, and that it'll spread like wildfire – but I'm not holding my breath, so to speak.
However, it's in trying to understand why the god delusion is proving to be just so persistent in the age of scientific reason that Richard begins to come unstuck. That's not to say there aren't many fascinating insights here, especially from the domains of evolutionary psychology and the memetics of religious memeplexes [10]. But ask yourself this: what's arguably the most famous quote about religion from a dead-white-european-male? For me, it's obviously the sentence I've emboldened in the middle of the following three paragraphs.
"The basis of religious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion."
Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843 [11]
Quite so. Then there are the following rich and critical sources, all of which you can read online, and links to which you'll find in the end notes below.
Marx and Engels on Religion, 1841-1895 [12]Ernest Belfort Bax on Socialism and Religion, 1884 [13] and Religion v. Ethics, 1901 [14]James Connolly on Socialism and Religion, 1899 [15]Anton Pannekoek on Socialism and Religion, 1907 [16] and Religion, 1947 [17]Karl Kautsky on the Foundations of Christianity, 1908 [18]Felix Morrow on Religion – its social roots and role, 1932 [19]Mansoor Hekmat on how Religion is Part of the 'Lumpenism' in Society, 1999 [20] and on The Rise and Fall of Political Islam, 2001 [21] And how about this for a piece of work, eh?
"Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.
But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth."
V. I. Lenin, Socialism and Religion, 1905 [22]
What's so disappointing, if not altogether surprising, is that it seems that Richard has a blind spot for marxists, who have been among the most cogent, coherent and scientific of religion's critics for at least the last 166 years! He spends pages laying into Hitler and Stalin, as any good bourgeois liberal might; but without an understanding of alienation and the ideological weapon religion has become in the arsenal of the bourgeoisie, to oppress, confuse and mystify the class who would be the gravediggers of capitalism, he's missing out on a huge chunk of explanatory science. Why should that be?
Just as I believe religion 'belongs' to the childhood of humanity, and of individual humans, so I think science and the bourgeois materialism from which it so powerfully arose 'belong' to our adolescence, as a human culture and as individuals. Our late teenage flirtation with utopian socialism soon gave way to our developing scientific socialism as adults (for which see Frederick Engels on Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880 [23] ). But there are such major and serious impediments to everyone reaching such a mature point of view that only a minority of us ever do so. At which point, I can feel an explanatory table is about to emerge blinking into the cold light of reason.
No doubt the dates and ages in this table could be the subject of endless debate, and yet their value is far less important than the trends I'm seeking to illuminate. So with apologies for the lies-to-children oversimplification [25] that such an exercise inevitably entails, let's take a brief look at four currents in human culture across All Human History so far.
Within the catch-all category Religion, it's possible to trace a general historical progression from animism [26] (eg: ancestral paganism), through polytheism [27] (eg: ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Norse pantheons), and pantheism [28] (eg: Kabbalistic Judaism), to monotheism [29] (eg: Akhenaten, Moses, Jesus, Mohamed) – from where the next logical step is to believe in one less god, which is to say: atheism [30]. Science undoubtedly pre-dates capitalism, and yet it was only with the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie that science and technology really became the lynchpin of economic development. The moral offensiveness of some of the horrors that naked exploitation of workers for profit threw up prompted some educated men to champion "Plans for alleviating poverty through [Utopian] Socialism (1817)" [31]. But it took another three decades of class struggle maturation before the founding document of Scientific Socialism could declare, "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism," and implore that, "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" [32].
The Typical Personal Age values are based on my own life, and again, the actual values are far less important than the trends they illustrate. If one is going to 'get' a religion, it's most likely to be transmitted by one's parents, teachers and the clerics in one's community during childhood. As those child abusing specialists, the Jesuits, are so often quoted as saying, "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man." Thankfully, in twenty-first century developed capitalist economies at least, a curriculum including science is generally available for c. 5-18 year-olds, and the irreconcilable contradictions between the bronze age superstitions of "scripture" and the accurate predictions of modernist scientific theory lead many students away from "faith" and towards a rational scepticism. And that's as far as most folks get, because, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." [33] Or to put it another way, revolt, rebellion, revolution, and its theoretical underpinning ideas of anarchism and marxism, are not the kind of things you get taught about in school, college or university – unless you've opted to do so, and then they're studied only as an academic exercise.
At Oxford University, Richard chose to study zoology; and presumably, he also chose to ignore all the radical intellectuals hanging round Oxford from whom the memeplexes of marxism were available for transmission. And since such a distinguished scientific career as Richard's in bourgeois academia takes a huge amount of intellectual 'energy' to achieve, to which adding marxism would be at best a distraction and at worst a terrible impediment, then it's no great surprise that the 1.7 century long marxist critique of religion is significant by its absence from The God Delusion.
