A bookstore in Batemans Bay told me this week that if I wanted to buy Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, I would be on a list of more than 20.
The book was released in Australia last month, and has sold out at many bookstores and is going into reprint. So it is obviously in some demand, even in rural and regional Australia.
In the book, Dawkins hammers the rebaked creationist idea of intelligent design. He says all the scientific evidence points to life (and systems in general) evolving to ever more complex forms from very simple forms. The rebaked creationists, on the other hand, suggest that the universe starts with a hugely powerful intelligence – and presumably goes backwards given the state of humanity today.
Dawkins cites a lot of the more silly propositions of the Old Testament and the more theologically opaque tenets of the New Testament, especially the trinity and suggests that if they had come out of the mouths of Druids or Visigoths they would have been laughed out of court.
Of perhaps more importance, though, he called for humanist rationalists, atheists and agnostics to be more outspoken, to ridicule the religious irrationalists and to no longer put up with them in respectful silence. He is not talking only about Christianity (whether Catholic or fundamentalist Protestants) but about all religions – classifying pagan pantheists with the three main monotheistic religions as propagators of irrationalism.
It got me thinking that humanist rationalists and atheists get fairly bad PR – because they get virtually no PR, whereas organised religion gets a huge amount of free PR. Every day some bishop or other gets a free kick in the media. Religion has, literally, armies of proselytisers — the Salvation Army is just a start.
Worldwide, the Catholic Church has about 400,000 priests, two-thirds of whom are in the parishes spreading the word.
Catholics comprise about half of Christians. There are about another 300,000 Protestant clerics and, say, 200,000 Muslim clerics. That accounts for the two largest religions. Add the other religions and you have perhaps several million people around the world working full-time in propagating religion. Australia has about 15,000 ministers of religion.
Aside from that, millions of religious parents propound religious dogma to their children.
The churches rake in billions – about $40 billion a year in Australia alone. Much of this is spent on propagating religion.
Yet, virtually no-one is paid to argue for atheism or even agnosticism. Dawkins is suggesting it about time atheists and agnostics stand up for their non-belief, but that may not be necessary.
The interesting thing is that, according to census figures, the number of people having no religion or unstated religion has grown dramatically without the need of a priesthood or billions of dollars to seek converts.
The “none” and “unstated” categories have grown from 2.4 per cent in the 1901 Australian census to 27.2 in the 2001 census. Sure, some of the unstated might well have religious beliefs. Nonetheless, the growth in the non-religious appears to be inexorable.
Much was made of the fact that the Catholics overtook the Anglicans in the 1986 census. The fact the “none” and “unstated” categories overtook the Catholics in the 2001 census rated barely a mention. “None” and “unstated” is now the leading “religion” in Australia.
The inexorable rise in the non-religious (with occasional setbacks because of the sheer strength of the personnel and dollars of the religious proselytisers) is perhaps due to the fact that an atheistic or agnostic revelation is much easier to come by than a religious one. It is possible to wake up in the morning and realise that, in Dawkins’ phrase, a god (particularly a three-in-one god) as about as likely as the tooth fairy.
But waking up one morning with the full panoply of a major religion is not possible. One has to be converted and taught or inculcated with all of the dogmatic details. The dogmatic details are not self-evident. They are a construct of human beings.
However, the cause of rationalism is a long one. It has taken 500 years for it to be almost generally accepted that the world is round – despite religious teaching at the time to the contrary. It has taken 150 years for evolution to be accepted, but only by a bare majority, despite religious teaching to the contrary which continues to this day.
Don’t expect an end to irrationality soon, but expect inexorable progress.
Dawkins’ entry into the religious fray is timely. Millions have died in religious violence over the centuries, but there has been a surge in the years since the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
It is no good saying that the violence of the Crusades, Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the Inquisition, Bloody Mary and then Bloody Elizabeth in England, the Lebanon civil war, the Palestinian bloodshed and so on are not examples of religious violence. They were all calls to arms in the name of religion.
Sure, religious people and organised religion do a mountain of good works, but they can all be done without invoking god. On the other hand, the appalling violence in Iraq is done in the name of god, as was the Spanish Inquisition and the other examples mentioned.
The good can be done without god, but the faithful cannot be rallied to violence unless there is a belief in god.
One of the objections Dawkins has to religion is that the religious force their views on others. It is the name of the game for religions – to convert as many as possible and to push the tenets of the religion on everyone in society. Muslim clerics want every woman to wear the veil. Catholic priests want laws to ban abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia. He wants that to end.
Perhaps in the short term it might be handy to have a few full-time paid personnel to push the cause against irrational, and often violent religion, but in the long term there may be no need. All the wealth that buys full-time proselytisers will not be enough to stop more and more people realising the obvious on their own.