Prof Alice Roberts, the broadcaster, scientist and author, has been filming this week for the third series of Channel 4s Britains Most Historic Towns, after a five-month gap. The last time we were out, back in March, people were pulling the shutters down around us. We felt very nervous. I drove home that evening, and stayed there, she says.

Despite the hiatus in filming, Roberts has been remarkably productive during lockdown and its long tail. Her first childrens book, Human Journey, a story of ancestral migration, will be published this week, while a much bigger book, Ancestors: A History of Britain in Thirteen Burials, going back to the depths of the Ice Age, is due out in early 2021.

Roberts has also found time to co-author The Little Book of Humanism, a pocket-sized guide to the meaning of life and death scattered with quotations, mini-meditations and illustrations, published last week.

Roberts, who became president of Humanists UK last year, says she has come across many people who, on learning about humanism, say: Thats me! Thats what I think, I just didnt know there was a name for it.

I found there was a lot of fantastic writing on humanism but it tended to be quite hefty tomes, she says. I like those books that you have lying around and dip into, that offer a bit of inspiration. So Andrew Copson [the chief executive of Humanists UK] and I cooked up a plan to produce this little guide.

She hopes the book will be a lovely introduction to the ideas of humanism for those thinking about humanist ceremonies to mark lifes big events, such as marriage, birth and death.

In their introduction to the book, she and Copson write: Throughout history there have been non-religious people who have believed this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives using reason and humanity to guide us.

These people have looked to scientific evidence and reason to understand the world. And theyve placed human welfare and happiness as well as the welfare of other sentient animals at the heart of how they choose to live their life.

Today people who hold these beliefs and values are called humanists. There are millions of individuals around the globe who share this way of living and looking at the world even if they havent heard of the word humanism and realised that it describes what they believe.

The quotations in the book, which come from ancient philosophers such as Epicurus and Mencius through to contemporary literary figures including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith and Wole Soyinka, are intended to show that humanism is not a new idea, but has a deep history going back thousands of years.

Roberts, whose parents attended church every Sunday, became an atheist as a teenager. But atheism is defining yourself by an absence of something. Humanism is a positive choice to base your morals on your own human capacity.

At the heart of humanism, says Roberts, is the idea that humans can be deeply moral beings without having some external source of goodness to either impel or encourage them to behave well. Living a good life comes from you, from employing your own human faculties of reason and empathy and love.

Humanism is a general philosophy or framework for life, rather than a movement or an organisation that people join, she says. But Humanists UK is extremely needed. The organisation helps train humanist celebrants, supports people across the world who are persecuted for their non-religious beliefs, and provides a much-needed voice for humanism, she says.

Religion still carries immense political weight in the UK, despite the steep fall in the proportion of people who define themselves as religious, she says. The UK is the only country in the world apart from Iran that reserves places in its legislature for clerics, with 26 Church of England bishops sitting by right in the House of Lords. And yet we think of ourselves as a progressive nation!

The C of E also plays a huge role in the education of children, with a million children in its schools and increasing involvement in multi-academy trusts; Roberts says she suspects the churchs influence over the curriculum will continue to grow. Education has been an area of some controversy for Roberts, who has always been open about sending her own children, aged seven and 10, to a local C of E primary.

I live in a rural area, and my children werent offered places at non-faith schools, so I didnt have a choice. I was very open with the school about my humanist beliefs, and Ive been a school governor. I havent withdrawn my children from assembly as it felt divisive to remove them from the occasions when the whole school gets together, she says. But they say prayers in the classroom, which isnt something that should be happening in the 21st century. It goes beyond being taught about Christianity to indoctrination.

Her children are returning to school this week, a move which Roberts views with some anxiety as three of her family of four are asthmatic. We know that reopening schools will increase transmission of the virus. Most people dont have space in their houses in which they can isolate themselves if theyre vulnerable and of course, some families will have members who are extremely clinically vulnerable, and who have been shielding.

Theres been no investment in more space or teachers in schools, so many children and of course, teachers are going back to normal class sizes, in poorly ventilated classrooms, with inadequate social distancing and unclear, inconsistent guidance on face coverings. Teachers and heads are clearly doing their best in a difficult situation. I think everyones anxious, arent they?

She has not been impressed with the governments handling of the Covid crisis: The most gentle way of saying it is they could have done better. OK, they are dealing with something that is completely novel, but there has been a failure of policy making and communication. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started out wanting to give the government the benefit of the doubt. But their erosion of public trust has left me doubting them very much indeed, she says.

The pandemic has led to people asking questions about the meaning of life and death, and what really matters to them. In the past, people were more likely to turn to religion in times of crisis than look to other sources of guidance, Roberts says. But there has always been an alternative the humanist approach and in the UK today, where most people are now not religious, that alternative is more relevant than ever.

