My open disdain for religious belief has, not surprisingly, sparked a heated response. Allow me to clear up some misconceptions.
If you’re not interested in my opinions, you should probably not read my opinion columns. If you’re not interested in my opinions on religion, I’ll see you next week.
A lot of people, however, do appear to be interested, judging by the barrage of responses I receive every time I dispute the notion that religion in general, or Christianity in particular, merits respect.
For background to where this all came from, see my initial response to Ernst Roets’s broadside against liberal democracy and individual liberty, followed by my reaction to the social media storm that, apropos of very little indeed, accused me of supporting ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘sexualisation and grooming of children’, and finally, my reply to Roets’s rejoinder to my own and another article in defence of liberal democracy.
There’s no need to revisit the substance of that debate. It would, however, be nice to clear up some misconceptions that emerged once the dust had settled. There’s no particular structure to this piece. It merely consists of some observations or clarifications that occurred to me.
Scurrilous
Let’s start with the allegation that I insulted Ernst Roets, which he personally explained as follows: ‘Dear Ivo, in a single article, you accused me of being illiberal, anti-liberal, populist, alt-right, prejudiced, superstitious, right wing (both politically and religiously), conservative, paleo-conservative, collectivist, anti-scientific, racist, regressive and nationalist, with a “disdain for individual rights” and someone that supports tyranny, oppression, apartheid and by implication, Nazism.
‘Then, after all of this, you conclude that I’m the intolerant one.
‘That’s what I referred to with my reference to your name-calling and insults.’
Let’s take it from the top. ‘Illiberal’, ‘right-wing’, ‘conservative’, ‘paleo-conservative’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘collectivist’ are all words I did use. They are not personal insults, however. They are well-defined terms that describe his stated opinions. He is welcome to dispute them, but name-calling, they are not.
Roets argued explicitly against liberal democracy and individual liberty, and in favour of some form of communitarian rule according to common ‘customs and traditions’, ‘in obedience to God’. How else would one describe such views?
I never used the term ‘anti-liberal’, though it would have been entirely appropriate and not in the least insulting, given what Roets did write.
I used the word ‘populist’, but not in reference to Roets. Same with ‘alt-right’.
I used ‘anti-scientific’, ‘prejudiced’, ‘superstitious’, ‘racist’ and ‘regressive’ to describe Christianity during the Middle Ages. If Roets took this personally, he is a lot more closely aligned with medieval thought than I had imagined.
I did not say Roets supports tyranny or oppression, although one could certainly draw the conclusion that he unwittingly does so as a consequence of his views.
I did not say he supports apartheid and Nazism. I mentioned those two ideologies as examples of attempts to geographically separate different communities, which I postulated as a possible solution to the dilemma of how to deal with dissenters in Roets’s communitarian vision. Since he did not propose this solution himself, the comparison couldn’t possibly imply that I believe Roets supports apartheid and Nazism.
That he takes all this personally, and describes it as ‘vitriol’ and ‘hysterical’ (terms that actually are insulting) only reveals his own insecurities. Perhaps I struck a nerve.
(Let me not be coy. I do think Roets is a racist and apartheid apologist. His entire ‘let’s split into self-governed communities’ schpiel is ‘separate but equal development’ wrapped in pretty new paper. But I didn’t say so.)
The accusation that I did little more than hurl insults and hatred at Roets, endlessly repeated by his social media fans, is demonstrably scurrilous. This was dishonesty on the part of Roets, presumably in an attempt to both smear me and avoid having to counter the substance of my arguments.
Christianity
The more controversial element of my argument, however, was my criticism of Christianity.
In my first piece, I disputed that it was indivisible from Western civilisation. On the contrary, I argued that it arguably retarded civilisational progress since the end of the Roman Empire, and certainly did so since the Enlightenment.
In my second piece, I was faced with the assertion that ‘God is good’ as a potential basis for defining what ‘good’ ought to mean in a political context. I pointed out various reasons to believe why a reasonable person might disagree.
I could have added (and have argued elsewhere) that merely being Christian doesn’t necessarily improve the odds of moral behaviour, either. In fact, researchers have discovered patterns of sexual abuse in religious settings, including ‘a startling and consistent picture of institutional secrecy and widespread protection of those who abuse children in religious institutions in ways that often differ from forms of manipulation in secular settings’. This is not limited to cults or fringe sects, but occurs in all the biggest denominations of Christianity.
Then there are evils like ‘conversion therapy’ for gay or trans children, and sexual repression for everyone else.
There is the problem that the Bible has been used to justify all sorts of evils, from plundering the new world and beating or killing its native inhabitants, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid.
I believe that to teach children to believe tall tales of miracles and violations of basic physics – including a God who made the light that distinguishes night and day a full three days before he made the sun that causes the light – is harmful to the development of critical thought.