Of course all religions, old and new, are the bitter enemies of class-consciousness. And so it’s only after the victory of a global anti-capitalist political revolution, led by class-conscious workers, that we can reasonably expect the fading away of both religious anguish, and of the real distress from which it arises in this heartless world, because the social conditions from which the humanist spirit is excluded will be being consigned to the dustbin of history. Until then, no sooner have we reduced one religion to a smouldering ruin than another dozen have risen phoenix-like from the ashes: Rastafarianism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Branch Davidians, Hare Krishnas, LaVeyan Satanism, Neo-Paganism, Theosophy, Jesus Army, Scientology, the Raëlian Church, corporate Kabbalism, and the Nation of Islam (to name but, er... a dozen). Once our revolution has abolished "a state of affairs which needs illusions", and we've created social conditions predicated on nurturing the real "happiness of the people," only then can we realistically expect the end-user demand for "the opium of the people" to fade into nothingness.
Conclusion
As another reviewer of this magnificent book has already said,
"This is a book that should be read by everybody. Unfortunately it will be mainly read by those who don’t really need to read it. Such is the nature of religious belief that those who should read it will generally be too blinkered to do so. This is a great tragedy. [...] I would go so far as to say that any "believer" who fears to read this book should question in their heart whether their "faith" is not so weak that it is not worth having." [34]
To which I'd add that The God Delusion should also be required reading for all teenagers (and adults) who have passed that developmental milestone beyond which lies youthful rebellion, pervasive bolshy-ness and a determination to think for yourself – but served up only as an starter to feasting on the carcass of religion, the appetising marxist main course of which can be found in end notes [11]-[23] below, in all its chunky goodness.
The God Delusion is a bold, courageous and timely challenge to the god-is-on-our-side bullshit of the imperialist murderers in Westminster and Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran, and to anyone who's mind is still infected by a pernicious, viral, theistic memplex. If the book doesn't go far enough, then at least its deficiencies are understandable, and it should serve as a launching point for a more thorough understanding of the social, political and ideological role of religion available at www.marxists.org – and maybe even in your local bookshop. As I posted elsewhere, "Open your eyes and your mind, accept nobody’s authority but your own, ditch faith in gurus and gods, emancipate yourself from mental slavery, and really start thinking for yourself – and please do join the liberation struggle to create new social conditions in which every human is encouraged to do so for themselves." Amen to that!
Peace & Love,
dalinian
End Notes and Links
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins – from where subsequent biographical details arise
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_%28England%29
[3] http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk
[4] http://www.newamericancentury.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_a_New_American_Century
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
[7] For instance, see Toby Marshall on Integration or Segregation? http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2002-02/integration.htm
[8] Quoted in A Deadly Certitude – On God, Christianity and Islam, by Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in the Times Literary Supplement, which is well worth a read in its entirety http://pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/wf011907a.htm
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Marxism on Religion
[11] Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
[12] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Marx and Engels on Religion, 1841-1895 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/religion/index.htm
[13] Ernest Belfort Bax on Socialism and Religion, 1884 http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1884/06/religion.htm
[14] Ernest Belfort Bax on Religion v. Ethics, 1901 http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1901/09/letter-21-9.htm
[15] James Connolly on Socialism and Religion, 1899 http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1901/evangel/socrel.htm
[16] Anton Pannekoek on Socialism and Religion, 1907 http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1907/socialism-religion.htm
[17] Anton Pannekoek on Religion, 1947 http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/religion.htm
[18] Karl Kautsky on the Foundations of Christianity, 1908 http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/index.htm
[19] Felix Morrow on Religion – its social roots and role, 1932 http://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow-felix/1932/religion/part1.htm
[20] Mansoor Hekmat on how Religion is Part of the 'Lumpenism' in Society, 1999 http://www.marxists.org/archive/hekmat-mansoor/1999/06/13.htm
[21] Mansoor Hekmat on The Rise and Fall of Political Islam, 2001 http://www.marxists.org/archive/hekmat-mansoor/2001/misc/rise-fall-islam.htm
[22] V. I. Lenin on Socialism and Religion, 1905 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
[23] Frederick Engels on Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
[24] http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism and http://www.dialectics4kids.com
[25] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
[26] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
[27] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytheism
[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism
[29] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism
[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
[31] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen#Plans_for_alleviating_poverty_throug...
[32] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm
[33] Karl Marx in The German Ideology, 1845-1846 http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/
[34] Review by Bob Bourne, 14 Oct 06 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A16241465
More: http://www.hsengine.com/s_Oxford+University.html
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