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[Previous entry: "A quick review of the British national press"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Which book are you?"] 21 February 2004: "A matter of belief"
Norman Geras has some observations on an opinion piece in the Grauniad by one Mary Kenny, concerning planned guidelines for teaching atheism, humanism and agnosticism as part of religious education (RE) in the United Kingdom.
Yes - but where are the stories? Where is the narrative? Where are the images that illuminate a child's mind and develop that sense of history and purpose? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Lot's wife turning to a pillar of salt; the struggle of David and Goliath; the Good Samaritan; the puzzling tale of the Prodigal Son, to which all children chorus: "But it's not fair!" (No, it isn't: but sometimes relationships are like that.) Not to mention the cherubim and seraphim, the miracles and wonders, the pilgrimages and devotions, the El Greco paintings and Mozart masses, the Pilgrim's Progress and the lives of the saints.Let me deal with that last sentence first. The only way the examples cited do not require mention is if one is Roman Catholic, or possibly Church of England (after all, the only real difference in doctrine between the two is who is head of the church hierarchy; the Pope or the monarch of England). For the majority of Protestant denominations, which reject the concept of saints as crypto-polytheism and which do not conduct masses or embark on pilgrimages, these things are of little interest from a religious perspective. And while Orthodox Christianity may also revere saints, it has a different set than the ones Ms Kenny is thinking of. In short, when Ms Kenny says "Christianity," she means "Catholicism," and at the outside Anglicanism as well. Admittedly, those are the predominant denominations in the British Isles, but Ms Kenny couches her argument in too general terms to accept this geographical limitation; matters of faith and religion, in all their myriad forms, touch upon humanity as a whole. It's fairly common phenomenon, especially in Christianity, to claim that something hurts the interests of Christians as a whole when what one actually means is one's own specific denomination. But it's a historical fact that European culture grew out of Judeo-Christianity, and to deny this is mendacious.This, too, rings familiar, though I usually hear it as the claim made by American conservatives that the United States was founded on "Christian principles." Neither claim holds true, and wilfully disregards the influence of pre-Christian Greek, Roman, Celtic and Germanic culture, as well as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The "Common Law" legal system is not known as "Anglo-Saxon law" for nothing; it has its basis in pre-Christian Germanic tribal law. The "Civil Law" legal system is founded on pre-Christian Roman Law, with some modifications introduced by Napoleon. Theatre, poetry, our notions of aesthetics in the fine arts, all can be traced back to ancient Greece via Rome. Michelangelo's "David" may depict a Biblical character, but the aesthetic is entirely (and intentionally) Greco-Roman, right down to his uncircumcised penis. The greatest influence Judeo-Christianity has had on European culture is when it has incited revolt against itself. If one takes "richness of narrative" to be a determining factor in what should be taught in RE, the lines between subjects becomes rather blurred. By this argument, Greek mythology belongs in RE, not in the classics department, no matter that the polytheistic system which produced it is no longer practiced. Ditto for Norse, Celtic, Babylonian mythology, you name it. Conversely, if Joan of Arc belongs in RE, rather than in a history lesson, then why not also Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France, who in a mere five years of the Hundred Years' War (1369-1374) reduced England's vast holdings in France to narrow strip of land on the Bay of Biscay? Of course, du Guesclin did not claim to be divinely inspired, and does not carry the same appeal to the imagination, except for military history enthusiasts. What can atheism teach in its stead? It could teach anti-religion, of course: it could mount arguments for all the bad things associated with religious history. Yet anti-religion in itself is parasitic on religion - it depends upon religion existing in the first place.That's a rather fatuous argument. In practice, religion is so pervasive that it's practically impossible to find an atheist who hasn't been confronted with it at some point--usually a great many points--in his life and found himself driven to re-examine his (lack of) beliefs as a result. I think I can safely say that I'm a life-long atheist. My parents never imparted any concept of a supreme being to me, or of religion, even to deny it, which led to the following story: One of my earliest childhood memories, from when I was aged three or four, was talking to the six year-old girl who lived next door, and whose family was Gereformeerd, hardline Calvinist. She was telling