Here at work, I've had some extra time to do some stumbling on the website Stumble Upon, which is pretty much the slightly more manly version of Pintrest. I came across this article by Francis Spufford in introducing his new book Unapologetic. At first read, I always begin to get uncomfortable at the first couple sentences of his thoughts. But as I kept reading, I found that he had some very interesting, valid, and refreshing points to make. Here's a bit of what he had to say:
My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so,
she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go
to church.
This means as she gets older there'll be voices telling her
what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a
teenager they'll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe
in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and
suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we're too stupid
to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly
complex intellectual structures on the marshmallow foundations of a
fantasy. That we're savagely judgmental. That we'd free murderers to
kill again. That we're infantile and can't do without an illusory daddy
in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children
by implanting a sick mythology in young minds. That we teach people to
hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we
want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend, that we
believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourseves before a god who has
the reality-status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels,
preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason,
censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.
But hey, that's not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it. Or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.
As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, but at least they assume
there's a thing called religion which looms with enough definition and
significance to be detested. In fact there's something truly devoted
about the way that Dawkinsites
manage to extract a stimulating hobby from the thought of other
people's belief. Some of them even contrive to feel oppressed by the
Church of England, which is not easy to do. It must take a deft delicacy
at operating on a tiny scale, like fitting a whole model railway layout
into an attaché case.
No: the really painful message our daughter
will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New
Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject,
either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're
wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no
necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed
ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that
stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some
important or respectworthy or principled way, either. Believers are
people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put
themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human
behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that
invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who,
on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a
funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised
content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently
not noticing that childhood is over. And as well as being childish, and
abject, and solemn, and awkward, we voluntarily associate ourselves with
an old-fashioned, mildewed orthodoxy, an Authority with all its
authority gone. Nothing is so sad – sad from the style point of view –
as the mainstream taste of the day before yesterday.
What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be
guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of
continual, nervous resistance to reality. We don't seem to get it that
the magic in Harry Potter, the rings and swords and elves in fantasy
novels, the power-ups in video games, the ghouls and ghosts of
Halloween, are all, like, just for fun. We try to take them seriously;
or rather, we take our own particular subsection of them seriously. We
commit the bizarre category error of claiming that our goblins, ghouls,
Flying Spaghetti Monsters are really there, off the page and away from
the CGI rendering programs. Star Trek fans and vampire wanabes
have nothing on us. We actually get down and worship. We get down on our
actual knees, bowing and scraping in front of the empty space where we
insist our Spaghetti Monster can be found. No wonder that we work so
hard to fend off common sense. Our fingers must be in our ears all the
time – la la la, I can't hear you – just to keep out the sound of the
real world.
The funny thing is that, to me, it's belief that
involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of
which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion
after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual,
fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so
thoroughly incentivised by our culture. Take the well-known slogan on
the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that's an utterance by the
hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they're
pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus
says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life."
All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one,
the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it
doesn't even have time to wave goodbye? It isn't "probably". New
Atheists aren't claiming anything outrageous when they say that there
probably isn't a God. In fact they aren't claiming anything substantial
at all, because, really, how would they know? It's as much of a guess
for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here
is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of
neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is
great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To
say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that
mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be
purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a
bizarre category error.
But not necessarily an innocent one. Not
necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The
implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural
state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire
preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would
revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong
with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place,
that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing.
Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in
effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living
where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are
visible. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on
adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a
good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent
muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable
income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information
exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference, in this
case, that the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of
concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of
God's possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic
application of Reason......
You can continue reading the rest of the article HERE.
Happy Saturday!
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