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Alice Roberts: 'Atheism is defining yourself by an absence. Humanism is a positive choice' - The Guardian

The arrest and subsequent disappearance of Mubarak Bala, an avowed atheist from a prominent Muslim family in Kano and an engineer by profession, illustrates the fragility of human rights and the rule of law when an individual directly challenges the norms of conservative society in Nigeria. Bala says he rejected Islam and embraced atheism following exposure to a video of the beheading of a Christian woman in 2013 "by boys about my age and speaking my language." The immediate cause of his arrest was his Facebook post calling the Prophet Mohammed a terrorist; a group of lawyers in private practice complained about it to the police.According to Bala's wife, following his arrest four months ago, he has been denied access to a lawyer, contrary to a court order. She has been unable to contact him, and the authorities have refused to respond to inquiries about him. Now she is asking for "proof of life," implying the possibility that he has been extrajudicially murdered.The response of Bala's father and older brother to his 2013 profession of atheism was to have him committed to a mental hospital where, he says, he was beaten, sedated, and threatened with death.

Under a northern Nigeria version of sharia (Islamic law), blasphemy is a capital crime, though execution is rarely carried out.Under nation-wide, secular law, the penalty is two years imprisonment.Assuming Bala is still alive, the disposition of his case may depend on the legal system under which he is tried. Nigeria's federal constitution explicitly guarantees absolute freedom of religion; yet, in a seeming contradiction, blasphemy (of which Bala's Facebook post would seem to be a clear example)is a crime, though lesser than under sharia.

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If Bala is dead, it should not be assumed that it was necessarily at the hands of the security services.Conditions of incarceration promote disease, especially when prisoners are denied access to their families, as Bala has been. It is also possible that fanatics have taken justice into their own hands and murdered him, perhaps in an "honor killing."Nigeria, alas, has a culture of impunity; if Bala died under embarrassing circumstances, authorities at any level might successfully cover it up.

The Bala case raises multiple hot-button issues. His public embrace of atheism is a direct challenge to the patriarchal authority of his father, his elder brother, and, indeed, his entire distinguished Islamic family. His profession of atheism is a direct assault on traditional, northern Islamic society when it is under siege from the radical Islam of Boko Haram, but also (perhaps more assiduously) secularism and Christianity in the more advanced southern part of the country. Blasphemy is viewed as warranting death in other conservative Islamic societies, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as well as among northern Nigeria's Muslims. Bala's lack of access to a lawyer despite a court order highlights the weakness of the rule of law.

Atheism is seen as an assault by both Christian and Muslim Nigerians, even if the focus of the two is often different. Popular reaction to atheism is reminiscent to that of homosexuality. The draconian laws against the latter, including the possibility of the death penalty, were equally supported by Christians and Muslims during a particularly intense period of religious rivalry. Atheism, blasphemy,and homosexualityare perceived as, somehow, assaults on the family.Yet, as governance at all levels deteriorates, it is the family that provides the context and the safety net in which Nigerians live out their lives.

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Nigerian Atheist Arrested and Disappeared - Council on Foreign Relations

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Image Credits: National Geographic, September 1999, Kashmir: Trapped in Conflict

Sheikh Shahid

The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism; not Europe versus America; not even the East versus West. It is whether men can live without God. Will Durant

OUR evening tete-a-tete turned into a solemn conversation when a friend remarked, I am waiting for someone to return from his grave and set me free; in response to my question Are you sure there is no God?

The terse conversation makes manifest the ambivalence and the curiosity of humans befuddled with the question of God. Is there some supernatural intelligent design at work or are we left in lurch in a godless pit? Perhaps, the thought of the supernatural and its denunciation is as old as thought itself. But historians of ideas trace the origins of disbelief from the 6th century BC Ionian or Milesian philosophers like Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus one of the Ancient Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. They are called physical philosophers as they rejected everything else which was beyond the natural and tangible confines of this universe. Their ideas led them to ask some of the big questions that confront human mind, like the ultimate origin of this world and two centuries down the times lane their ideas ended up in the atomistic theories of Leucippus and Democritus. These Milesian philosophers iconoclastic worldview was in sharp contradiction to the traditional mythological writers like Homer. They are believed to be the first to have rejected the mythological explanations and instead put their weight behind the naturalistic worldview. If earlier, the workings of this world were explained by the nitty-gritties of mythology, the Ionian philosophers believed that the world was a self-sufficient system working in accordance with the laws intelligible enough for the human mind. No longer was the unrequited love the undoing of Aphrodite, no longer did a man act reckless because Athene willed it, and no longer did Zeus take away anyones wits. Many centuries later, this naturalistic view would echo in the words of Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, where he describes an atheist as someone who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world.

This pre-Socratic period could be said to have commenced the scientific outlook, though not in the current experimental sense. However, this radical turn of thought did not replace mythology by science only, rather it was replaced with a rational explanation in general. For instance, Herodotus History is populated with mythology so that the gaps are plugged while Thucydides wrote perceptible history dotted with facts or in Bernard Williams words, the history of Thucydides aimed at telling the truth plainly. So, we could argue that what supersedes myth is rationality. So that there is only room for reason, evidence and opinions which are wide open to rational scrutiny. Therefore, the naturalism of Milesian philosophers stems from rationalism which in turn is the fundamental basis of Atheism.