Once you teach a child that they can accept assertions, no matter how fantastical, on faith, without evidence, you open them up to believing literally anything they’re told.
I object to teaching blind obedience to authority, especially if that authority is remote and incomprehensible.
This doesn’t mean that I hate Christians or think all Christians are bad people. Many – the majority, even – are charitable, kind-hearted people, even if I think their worldview is sadly unmoored from reality. Some of my friends are Christians, and I love them dearly.
What it does mean, however, is that I will not be governed under religious ‘morality’, nor accept that ‘God is good’. Nor can I accept religious morality as a sound basis for the government of any community, unless every member of that community consents to it.
Religious freedom
Some Christians who read my piece (or picked up stompies) said that I presented atheism or anti-theism as a liberal principle. That, it isn’t. Classical liberalism has nothing to say about the veracity or moral standing of religions.
Some of my fellow-contributors at The Daily Friend, and my colleagues at the Institute of Race Relations, hold views diametrically opposed to mine on the subject of religion. They have on several occasions written articles dissenting from my anti-religious opinions.
We share, however, the classical liberal advocacy of religious freedom, under which everyone is entitled to pursue their own faith in private, and the state favours no religion, nor imposes religious rules or practices upon anyone.
‘When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, “there ought to be a law,” you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap’, wrote Thomas Sowell.
Unlike fundamentalist Christians, who – with alarming success – lobby left, right and centre for laws that impose their moral beliefs upon more liberal Christians and non-believers, I do not seek laws or prohibitions against Christianity, or any other religion.
All I want – and this is a classical liberal principle – is not to have religious mores imposed upon me by law, or, as Roets proposed, by ‘community standards’. If you propose that, I’m going to say no, loudly, and probably more clearly than you’d like.
Religious freedom not only means the freedom to practice your religion, but also implies freedom from the religion of other people.
Woke leftism
My opposition to the religious right does not mean I am a ‘woke leftist’. Nor does my support for equal rights for everyone, no matter who they are or how they choose to live their lives, make me a ‘woke leftist’.
The left is socialist. I am not. ‘Wokism’, which I take to mean a brand of Marx-inspired critical theory and identity politics, is illiberal and racist.
Just because I do not share the anti-trans or anti-gay instincts of the religious right does not mean I approve of crude, explicit sex-ed material, or that I want to ‘groom’ children into sex with adults or convince perfectly happy pre-teens to have sex-change operations.
You laugh, but this is actually what religious conservatives say to me. They call me a paedophile or a groomer fairly frequently, merely for rejecting bigotry. There’s no hate like Christian love, eh?
The US culture wars love to present politics as a matter of two partisan, extreme pigeon-holes: right or left, Republican or Democrat, red-pilled or woke. It isn’t. Not only does American politics not translate well in South Africa, but classical liberals like me fit in neither pigeonhole.
As I’ve pointed out often before, classical liberalism opposes illiberalism on both the left and the right. Religious authoritarianism is just as problematic as socialist authoritarianism.
There isn’t even a single classical liberal pigeonhole. Some are personally conservative. Some are libertines. Some are religious. Some are non-religious, or anti-religious.
That’s really the point of liberalism: it enables people to hold different views within the same heterogeneous political society, provided they respect each others’ life, liberty and property.
Roets’s solution to differing opinions on matters such as these is to create a separate community for each opinion, so everyone in a community can be neatly homogeneous. That smells a lot like apartheid to me.
Morality
I’ve also been told that atheism, and the absence of a universal moral lawgiver leads to a lack of moral values, and that the communists were atheist, so Q.E.D.
Yes, the Soviets were atheist, but that had everything to do with not tolerating multiple centres of power. They wanted to establish the patriarchal state as the sole provider upon which citizens had to depend.
Atheism is merely the absence of belief in supernatural deities. It has nothing, whatsoever, to say beyond that. It does not propose political systems, nor moral values, nor anything else. It is just the absence (a-) of belief in god (-theism).
It wasn’t atheism that caused communism, but communist totalitarianism could not tolerate a powerful church.
It might sound appealing to anchor morality to some absolute reference frame such as a universal moral lawgiver named ‘God’, but since such a lawgiver does not exist, we cannot do so.
The religious person will then say, but that makes atheism ‘immoral’. It isn’t. It is ‘amoral’.
For morals, atheists have to turn elsewhere, such as humanism. Religious critics will say that such a secular morality is ‘relative’, or ‘grounded on nothing’.
That is, of course, not true. Secular morality reflects the use of reasoning and evidence over intuition and tradition, and of moral consequentialism over deontology.
In fact, the foundational principles of classical liberalism, namely the sanctity of life, liberty and property, themselves form an excellent basis for moral behaviour. I certainly measure a lot of policies and actions against this yardstick.
