John Gray on delusions.
One reads something and considers it an interesting perspective on a balance between theism and atheism.
Two days later, I read this absolute stunner of an excerpt from a book by John Gray. I don't know what to say. At an intuitive level, much of what he says makes immense sense.
Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody....
It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to explain the appeal of religion in terms of the theory of memes...He recognises that, because humans have a universal tendency to religious belief, it must have had some evolutionary advantage, but today, he argues, it is perpetuated mainly through bad education....Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history, and if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this. Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory...
The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society....
Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.
Powerful and I suspect that Gray may well love anything that has nothing to do with 'hope' or 'progress'. Essentially, a Cthulhu worshippper minus the zealous fanaticism. Gray shall now be sought out and consumed.
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mrsgollum) wrote,
amused
