Reason’s Idiots (2)

A C Grayling on God is not Great.  [Independent on Sunday, 24 Jun 07.] He behaves in the usual way; cheers from the sidelines someone who has the rational steadiness to realise folly when he sees it.  But one has to question how this can be rational: “Hitchens … answers the weary canard that the secular tyrannies of fascism and communism have as bad a record as religion.”  - But he doesn’t seem to at all!  If what is at stake is rationality and fact, then – fact and rationality must be observed.  Fascism and communism produced the bloodiest times in human history; along with the First World War, and neither was that a religious war.  The problem that thinkers like Grayling, Hitchens and Dawkins have to deal with is that if they want to speak about human cruelty and violence originating with religion they need much stronger arguments.  They face the paradox that if – as they also want to say – the basic human impulses that brought about the arts and so forth would still exist, even if all religious sentiment had been removed from mainstream culture – well why not the same for cruelty and violence too?  Clearly if it doesn’t need religion to invoke these impulses then the entire argument is redundant.  So that the project of getting rid of religious belief wouldn’t make any difference!  Which brings us back to square one.  Religion is not evil!