Virtually all religions share a broadly similar set of moral principles, though each adds unique flourishes. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that these principles were derived not from the infallible word of a supernatural deity, but from secular reasoning and the self-evident necessity for peaceful and prosperous social co-existence.
I would be more comfortable with someone who refrains from murder, theft and assault on grounds of reasoned self-interest, than I would be with someone who only stills their hand because some stone tablets from 3,300 years ago threatened them with holy vengeance if they didn’t.
If you need a book to tell you not to kill, I’m not sure how moral you really are. There’s a good argument to be made that a secular morality based in reason is superior to religious morality based on ancient myths.
Secularity
Far better questions would be whether (a) social morality has declined as the world has grown more secular, and (b) whether countries that practice religious freedom, but have many atheists, are morally or otherwise worse off than highly religious countries.
On the first question, you’ll get a fairly consistent answer from most people: of course morality has declined. In fact, a new paper in Nature shows (pop-sci version) that ‘people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations’.
However, the paper also shows that ‘people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion’.
‘Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced,’ the researchers conclude.
The second question has also been researched. ‘[T]he research suggests that religious decline is associated with a general shift towards valuing individual autonomy over traditions, but that this is not the same as selfishness or anti-social attitudes. In other words religious decline does not equal moral decline.’
Islam
My anti-religious views are not limited to Christianity. I feel exactly the same way about other religions, and Islam in particular. The reason I’m not ranting about Islam is not because they’d kill me. Christians habitually remind me of this, daring me, even, as if their own restraint is a point of pride.
Until fairly recently, their own responses to heresy, blasphemy or other ‘sins’ were equally brutal. The only reason they don’t still hang heretics or imprison sodomites is because they no longer have the political power to do so… thanks to the rise of liberal democracy.
I rarely talk similarly about Islam merely because I live in a country in which Muslims represent only 1.6% of the population, while Christians of some form or another are an overwhelming majority at 78% of the population. Christians have the political power to impose religious tyranny upon South Africa, which no other religion (or non-religion) can do.
Trauma and fear
My antipathy towards Christianity is not merely a symptom of some grave childhood trauma, as one patronising Christian decided for me. My experience with Christianity, though certainly not positive, was no different from that of millions of others.
I never questioned my heterosexuality, so unlike some friends of mine, I never suffered extra hatred or judgment from Christians for being gay. The physical abuse I suffered at home and school was not unusual for a child of my era, and I never suffered sexual abuse by a Christian (or anyone else).
I am not ‘angry with God’, or ‘running from God’. How could I be? I do not believe God exists.
If I am afraid of anything, it is not some god, or the possibility that hell might be real. I believe that when I die, I’ll go to the same place I was before I was born, and that doesn’t scare me one bit. My only fear is of religious authoritarianism, in much the same way that I fear socialist authoritarianism, or fascist authoritarianism.
There’s nothing pathological about my anti-theism.
It is also not some puerile rebellion. I’m not some young edge-lord. I have never read Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. I’m in my fifties now. My views were perfectly rationally formed, after long years of thought and experience.
Much of my opposition to Christianity I learnt directly from the words of preachers, in fact, or from reading the Bible myself (which I’ve done cover-to-cover, several times).
I don’t need ‘saving’, thank you very much. I’m perfectly happy with my life.
Unwise
Was it unwise of me to lay into Christianity or the Christian conception of God?
That much may be true.
It likely detracted from my main argument, which was to defend individual liberty and liberal democracy against the collectivism of communitarianism, conservatism and religious or other traditional mores.
It probably put off some religious people who would otherwise have agreed with me, and that is unfortunate.
On the other hand, I’m tired of always having to walk on egg-shells around Christians.
The religious right laughs at the left for being insecure snowflakes who need safe spaces to avoid being hurt by mere words. They sneer at ‘cancel culture’. Yet those very same people are the first to shriek about ‘insults’ and demand people be fired when someone dares to challenge their religious beliefs.
When someone proposes to violate the separation of church and state, and declares their particular conception of a god to be the definition of ‘good’, I shouldn’t have to submit in silent assent because I’m not permitted to disrespect their religion.
I can (and do) respect their right to hold their beliefs, but I am not required to respect the content of those beliefs.
Ultimately, that’s what it is about. If you don’t want a fight about how good your God is, then don’t pick one. Don’t land the first blow and just expect others to cave, out of some misplaced demand for ‘respect’.
Atheists and anti-theists have just as much right to express their opinions on religion as anyone else.
Still, our religious beliefs, or non-belief as the case may be, are probably better kept private. They do not belong in our political system or public law, after all, unlike ideas such as classical liberalism that stand against socialism, conservatism, identity politics, nationalism, communitarianism and all other forms of illiberal, authoritarian collectivism.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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