Through the Islamic Lens

The Islamic word for Atheism is Ilhaad, which literally means deviation. The word Ilhaad is derived from an Arabic root word lahad, which is used to describe the grave where a trench is dug straight into the ground and then a side pocket is carved for the deceased. The side pocket marks a deviation from the main trench. So, in this sense Atheism is considered a deviation from the natural or straight path. From the Islamic perspective, Atheism could be said to have emerged from the 8th century Dahriyya movement, who were empiricist thinkers believing that only through empirical means could knowledge be acquired. They reasoned that everything in this universe always existed as it is, hence there is no need for the inclusion of a creator. Faraj al-Isfahani in his book Kitab al-Afghani mentions Abu Hanifa, the famous Islamic jurist and the founder of one of the Islamic schools of thought, who debated many Dahriya in the 8th century and intellectually confronted their claims. There were many other Islamic scholars like Al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Jawzi, Muhammad Shabab, Abu Isa al-Warraq, Ibn Qutayba etc, who responded to the Dahriyya claims of disbelief. In his book Kimiyai Saadat (The Alchemy of Happiness), Al-Ghazali has described Dahriyya as reductionists bereft of any holistic understanding of the universe and its purpose. He compares them with ants on a piece of paper that cannot lift their eyes from the ink and thus fail to see the writer who holds the pen.

Beginning of Avowed Atheism

Historians agree that the first use of the term Atheism could be traced down to the Greek scholar John Cheke in his translation of Plutarchs On Superstition. However, many historians are of the opinion that the avowed atheism did not emerge up until late in the 18th century. David Berman, in his book A History of Atheism in Britain, writes that the first avowedly atheist work is Baron dHolbachs The System of Nature published in 1770 and first such writing Dr. Priestleys Letter to a Philosophical Unbeliever was published in Britain in 1782, the authorship of which is still disputed. James Thrower in his book Western Atheism A short History also unambiguously states that while some works of Democritus and Lucretius are atheistic, DHolbach was the first unequivocally professed atheist in the Western Tradition. Hamza Andreas Tzortzis has mentioned the 17th century Polish thinker Kazimierz Lyszczynski as having denied the existence of God in his De non existential dei wherein he writes that God is a creation of man and that humans created the concept of God to oppress others. Similarly, in 1674, Matthias Knutzen produced such atheistic writings and in 1700s Atheism saw the emergence of the intellectual promulgation in the likes of David Hume and Voltaire. Voltaire claimed deism accepting the existence of a creator while rejecting the revelation or word of God. For Hume, the idea of an omnipotent God was incomprehensible given all the suffering and evil in this world. The question of suffering and evil has led many generations of thinkers to ponder and question the existence of God. Professor Bernard Schweizer, after scrutinizing a number of literary works of many prominent writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Peter Shaffer, Philip Pullman, Elie Wiesel, Charles Swinburn, Rebecca West et al, comes to a conclusion that there is one common thread running throughout these profound works that all of them seem to be struggling with the idea of a merciful god in a world full of suffering. He says that the Misotheist (one who hates God) is psychologically troubled and it is quite true that the psychologically, emotionally, and physically wounded are most likely to turn away from God. Another avowed proponent of atheism was the 19th century member of British parliament Charles Bradlaugh who fought for atheism to be acceptable for society. In his essay Humanitys Gain from Unbelief he defends atheism and charges society of bearing prejudices against atheists and those who are falsely suspected of atheism.

The Four Horsemen

The currents of atheism were flowing subtly underneath without too many people heeding to the rhetoric of its proponents. And suddenly 9/11 happened and the fear and anger it created culminated in the prolonged War on Terror occupying the US and its allies in a protracted war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most importantly, it provided a renewed impetus to the emergence of a political manifestation of atheism. To describe this new brand of atheism, Gary Wolf, in 2006, while writing a column for Wired, a British magazine, hit on a catchy slogan New Atheism. Its protagonists were a group of three men who had attracted tremendous media attraction with their bestsellers. Sam Harris with his book The End of Faith (2004), Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion (2006), and Daniel Dennett with Breaking the Spell (2006). And in 2007, the movement secured a new hero when Christopher Hitchens published his book God is Not Great. All these books are first and foremost fueled with raging anger against religion and very much sustained by the events of 9/11.

The New Atheist will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; its evil. wrote Garry Wolf.