me about going to church on Sundays to talk to God, and I, being entirely unfamiliar with the concept and not burdened with the concept of tact, asked her a number of questions about it. I remember my final statement was (in so many words), "So you go all the way to this place to talk to someone who isn't even there? That's ridiculous!" My mother tells me relations with the neighbours were frosty for weeks afterward, but that's not really germane to the story. I stress that my parents didn't tell me "there is no 'God,' despite what some people might tell you"; they simply didn't mention the topic at all, and thus I was a blank slate when I entered my first encounter with the concept of religion. Also, I think a very significant factor in this is that this my first run-in with religion did not involve an "authority figure" like a parent or a teacher, or some other adult. Now, if this had been a Chick tract or some biblical piece of guff, the clouds should have parted and sunbeams struck my face as I understood the self-evident truth of the existence of God, and his being the way and the light and all that jazz, and I should have hied off home demanding to baptised, right? But this wasn't some Bible story, it was real life, and I dismissed the whole notion as ridiculous. If the most basic precepts, of any religion, monotheistic or otherwise, utterly fail to capture the imagination of a three year-old with no pre-implanted notions, how compelling can they really be? The next year, my father got a job with an oil company and my family moved to England, where I ended up going to the local primary school, St. Stephen's in Canterbury, where the British state religion of Anglicanism was imparted in morning assembly five days a week; no separation of church and state in 1975, no sir. But I'd already encountered Christianity and resisted, and the following four years only taught me to be circumspect; they utterly failed to impart any religious inclination in me. Au contraire. The clincher, perhaps, was a story the headmaster (Mr. Wilson) told in the 1978-79 school year (when I was in the "first year juniors"), which recounted the tale of how, somewhere in the 10th century, a Frisian tribe caught three converted Danes chopping down their holy oak, a "symbol of idolatry." As it happens, my mother's side of the family is Frisian, and raw naked nationalism not only made me root for the Frisians in the story, but when the headmaster described Frisia as "one of the... states of Holland" (Friesland and Holland are both provinces of the Netherlands), my thoughts were "well, if he can't get his geography straight, why should I believe anything else he tells me?" At this point, I'll skip forward twenty years to late 1997, when a friend of mine and I were both working on a project at the ICTY analysing witness statements (mostly) from the Bosnian War. My friend had been raised a Catholic, and as we tried to drown the nightmares in alcohol after work every weeknight, I remember how he burst out one night and declared that if there were a god at all, and he allowed the events which we spent every day reading about to occur, such a god didn't deserve to be worshipped; what's the point of a supreme being if it doesn't do any good? At the time, the consideration hadn't occurred to me, but it reinforced my atheism, if only because what we had been told about god over the years (omniscient, all-good) was being proven false before our eyes, as the faithful of all religions were not spared from suffering. Hm. Originally, I set out to point out that it's impossible to be an atheist without having religion shoved down one's throat every so often, and that therefore rejection of religion is inextricably linked with atheism. This is not "parasitic on religion" any more than the act of vomiting can be termed "parasitic" upon indigestible food. As I said before, the greatest achievements of Judeo-Christianity in European culture were in inciting revolt (or "revulsion" if you prefer) against itself. But in the process, I do believe I've produced an "atheist narrative," of a child born and raised without religious preconceptions, who rejected religion when he came into contact with it. This would seem to bolster Norman Geras' counter-argument "against Mary Kenny that the lack of imagination here is entirely hers." Not only the lack of imagination, but also the lack of research. I will leave you with the story of Private Keith Lance of the 84th US Infantry Division (9th Army) in the European Theater of Operations, during the winter of 1944-1945. Pvt. Lance was that rare thing, an atheist in a foxhole, and paired with a devout Catholic. During a night of heavy shelling, Lance was driven to distraction by his buddy's incessant repetition of the "Hail Mary." Finally, Lance left the foxhole to "check on the guys," and scurried to the next hole. No sooner did he reach the next hole, or a shell landed in the one he had just left, with the good Catholic boy still in it (source: Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose). Make of that what you will. |
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