The empty myths peddled by evangelists of unbelief

John Gray
December 12, 2007

From where does Dawkins derive this faith in human freedom? Not from science. It comes from Christianity, which has always held that humans are different from all other animals in possessing free will.
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As a sceptic I am struck not so much by how much religious faith and secular humanism differ but more by how much they have in common. Both are tissues of myth, serving a need for meaning rather than an interest in truth.

The chief difference is in the quality of the myths. Though they are not true or false in the way scientific theories are true or false, myths can be more or less truthful in reflecting the human situation. In this sense the Genesis story is a truthful myth. It tells us that knowledge need not give humanity life or freedom; it may only bring slavery and death. There is no prospect of a return to innocence - once the apple has been eaten from the tree of knowledge there is no going back. Modern secular thought contains nothing as profound as this ancient biblical story.

While the myths of religion express enduring human realities, the myths of secular humanism serve only to conceal them. It may be a dim sense of the unreality of their beliefs makes militant atheists so vehement and dogmatic.

One searches in vain in the company of militant unbelievers for signs of the creative doubt that has energised many religious thinkers. While theologians have interrogated their beliefs for millennia, secular humanists have yet to question their simple creed. Evangelical atheism is the mirror image of the faith it attacks - without that faith's redeeming doubts.

John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Doubleday Canada).
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Gus: What a lot of crap...

I was going to leave my remark at that : "what a lot of crap" ... but I felt there was a need to reject the false rubbish posted by John Gray about the mind and life of the atheists. First, at the beginning of his badly thought out tirade he writes "A new breed of missionaries is trying to convert the world. Evangelists of unbelief..."

Wrong. There could be as many forms of atheistic behaviour as there are atheist people... Few are pushing barrows except when provoked... Most atheists do not try to convert the world. Those who do, are not evangelists but spruikers of a different kind trying to show the pitfalls of dogmatic religion. These spruikers have an opinion and should be allowed to express it.

Further more, despite religious fervour having taken over the construct of our societies, for many millenia, atheists have existed... Yes, many people who have not subscribed to a religious belief have plighted the earth, accepting its offerings while modifying their surroundings to achieve a greater security, without any other purpose than to be... Sure, they are not sung about in history, nor are they mentioned often, because it suited the religious mob to spruik only about itself and its own navel, while the "atheists" lived "hidden" to avoid usual persecutions and such annoyances.

Should people try to convert an atheist, the said people could be subjected to a hard questioning about their own faith, for good reason... Sure "there is more to religion than beliefs", but the same can be said about atheists. Most atheists do not hold on to a tissue of myths, but are often prepared to test the fabric of nature, including the cosmic universe, in a relative understanding of knowledge.

This is the essential difference between religion and an atheistic concept. Religion approaches the world and its stacks of events via an absolute structure, with a deity at the top. Atheism accepts the relative concept of the universe. It is a very powerful singular difference. No mirror imaging here.

Religion is static, locked into its dogma, apart from small bits that have to be fiddled with to suit events that do not fit the dogma, including evolution... and despite this it is opened to interpretation about the bits. Atheism is deliberately flexible and adaptable within the realms of perception and expression. Relative freedom in this set of value is much harder to grasp, yet it is a lot more genuine, than the freedom in a religious belief that separates humans from the animal world. Wrong premise this is.

Most atheists would see themselves as part of the animal world with a few extra natural attributes — say natural evolved tooling — that give us, humans, what most people believe, a greater awareness and flexibility of adaptation than other animals. But we, humans, are still bound by important natural factors such as having to eat, having to defecate, having to sleep and having to gather our food — whether we are hunter, gatherers or working in an office to pay for it at the local grocer...

Greater freedom thus is relative to our desire to participate into a collective or not and our desires strongly depend on our education in which many myths have taken over our personal power of observation and discovery. In fact I have long expressed the concept that our memory is our most important tool. But we foul it easy...

The human memory is a very complex natural bio-tool in which — I will express here in a very simplified manner a complex formulation (one day, I might extract what I wrote in some of my previous works about this subject) — the amount of uncertainty is larger than the amount of certainty, compared to the proportion of such in many other species. Certainty here bathing in more or less automatic relations to instincts, basic biological maintenance and our accepted "beliefs" — beliefs that often thwart our ability to manage our individual reactivity efficiently.

In short we have more brain power than we need for survival, so we spend time filling the rest of our uncertain brain with "absolute" rubbish... arresting the amazing power of adaptation of the human brain... and arresting our personal natural curiosity.

John Gray should go back and study all the Greek and Roman philosophers BC to get a fix on beliefs, myths and absence of beliefs... And he should study Jean-Paul Sartre in conceptual details as well...

So, despite his "professed" scepticism, John Gray's idea of freedom is still cast into the "Christian" mold — not in the natural and extended atheistic visualisation of freedom.

At extreme, should this atheistic freedom be dangerously managed, it can lead to massive psychological problems and unsavoury behaviour. But so can the religiousness of the lynching mob.

The difference here is that a true "modern" atheist is often less dangerous to a mob, considering his relative understanding is often very carefully studied (as opposed to learned, unquestioned outside the dogma framework) — and the dangers of unbridled freedom are often limited to a simple surrounding. A mob, or some loose individuals, from a religious dogmatic base, geared to go and evangelise, can often be more dangerous by promoting apocalyptic rubbish and go to war on a whim and a lie.

Hitler was not an atheist... Hitler dug deep into religion dogma to get his "inspiration"... Be aware.

More could be said to refute John Gray's rubbish... I'll keep the rest of my counsel.

Except say he expressed a lot of crap.

I forgot to mention in my tirade above, to the dismay of many people — the realm of "spirituality"...

To me, spirituality can be what each of us wants to comfortly believe of our "limitless" life to avoid contemplating the natural finite void of our singular death...

Spirituality is thus an ego-driven non-acceptance of who we are, which, as a learned practice, is also designed to make us accept most of the misery done onto us by others...

My "belief" is that we are not fallen angels, but monkeys on the rise. The sky is the relative limit... We should take care of our selves and care of the whole planet in this context, not in the context of using (abusing) the world as if it had been given to us by a god...

Send me brickbats if you think I'm off the planet...