And precisely four days after the 9/11 attack, Dawkins wrote an article in The Guardian in which he mounts a scathing criticism on Religion writing:

To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

It is certainly true that the Four Horsemen, named in reference to the biblical image of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6.1-8), seen as a portent of the end times, sufficiently capitalized on the events of 9/11 and suddenly everyone was talking about religion and their writings gained a new relevance. God was thought to be vanishing from this world, never to come back from eternity. The Economist, in their millennium issue, had even wrote an obituary of God. But soon afterwards felt a genuine need for a volte-face in their 2007 issue In Gods Name, writing that The Economist was so confident of the Almightys demise that we published His obituary in our millennium issue. This is reminiscent of the moment when Time magazine, in their 1980 issue, announced Gods comeback by writing:

God? Wasnt he chased out of heaven by Marx, banished to the unconscious by Freud, and announced by Nietzsche to be deceased? Did not Darwin drive him out of the empirical world? Well, not entirely. In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anyone could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback.

Temptation of disbelief in Kashmir

While writing about any kind of dissociation from religion in the valley, its important to note that there is a lack of comprehensive survey in this domain. Also, given the conservative religious society, there is almost no history of avowed atheism. Therefore, the writer has sought responses from different people with different backgrounds and varied beliefs to see where Kashmir stands on the issue of disbelief.

Mohd Yusuf, a self-professed atheist, after completing his masters in Urdu, gained a keen interest in religious philosophy and he started reading from an eclectic trove of writings. It has been twenty years now, since he and his small circle of friends started sifting through the esoteric works of philosophy. He says that over a period of 10 years they met the highly educated people in universities and colleges, doctors and other professionals and found that out of these 20 to 25 percent were those who openly dissociated themselves from any religion. His further opines that about 10-15 percent of overall population in the valley might be irreligious and it could be more as most people fear to express their disbelief. The reason, he states, is the highly orthodox society and the intolerant clerics who issue fatwas on the slightest of suspicion.

Assistant Professor of comparative religion at the Central University of Kashmir, Dr. Nazir Ahmad Zargar, is of different opinion. He wrote in response to me:

I think atheism is newly born in Kashmir as a fruit of modern western education. Religious contradictions caused by pseudo street preachers, plethora of baseless opinions, posts, lectures on social media, unreal tussle between religion and reason, random reading, moral degradation, being religious meaning backward, and above all materialistic education system and jumping to conclusions without knowledge, are some of the reasons for getting astray

Saqib Ahmad, who did his masters in Philosophy from Aligarh University, commented that according to his own experience, atheism or skepticism is a growing trend among young generation who have uncensored access to the internet. Sajad Ahmad, assistant Professor of Mathematics and an autodidact in philosophy of religion, is also of the opinion that many young people, especially in humanities discipline, are getting liberalized with an unconventional outlook towards religion.

These are all free conjectures drawn from personal experiences of some curious persons. However, the exact figure is unknown for want of a substantial survey. Whatever the cause, belief and disbelief would play simultaneously till eternity. As Christopher Hitchens himself acknowledged in his book, though ruefully, that religion is ineradicable.

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The Temptation of Disbelief - Kashmir Observer

The Karl Marx sculpture in Chemnitz, Germany, August 31, 2018. (Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)Paul Kengors The Devil and Karl Marx is superbly researched, but makes no effort to persuade the unconverted.

Per its introduction, Paul Kengors new book, The Devil and Karl Marx, deals with the grim, disturbing, militant atheism and intense anti-religious elements of Marx and other founders and practitioners of communism. The history of the last century gives Kengor no shortage of examples of these elements, and, as a superb researcher, he is well suited to the task he has set himself. The book contains almost 700 footnotes, and he is clearly well acquainted with practically every biography of Marx in print. Nary a point is made about the life of Marx, or the Soviet Union, or domestic Communist infiltration, without citations from primary or secondary sources (in most cases, both).

The great virtue of the book is the attempt it makes to correct those who would separate Marx the man from the evils ushered in by Marxism. Kengors point of departure is the observation made by Aristotle that men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives. He sets out to show that the salient features of Marxist ideology are each and all putrid emanations from Marxs miserable, morally destitute private life. But he doesnt devote any significant space in the book to a forensic and dispassionate deconstruction of Marxs ideas; he merely contents himself with illustrating Marxs many flaws and implying that Communism can be explained in terms of those flaws alone. In so doing, he leaves himself open to the critique of those who would point out that an idea cant be refuted by simply observing or explaining its historical origins. So an extra chapter detailing how the ruinous results of Marxist ideology flow ineluctably from its intellectual premises, quite apart from the manifold defects of Marxs personal character, would have been welcome.

Nevertheless, Kengor does make a strong case that the philosophical output of a man who called for the ruthless criticism of all that exists might have been born of considerable personal unhappiness. It is not surprising, for example, that Marx, who once wrote Blessed is he who has no family in a letter to a friend about his own domestic unhappiness, also included the weakening of family ties as part of the path to his envisioned utopia. His inability to play well with others also seems to have prefigured the practice of his ideological progeny:

Marx was often dictatorial with his editorial staff and with his Communist League and Party. Payne chronicles what he aptly terms Marxs purges, a haunting bellwether for how various Communist Parties, from Russia to America to worldwide, would deal ruthlessly with internal dissenters who did not always toe the Party line.

