News from the New Party

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Hitchens vs Hitchens vs God

Christopher Hitchens' new book, "God is not Great", has drawn an interesting and apposite response from his brother Peter.

If you prefer the idea of an ordered universe with unalterable laws which no power on earth is entitled to break, then religion is for you. If you prefer to think that you are just a rather elaborate relative of the amoeba, resulting from random chaos, and that you can make up the rules as you go along, then it's not. Feel free. But what I find quite amusing is that atheists are not at all relaxed about their faith, and so often try really hard to convert me, and enter this argument under the impression that their belief is a proven fact.

That way lies intolerance, persecution and the inquisition, I'm afraid.

Detractors of religion like to point to religious belief as a key factor in the extreme violence, murder and oppression we see all too much of in the world, and it is certainly true that in the past few years particularly religious fundamentalism has played such a role, and indeed it has throughout history. It is equally true, however, that atheistic regimes have perpetrated some of the most appalling crimes of history: the twentieth century, the century of Stalin, Hitler and other lesser monsters, has established that the insanity of mass slaughter is not the prerogative of the religious, neither are atheists immune from intolerance and persecution. The reality is that the full range of human behaviours is or has been manifested by both the godfearing and the godless at some point in history.

Peter Hitchens touches on the two underlying views of society that flow from the atheist and the religious position. Atheism implies that human beings are free to make their own rules; religion implies that there is a higher order, the rules of which human beings are not free to change. In other words, atheism tends to put the individual at the centre of the universe, whereas religion sets the centre of the universe somewhere else: the individual is not absolute, but part of a greater whole, with commitments and responsibilities which cannot be avoided or ignored. Of course, this is an oversimplification, to say the least: Stalinism is hardly an individualistic creed. Nevertheless, western civilisation these days is almost entirely secularised (except perhaps in the United States of America, which has somewhat further to go along the secularist road). The result throughout the West has been similar, however: family breakdown on a colossal scale; a burgeoning welfare state replacing individual responsibility and picking up the pieces where adults fail to honour their commitments to their families, or to themselves; a plummeting birthrate as the business of having children has just become too much of a burden for people who would rather amuse themselves than start a family.

Mark Steyn has commented extensively on the demographic decline of the West, drawing a contrast between the much higher birthrates of religious communities compared with secular ones: although Protestant Christians also enjoy comparable birthrates (and the most fertile religious group in the world is the Mormons), this is particularly significant with respect to the birthrates of Muslim societies. The falling birthrate across the West has led to a demand for immigrants, and the countries with the most capacity to export people include a disproportionately large number of Muslim nations. What this implies is that an excessively individualistic (one might even say a religiously individualistic) society where notions of personal responsibility are attenuated cannot in the long run survive. Such a society ultimately lacks the motivation to perpetuate itself, and in the case of Western Europe currently, this is a key driver of mass immigration. By contrast, religious societies with a belief in overarching laws, commitments and responsibilities do not have the same problem. No lack of motivation there.

All of this does not mean that a religious revival is the key to all our problems; indeed as we have noted, religious fundamentalism carries dangers of its own of which we are all only too well aware. It does however indicate that there is a moral dimension to freedom which cannot be ignored. A free society cannot be a free-for-all. Liberalism is not the same thing as libertinism. A new awareness is needed of the basic core values of Western civilisation (many of which have their roots in the Judeo-Christian ethic, moderated by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment.) In other words, freedom cannot survive without responsibility: and responsibility cannot be exercised without a sense of community and a personal commitment to shared values. To stabilise to our society and defend our freedoms and way of life will entail nothing less than a wholesale moral renewal.

News from the New Party

News Highlights

News Archive

Hitchens vs Hitchens vs God