Oh dear. The World Cup is nine months away, but we may not see a greater own goal than Greg Craven’s attack on the neo-atheists in today’s Age (sorry, National Times, the brave new collection of all the stuff that was available on Fairfax anyway) .
The neo-atheists – Dawkins, Hitchens and others – are an annoying bunch, taking the most literal version of monotheism, and then guffawingly mocking it (’oh a whale, really’) in a tone not unlike the baby in the Family Guy.
Trouble is Craven sounds worse…
If you’re going to oppose atheists, you better give a more sophisticated account of what belief is, because even those of us sympathetic to the possibility of meaningful belief do sometimes wonder what exactly it is intelligent religious people believe.
Does Craven, G, for example, actually believe that God is some form of higher consciousness watching our every move like it was a billion films unspooling and occasionally intervening? Or is it more abstract? In a scientific civilisation there is at least a case to answer.
Craven G avoids them all, being both supercilious (’such dislikeable creatures’), put-upon (’ohhh how they hate us’) and skirting genuine issues, such as school funding and child abuse.
This won’t do. Craven G’s tone simply feeds the darkest atheist suspicion about intelligent religionists – that their beliefs are a form of bad faith, designed to avoid the tough issues posed by a universe that comes with no big Meaning supplied.
The treatment of child abuse is stupidly blithe — does Craven G think we haven’t noticed that whole sections of the Church, such as its entire child home system in Ireland for decades, functioned as a sadistic and predatory gang? Quite aside from the suffering involved, might this not suggest a church whose core beliefs have corroded away, leaving nothing but a wealthy political organisation with schools, universities…and generous tax breaks?
Does Craven G think it would be both wise and necessary to make a better case? And that maybe he should be a little more down in the Lions’ den, and a little less up himself.
5 Comments
Good to see your ongoing campaign of sneaky misdirection to http.com continues Guy. Do you own shares?
It’s a fair cop. You lot may well have occasion to cringe and roll your eyes at having to suffer loquacious narcissists like The Hitch as your point men, but at least they can put a bit of first person juice in their shtick and not be kneecapping themselves from the off. One of the truly annoying things about believing in God and being vaguely intelligent about it is all that killjoy ‘On the mountain the Lord provides’/'accept, surrender, submit’/'meek shall inherit’ humility stuff. One of the One God’s sicker jokes: hand you the keys to the ‘I,I,I’ musclecar and then tell you that if you drive it too fast or nasty He’ll only nick them back*. (He think He’s being ironic here but He’s just been listening to too much Morrisset.)
So we can only make our ‘best’ case for Him in one of three ways, really: genius art; lifelong self-effacement & daily good works; or crucifixion redux.
You can see our didactic problem, huh.
Personally, I’ll keep quietly believing in a benevolent and loving God for at least as long as I can keep shoving new hotmail addresses into Crikey’s ‘21 day free trial’ Kotel and reading your always dazzling, always joyous athiest prose without paying for it. Manna, dude!
* As He did long ago, from all the loons and hoons which The Hitch et al, as you graciously concede, do rather tend to go after as the fishy
loavesbarrel option (although, being loons and hoons, they’ve yet to notice themselves that they’re now just dragging themselves along the path to salvation on their ragged asses, going ‘Brrm, brrm!’ VERY LOUDLY…so it’s unsurprising your guys don’t, either – and why should they, anyway? All’s fair, and all that.Reading through the comments, I’d suggest that Craven G has not so much scored an own goal as successfully achieved self-crucifixion.
Quite an admirable feat when you think about it. One wonders how he managed to bang in that last nail.
I can’t believe he palmed off the child abuse thing as some kind of baseless accusation. I’m pretty sure the large scale systematic rape of children has something to do with why lots of people don’t like the Catholic church. If there wasn’t anything to get angry about, I don’t think people would get angry. You don’t get much atheist rage against Buddhism.
“and then guffawingly mocking it (’oh a whale, really’) in a tone not unlike the baby in the Family Guy.”
pwned.