The inconsistency of Marxs conduct with his ideology is, however, even more powerful than the consistency Kengor traces. Marx was a rank hypocrite, devoid of any integrity. He spent an extraordinary amount of time traipsing across Europe to estranged relatives, attempting to scrounge money off of them, since he refused to get a job. He was only too delighted when his mother, for whom he had no affection, died and left him 6,000 franks. His attitude toward the woman who gave birth to him is encapsulated by this line from a letter he sent to his wife, Jenny: She does not want to hear a word about money but she destroyed the I.O.U.s that I made out to her; that is the only pleasant result of the two days I spent with her. As Kengor observes, this flies completely in the face of Article 3 of the Communist Manifesto, which calls for the abolition of all rights of inheritance.

Marx and Jenny also retained a live-in nanny, bequeathed to them by her family. They never paid this woman, named Lenchen. She functioned as an indentured slave, upon whose body Marx would slake his sexual appetites when his wife was ill. The reader would do well to remember Lenchen the next time they hear something about the exploitation of the proletariat quoted from Das Kapital.

The books novelty is found mainly in its focus on Marxs work as a poet and a playwright, which, Kengor claims, displays a wicked affection for the figure of Satan. I have to confess, I dont find this argument particularly compelling. Its true that the Prince of Darkness does make several appearances in Marxs creative work, but, as Kengor concedes, there is no real evidence of any interest in the occult or in Satanism as such in these works. What we find instead is the same affection for the figure of Satan that tends to fire the imaginations of most violent political revolutionaries. Marxs one-time friend and ally, Mikhail Bakunin, eulogized Lucifer as the eternal rebel, the first freethinker, and the emancipator of worlds. Even John Milton, himself a devout Puritan, could not wholly resist the literary allure held out by the Devil to political insurgents, as Paradise Lost amply demonstrates. Marxs similar literary interest doesnt tell us anything we didnt already know about the man: He resented the givenness of the world and sought with fiendish fervor to remake it in his own image.

Although Kengors skill as a researcher is considerable, and the new historiographic ground he breaks is interesting despite the tenuous conclusions it leads him to, his book is in the end a failure, mainly because it exhibits one of the besetting sins of present-day conservative publishing: It is pitched at an incredibly narrow and siloed right-wing audience that is bound to already agree with everything Kengor has to tell them. Put simply, if you are not already a conservative Roman Catholic, youre unlikely to get very far into this book before putting it down. No attempt is made to convince people who fall outside this demographic of the authors thesis. Marxists, or even moderately progressive readers, will be so turned off by Kengors insults and his childish dismissals of his ideological opponents that they will rightly dismiss it out of hand. We come across fan service for the already-converted and bad writing besides in lines such as as usual, however, Marx was far from finished venting the acrid recesses of his bitter brain, and admirers of Marx will surely want to dispute that, given their fealty to their beloved founding father, for whom they make excuses for everything, and modern Marxist oddballs will find reasons to defend this nightmarish trashin a way, of course, they would never do if, say, a Republican president had penned such pernicious claptrap.

This is not to say that theres anything inherently wrong with converts, of course; the history of the conservative movement in America is littered with them. Some of our brightest luminaries have been socialists or progressives who were mugged by reality, to use Irving Kristols memorable phrase. Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell all began their political lives on the left before being won over to the right, and we can always use more like them but Mr. Kengors book wont produce any.

One of the most important principles of Sun Tzus Art of War is that its important to provide ones enemy with a golden bridge to retreat across. In intellectual terms, this means giving your opponent the respect necessary for them to climb down from their position and change their mind. They have to be able to do this while keeping their self-image and their dignity intact. Otherwise, they will simply dig in their heels. No human being is going to admit that his political aims are wicked and that his conscience is therefore corrupt. Consequently, its always advisable to at least attribute noble motives to ones ideological opponents. Unless they are particularly depraved, the reason that most Marxists want to see their political agenda enacted is probably not that they think its evil. They want to see it enacted because they think it is good. Conservatives must work to show them that they are mistaken, and that there are better means to fundamentally good and decent ends.

Kengors book shows no interest in that vital work. Take the following passage. After quoting extensively from a Communist writer, Kengor dismisses the content of the quotation out of hand without making any argument:

This, of course, is relativistic pabulum. It is the sophistry that, unfortunately, has evolved into the modern secular-progressive zeitgeist that dominates America and the wider West today. It is the childish philosophical silliness that has enabled modern leftists to redefine everything from life to marriage to gender to sexuality to bathrooms. When man makes himself his own Sun that is, his own God then he destroys his world.

Any writer worth his salt knows that the way to convince a reader of something say, that a given text is relativistic pabulum is to describe, explain, and take apart the opposing argument in such a way that the reader says to him or herself, Ah, I see. Thats some relativistic pabulum right there. Kengor doesnt care to show the reader what to think; he simply tells the reader what to think. Without addressing the claims of the text in question, he has a verbal hissy-fit about the modern Left, punctuated by a bald and pietistic theological assertion.

