[Mb-civic] Beyond belief

[Jef Bek]

Commentary
Beyond belief

Justin Cartwright on religion's vain quest for the meaning of life

Justin Cartwright 
Saturday August 13, 2005

The Guardian

Near the end of his life, Isaiah Berlin wrote these words to a correspondent
who had asked the great imponderable:

"As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at
all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of
great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is
about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are,
believe me, pathetically mistaken."

It's time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that
religion is at bottom nonsense. I do not deny the good work of religious
people, nor the cultural effects of religion, nor its deep penetration into
our consciousness, but what I think we should acknowledge is that religion
contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our
actions and responds to our plight. As AJ Ayer said, if God has constituted
the world in such a way that he cannot resolve the phenomenon of evil,
logically it makes no difference whether we are believers or unbelievers.
The hypocritical respect now being accorded to Muslim "scholars", people who
believe that the Qur'an was dictated word for word by God, is just one
example of the mess we have got ourselves into by pretending to take
religion seriously. Disagreements about society can only be resolved in the
here and now on liberal principles of discussion and compromise. You cannot
have a sensible discussion with fundamentalists, be they Christian, Jewish
or Muslim, because they start from a different point.

What preoccupied Berlin as a philosopher and historian of ideas was the very
prevalent belief that somehow life is other than the one we live. "Things
are what they are," he was fond of saying, paraphrasing Bishop Joseph
Butler, "why should we wish to deceive ourselves?" He regarded the
essentially religious belief that we could forgo our freedom now for some
future society - Marxism was his particular bugbear - as ludicrous and
against all the tenets of common sense. Freedom was, in his view, the
freedom to conduct our own lives in our own way with as little interference
as possible. He had no time at all for the idea that we are living with a
false consciousness, which needs to be changed either by the religiously or
the ideologically enlightened. In an age when fascism and communism were
battling for the soul of Europe, he saw that they were essentially the same
thing, offering a sort of heaven for those who gave up their personal
freedom.

He had even less patience with the idea that life is politics. Instead, he
acknowledged that people could have conflicting aims, and he concluded that
politics was not the end of life, but the unavoidable activity to resolve
these aims. This is the liberal way for which Britain has - rightly - been
highly regarded. It is not some wishy-washy alternative to a more active set
of beliefs, but the starting point of a liberal and secular society. It
pre-supposes a rejection of explanations that involve miraculous events, and
unprovable explanations of existence and death. As a comfort or as a
delusion or as a moral guide, these views are unexceptionable in a modern
society, but when they assume a higher authority they have no value at all.

When South Africa was struggling to achieve a resolution after apartheid,
neither side was, at that stage, truly committed to democracy. The ANC was
at heart centralist, and the outgoing Nationalists wanted separate
provisions for whites. In the end, the ANC and the National Party could only
agree on a liberal democratic constitution; the unassailable logic of a
liberal democratic constitution had prevailed. It is the very fact that a
liberal democracy is not prescriptive, but values the processes above the
ideology, which has stood the test of time.

It follows that I believe we have to acknowledge happily that ethics has no
rational content, that we behave morally and responsibly not because God
commands us to do so, but because it is in our nature and because it makes
profound common sense to do so. I am not in any sense advocating active
hostility to religion, merely that we should as a nation distance ourselves
from religious explanations.

There is absolutely no reason for the Church of England to be represented in
the House of Lords nor for the Queen to be the Defender of Faith, (or -
fatuously - faiths), nor is there any reason to take the Muslim Parliament
or the Board of Deputies seriously if they claim to have special knowledge.
Their role, like every other group's in the country, should be to lobby and
persuade. We must eliminate any suggestion of a religious agenda: I have no
doubt that a substantial proportion of Muslims in this country believes that
western society is anti-Muslim and that the Iraq war was directed against
their religion. Not so long ago I interviewed the head of Palestinian
Broadcasting and asked him why his television station glorified suicide
bombing. His reply was interesting, perhaps even frightening: the TV station
had to reflect all strands of Palestinian thought. It may be
incomprehensible to true believers, but a secular state does not pursue
religious crusades, even if US president George W Bush sometimes appears to
believe that he has a divine sanction.

So the measures the government is taking against mullahs and against
religious incitement seem to me to be misguided. By pandering to the
credulous while cracking down on "extremists", we are trying to maintain the
fiction that we are semi-religious in a harmless, Hobbity sort of fashion.
Interestingly, Berlin, while himself absolutely against any "vaporous clouds
of nonsense" as guiding principles for society, believed that religions lost
their meaning when they compromised their beliefs. Muslims - and indeed any
other religious group - should be treated in a secular fashion: if they
stray into crime, that is what it is, crime, nothing else. We should make it
absolutely clear that there are no special political or religious crimes,
and we should make it clear that we do not tacitly promote religion in
government or in schools. What we have to promote above all else is the
liberal society, and this is best done by observing scrupulously the
principles of that society.

And that demands that we acknowledge that religion is, at base, nonsense.
The sooner we eliminate the idea that life has "some cosmic, all-embracing
libretto", the better.