Still Unfunny

Exhausted as you clearly all are by my attempt to show that Catherine D's atheism is a classic Krausian symptom of a social problem it purports to be a cure for, I can't help having another go. It's Anzac Day and what else is there to do but keep thinking about fighting?

"A further problem for the Dawkins-Deveney approach to religion is that it tends to take myth and narrative - indeed seemingly all forms of communication that rely for their sense of depth on symbolism or indirect representation - as something patently ridiculous that can and should be mocked out of existence. Deveney is not really so daft as to think that the Bible stands or falls on whether it provides a literal account of the creation of the world or the history of human affairs, though she's forced to pretend on this score a lot of the time so she can make as much use as possible of the blowtorch of sarcasm against the dim-witted fundamentalism of our day and age. The trouble is that when she uses the same blowtorch against non-literalist takes on the Bible, the result is an even more volatile mixture of funny and unfunny doctrinaire nonsense. Parables degenerate into fairy stories, all religious institutions turn into cults (as Deveney lamely jested in God is Bullshit, there's only one letter's difference between cults and cu*ts) and there's nothing much more to cults than middle-aged charlatans extorting free sex from gullible followers or innocent children. . . OK, she was joking - it's was only for the sake of entertaining caricature that she attributed to herself the inverse Midas touch - turning everything religious to sh*t, or, more exactly, to magic (= literally the coercion of spirits by force of sheer charisma or arbitrary formulas). The question though is - how far does she want to take the joke? God is Bullshit, as I said in last week's post, is a transparent attempt to make a serious point in disguise - the serious point being - not just that you're a dope if you think Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin or the word made flesh, but that you're also a dope if you think these stories and ideas have any interest or meaning, except maybe as testimony to the incredibly stupid things human beings can be fooled into believing. Where the serious problem lies is in the denial that religious texts - or, for that matter, literary texts, poems, etc. - can convey truths, even if they aren't scientific truths, "demonstrative truths", truths that everyone must rationally accept, truths which exclude their contraries, etc. Here we have perhaps the biggest single contributor to the impression that the intellectual master of the atheist movement himself is as self-righteous and literal-minded a crusader as any 6-day young-earth creationist, i.e. Richard Dawkins' refusal to acknowledge truths whose truth depends (for example) on the story-like way they are elaborated and realised in a text as a whole human predicament [For more on this, try Harry Redner's aesthetics book, reviewed last year in these pages - Chapter 8 especially. CS]. While in his own defence Dawkins would probably say - and he'd be right to say - that there's a categoric difference between taking the Bible literally (or thinking that it contains all the truth) and taking the facts of nature literally (or thinking that they are the whole truth) - it's the entire aspect of the world that he can't see and doesn't have any feeling for or even want to think about - precisely what lies to one side of the literal scientific truth once the literal Biblical truth has fallen to the ground - that is his blindspot, as it is for a lot of the rather less self-assured atheist agitators who want to wheel Dawkins on as The Authoritative Smart Guy."