This last point needs expanding on, because the way the author employs his own Catholic faith throughout the book is also a case study in what not to do when seeking to persuade. Kengors references to Roman Catholicism leave an impression of expectation that the reader already shares his prior religious commitments. For instance, take Kengors invocation of Christs temptation in the wilderness:

As the two debated, the Living Bread told the tempter that man lives by every word from the mouth of God. Marx took not the side of Christ on that one. Of course, Marx rejected Christ in total. Communists are atheists after all.

What is the reader who doesnt already believe that Jesus is the Living Bread to make of this? And why the complete conflation of atheists and Communists? Doesnt Kengor want to convince his atheist readers that they, too, should abhor Marx and Marxism?

The book is also chock-full of appeals to papal encyclicals, writings, and statements condemning socialism and emphasizing its incompatibility with the Catholic faith. But the author fails to demonstrate why anyone who isnt a Catholic should care about what any of these popes or bishops have to say. The authority of their statements, as presented by Kengor, is not derived from the independent merits of their historical analyses but from the fact that they are men of authority within the church, which, again, cant mean much to anyone who doesnt share his faith. The books conclusion includes an appeal to Pope Pius Xs critique of the many roads of modernism. Kengor then sums up the Popes warnings in his own words:

We face a terrific danger as each and every person renders unto itself his or her own individual interpretation of truth and reality. Eventually, each person becomes his or her own god. Soon enough, it ends in Karl Marxs ultimate goal: the undermining if not annihilation of religion.

Theres more than a little irony involved in an author condemning the individual interpretation of truth and reality in a book. After all, why put pen to paper if not in an attempt to alter the individual readers interpretation of truth and reality? By the very end of the book, Kengor has descended into full-on homiletics, appealing to the anti-Communist Fulton Sheens predictably approving assessment of his own church:

The truth was to be found in Truth itself, in Himself. And Sheen was certain most of all that Truth existed in the Church that He, Jesus Christ, founded upon Peter, the rock upon which He built His Church. That Church would provide the foundation for surviving age after age and all the corrosive ideologies and isms and spirits that pervade it. The Church offers a constant reminder to people of the principles that do not change and which thus are those to live by, and those which will protect us from being children of our age.

As a general rule, writers should not make claims that they are unprepared to back up with explanation and evidence. Everything Kengor writes here would fit reasonably in a Catholic devotional book, but baldly asserting any of it in a political and intellectual history of Karl Marx and Communism is unprofessional and immature. Perhaps this brand of presuppositional pietism could be excused to a limited extent if it made room for all theists, or all Christians, seeking to unite them against the avowed materialism of Marx. But Kengor goes out of his way to alienate every one of his readers who is not in communion with the Bishop of Rome. First of all, the Protestant Reformation is presented as leading ineluctably to Communism:

[Marxs father] became Lutheran. It was a choice that allowed him more choices to define his own views. The son would seize upon such choices with wild abandon. . . . Thinking completely apart from the Church of Rome could pave the way for him to open the door to philosophical communism. Breaking with Rome was the break he needed to pursue atheistic communism.

Theres no attempt to back up this ludicrous assertion of a direct and immediate causal link between disbelieving the claims of the Roman church and embracing communism. Once again, Kengor confesses himself to be an opponent of thinking completely apart from the Church of Rome, something that the material conditions of the modern world all but guarantee, quite apart from the theology of the Reformation. Kengor also spills a lot of ink to establish that Protestant churches were easy targets for Communist infiltrators in America. This phenomenon is neatly contrasted with Catholics Reject the Outstretched Hand and The Catholic Worker Steps Up.

After defaming Protestantism as a staging ground for full-blown communism, forgetting all the while to mention any of the prominent Protestants who battled against Marxism in the 20th century, the author then sets about burning his bridges with Eastern Orthodoxy. Totally forgotten in the West today, he informs the reader . . .

. . . is that the Russian Orthodox Church surrendered to become a tool of the Soviet government (to quote Cianfarra) in order to unite all Christians and make Moscow the Rome of the Twentieth Century. Both the Bolshevik leadership and Russian Orthodox Church leadership alike wanted to contest Romes leadership as the primary head of the worlds Christians.

This claim is as historically illiterate as it is morally offensive. Insofar as the Orthodox Church behind the Iron Curtain accommodated itself to the Bolsheviks in light of the relentless and overwhelming persecution it experienced, it was with a view to survival, not to deposing the pope. The idea of Moscows being a Third Rome has furthermore been around since the conversion of the Slavs in the Middle Ages. It is not a Twentieth Century idea. Kengor further alienates Muslims alongside Orthodox Christians by deciding to defend, of all the things that Marx criticized, the Crusades. The Crusades, the reader is told, are greatly misunderstood and maligned to this day. The goal was to rescue those Christians and recover land and sites (such as the Holy Sepulchre) that had been theirs until Muslim invaders seized them violently. This would have been news to the Orthodox Christians of Constantinople, who were completely unperturbed by the Muslim invaders in 1204, when their city was sacked, pillaged, and burned to the ground by Roman crusaders during the Fourth Crusade.

In short, Kengors book fails to justify its own existence as a work of ideas. Virtually the only readers that it wont alienate are his fellow conservative Roman Catholics. It will undoubtedly serve to confirm the already-entrenched biases of some particularly excitable members of that demographic, but that is insufficient grounds for calling it a respectable work of political history, or even of polemics. Kengor should spend some time immersing himself in the work of C. S. Lewis. He might learn how to graft religious belief onto persuasive intellectual arguments in a winsome and non-sectarian way. If he can master that art and combine it with his remarkable prowess as a researcher, his next work will be a real treat to read.

Read more:

A Conservatives Revisionist History Aims at Marx and Misses the Mark - National Review

Hi and welcome back! Lately, weve been talking about Christian Smiths 2019 book Atheist Overreach. Weve covered the three questions that Smith asked and answered in his book. Now, lets look at the conclusion he draws from his work. Namely, he thinks secularization will ultimately fail making religion dominant once again across humanity. So today, lets see if his overweening optimism is really justified.

(Notes: In the book, Christian Smith specifically tries to make it look like hes talking about all religions generally, not just Christianity. However, the way he talks about religion makes it clear that he really means Christianity, and Catholicism in particular. Page citations come from the 2019 hardback edition. Please check out the Atheist Overreach tag for lots more posts about this book!)

Christian Smith makes a bold prediction at the end of his third question (p. 122):

we should not expect human societies to become thoroughly secularized on any long-term basis.32 Secularization as a process will likely be limited, contingent, and susceptible to reversal. The New Atheist dream of a fundamentally secular world will prove illusory.

Its quite an optimistic show of bravado. In reply, I must ask:

According to what research, exactly?

That citation, Atheism and the Secularization Thesis, comes from theOxford Handbook of Atheism. I cant access this work, alas. However, I can take a wild guess about it.

Thesecularization thesisholds that as societies modernize, they become more secular. As secularism rises, religious authorities own power fades.

Christian Smith aint buyin that idea. And I can absolutely see why hed dislike it.

Dominance is, after all, a zero-sum game. If someone wins it, then someone else must lose it. So if religious authorities are not dominant in a society, then secular ones will be. Ifreligion itselfdoes not dominate peoples lives, thensecularismmust. (Though sometimes, they take turns.)

The secularization thesis states that as societies become more rationally-oriented and modernized, their people lose their need for religious affiliation. They look instead to rational answers for their questions about the universe and themselves.

But Christian Smith doesnt think thats how it works.

Instead, he thinks that somehow religion will regain and maintain its dominance over societies. In his view, secularism will only arise briefly in scattered areas. Eventually, that spark will be snuffed out by religion again. (And to him, thats agoodthing.)

As for the trend toward secularization now, he sees it as a show of smug, teenage rebellion against the status quo. Hes even in the Wikipedia article about secularization saying so:

In contrast to the modernization thesis,Christian Smithand others argue that intellectual and cultural lites promote secularization to enhance their own status and influence. Smith believes thatintellectualshave an inherent tendency to be hostile to their native cultures, causing them to embrace secularism.[6]

The citation in the above quote comes from Smith bookThe Secular Revolution. I suppose that in Christian Smith-Land, as these elites calm down and embrace religion again. In other words, they allow religion to dominate their lives again.

InAtheist Overreach, he tells us something similar (p. 125):

Humans are not naturally religious in the sense that religion is inevitable in human lives and social institutions. But we are naturally religious in the sense of possessing by nature not only the complex capacities but also the recurrent, strong inclinations to cognize, believe, and observe religious ideas and practices. [. . .] But atheists have little reason to be confident that human societies are on a path toward steadily increasing secularization. Atheist overreaching has tried in various ways to deny or ignore these realistic conclusions, which accomplishes little good for anyone.

Its big talk. But where is this happening? What societies are going back to religion after embracing secularism? Whos allowing religious leaders to dominate their lives again?

He offers us no support at all for these astonishing claims nor for his sidelong insult to atheists. Instead of offering evidence, he throws a snotty little hissy-fit over atheists apparently ignoring Aristotelian ethics, and there, my friends, the book ends.

Over here in Reality-Land, meanwhile, Ive seen little evidence of any of this dream actually happening anywhere.

Im struggling to think of a single time in the past 50 years that any society has gone secular and then experienced a massive resurgence of religious dominance. Im just not coming up with anything.

Instead, what we see is a constant decline of religious affiliation in major religions.

Christians love to gloataboutMuh Chinese revival! MUH AFRICAN REVIVAL! Theyve done thisfor many decades.

These gloaters place their improbable stories only in dystopias, of course. There, the false promises of religion might be believed by achingly-desperate people who have no other options or hope.

By contrast, I have seen no evidence of this grand revival happening in any free societies that embrace human rights and civil liberties for all. At most, religious movements (like the Toronto Blessing) poach Christians from other groups or revive faith in lapsed Christians. Even then, these movements dont even ping the radar of non-Christians.

Once a society embraces secularization alongside human rights, religious dominance dissolves away.

The few times Ive heard about religion making a comeback it has been on the smallest scale imaginable. Moreover, such cases usually represent a form of religion that violates Christian Smiths entire narrative.

For example, Hellenistic pagans achieved legal recognition in Greece a few years ago. Norse paganism is apparently now the fastest-growing religion in Iceland. In both cases, the actual number of people involved in these religions is quite low (1.2% in the latter case). Thus, I doubt well see either country declaring itself pagan anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Christianity declines inboththose countries. In Greece, the decline looks especially dramatic. Greek Orthodox leaders are panicking there these days for good reason!

Even worse (for Christian Smith), these up-and-comers arent at all like Christians.

They arent trying to force their rules on everybody. Nor are they seeking to enshrine their demands into law. They arent annoying people with evangelism attempts, even.

(And yet they are still growing! Ill tell you this: When I was a pagan, I converted several peopleto Hellenismos but none to Christianity. And each time, it happened by accident. Christian evangelists only wish they could experience those conversations.)

In short, these new religious adherents do not seek coercive power over others.

And so they wont ever attain it.

Religious dominance hinges upon coercion above all other factors. Secularization is what we get when coercion is demolished.

As human rights and civil liberties get more and more firmly supported by governments and society, religious leaders power diminishes significantly. Most particularly, religious leaders lose the power to forcethat societys people to play along with their Happy Pretendy Fun Time Game.

Despite their frantic machinations, religion becomesoptionalin free societies. Once that happens, every adherent whowantsto leave,can. Every person who wants to reject religious recruitment, can.

And thats exactly what happens.

People leave. They refuse to join up. They reject religious leaders demands.

Before, religious leaders and adherents alike retaliated brutally against these rejections. But in a free society, they cant. The law ties their hands. It punishes and prevents religious overreach.

So coercion becomes the magic fairy-dust that brings religions to dominance.

By contrast, human rights, embraced and enforced, become the thunderclap that heralds secularization.

Ever wonder why world religions tend to be so authoritarian?

Wonder no more.

Humans might be naturally superstitious. Our cognitive development and our evolution into modern humans speak to that tendency.

But humans do not naturally tend toward organized religion. They dont naturally want to follow strict behavioral rules that make no sense. Nor do they want to spend their diminishing resources and finite lifetimes on stuff that theyre not excited about and doesnt seem to bring any benefits to anybody. Most especially, they dont want to be part of groups that might hurt them.

It always has been like that. It always will be.

Authoritarian groups like Catholicism demand a lot while actively harminga significant number of people. So those groups dont appeal to many people on their own. They cant. They never did.

Instead, such groups might win a few adherents here and there, as pagans are doing and as Christians did before they gained real temporal power. Where people can freely reject them, where they cant gain artificial support from governments, these groups always struggle to keep the lights on.

History teaches us a very sobering lesson:

In order to grow to world-religion status, religious leadersmustgain coercive power, and theymustkeep it.

I can see why Christian Smith a member of a flavor of Christianity facing a particularly pronounced decline nowadays might want to believe that sooner or later, some large number of people will spontaneously wake up one day and flood into his abandoned cathedrals and churches.

Christians like imagining themselves as being onthe winning team.

I can also see why Christian Smith a very scholarly member of that flavor of Christianity thinks that religions resurgence hinges upon atheists re-subscribing to Christian dominance based not on belief in gods, but something far more esoteric. He thinks theyll return because ofCatholicismshigh-flown philosophy and ethics. Catholicism in particular falsely imagines that it is the only real source of ethics and morality. Indeed, Smiths spun this narrative of superior ethics and morality all through his book.

But Catholicisms own history contradicts that narrative, even more so than just that of Christianity generally.

At the books very ending, Christian Smith laments that (p. 130):

All parties involved in the theism-atheism debates, in shared moral reflection, and in the public consumption of the findings of science should be interested in and committed to careful reasoning, rigorous criticism, and the making of justified and defensible claims.

Im feeling really helpful today. Thus, I offer some advice in return:

Maybe try shared moral reflection yourself sometime.

Living in reality is rewarding and spectacularly interesting. More than that, though, its the only real game in town.

NEXT UP: Its not just about hypocrisy anymore. Its about blatant, indefensible hypocrisy and the world is watching Christians reveal their true nature and goal. Tomorrow, lets see what really drives secularization.

(Hint: It sure aint cultural elites throwing teenage temper-tantrums about religion.)

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See more here:

'Atheist Overreach' Thinks Secularization Will Fail | Roll to Disbelieve: 'Atheist Overreach' Thinks Religion is Forever - Patheos