Is Religion a Force for Good... or Would We be Happier Without God?
In the week that militant atheist Christopher Hitchens challenges Tony Blair to a debate about God, we
ask five leading thinkers: do we need a deity?
Cristina Odone: "I must stress here that
I embrace the concept of religion as faith rather than simply a structure like
the
Jon Cruddas: "I agree. I think the
generic element of all religions is the search for compassion. That's quite a
good departure point in terms of how you live your life
the search for virtue
in our world."
Evan Harris: "I agree with [Cristina] only in the
sense that she's appropriated to religion obvious moral rules that apply
equally to people without religion. So you can't really defend religion by
claiming unto religion rules that predated them, that are statements of the
obvious. And the real question is, 'What would the world be like without
organised religion'? Everyone has beliefs it's not reasonable to suggest that
people wouldn't have beliefs, mystical or otherwise. I think I'm with John
Lennon on this, that it would be a much better place in terms of peace.
"There's a wish to label those people who
believe that there should be less of a role for religion in public policy, as
somehow extreme, when they're not extreme. I've looked carefully at what's been
done in the name of religion..."
Cristina Odone: "And in the name of
secularism, Evan? Fascism, communism?"
Evan Harris: "All that I could find in the name of
atheism or secularism is a ban on head-scarves in Turkish universities and a
proposed burqa ban in
AA: Anthony, you're nodding in agreement. But is
there an argument that the good perhaps even in atheist people today is
something that is the result of religion's influence?
AC Grayling: "No. If you think about the dominance
of Christianity in
Samia Rahman: "I see religion and
the practice of religion as often an extension of [an] individual's personality
and their existing thoughts and beliefs and their characteristics. And so I see
this oppositionality between belief and non-belief as
almost a moot point. We have shared values. Religion offers many people a
framework and a moral compass and they navigate through the framework and
through the guidelines that their religion offers them
and they come to their own conclusion and their own way of living. So I do have
difficulty with the dichotomy between belief and non-belief and I think we can
look at the intersections and where we do agree and gain something from that,
rather than constantly positioning ourselves as the other."
AA: What about the charge that [religion is] also
responsible for many very negative things?
Cristina Odone: "What I think we who
believe are very conscious of is that we want to take the best of religion and
we don't want to take on the bad bits. We don't want to in any way condone
paedophile priests. We don't want to in any way condone the lachrymose
televangelist in
AC Grayling: "I welcome tremendously the
concessive and inclusive attitude of people who have a faith and say they want
to co-exist with other people who have [no] faith, [who] cherry-pick the best bits
of their religion and leave the undesirable bits, the anti-gay, the anti-women,
the burn-them-at-the-stake bits. I welcome that. And that is a function of our
secularism, in fact. The fact that since the Enlightenment, the churches, which
when they were in power were able to exercise tyrannical control over people's
lives and thoughts and beings, they've been pushed back into a corner. It's
really interesting that wherever religion is on the front foot, it bears down
in a very impressive [way] on people. Look at the Taliban. Wherever they're on
the back foot, they suddenly become very friendly, very concessive and very
tolerant. And that's where they should be, very firmly on the back foot."
Cristina Odone: "I think that what
we have seen in the past may have been the oppression by some church
institutions of people who were not believers. What we're seeing in the present
is the oppression, the hunting down of believers, whether it is the Muslim
community who feel every day that they open the newspaper, 'Oh my gosh, it's
anti-Islam again', or the Christian BA worker who is not allowed to wear a
cross, or the school play that is not allowed to be called the nativity
play."
Evan Harris: "Clearly some religious minorities
are oppressed. But I don't think we can accept, and I don't think one should
accept, the idea of Christian victimhood in this country. Because there are
huge privileges accorded to religion and particularly Christianity in this
country. There are charitable dispensations for religion. Religions are
allowed, uniquely, the exemption to discriminate against people on the grounds
of sexual orientation in a way that gay people are not allowed. It's only
religious schools that can discriminate against the non-religious or the
other-religious. So I don't think we should accept for a moment this religious
victimhood. But a liberal, secular democracy is the best protector of religious
freedom, because it says that we need to guarantee the absolute freedom of
belief. There is no theocracy that has ever provided for religious freedom, let
alone emancipation of women and equal rights for gay people."
AC Grayling: "I second all that. There's an
important additional point of view, that religious organisations should
recognise themselves for what they truly are, which is self-constituted
interest groups. They're civil society organisations which exist to put a point
of view. They have every right to have their say, but in our society they have
a massively over-amplified voice, massively oversized footprint in the public
square, and that's wrong. They're like trade unions or political parties and
the rest of them. Let them have their say, but don't give them this artificial
amplification of seats in the House of Lords, and four hours of broadcasting on
the BBC every day, and faith-based schools and the rest of it, because it
distorts our society."
Jon Cruddas: "I come at this from
a slightly different approach. [Faith] is one of the forces which resists the commodification of our lives, and that is the struggle. It
seems to be self-evident in terms of the destructive way that capitalism has
deracinated our culture and our lives: [there are] redeeming elements in the
world that can safeguard and fight against that commodification
in our lives, and faith communities are one of them."
Cristina Odone: "That is absolutely
right, and I think that is one of the elements of religion that anti-religious
commentators never want to focus on. It is so subversive because it questions
it challenges the materialism, the consumerism, the individualism that is
wrecking our society."
AC Grayling: "Any organisation that wants you to
sign up for its version of the One Big Truth, tells you how to live your life,
how to behave, what you should believe, what you're not allowed to believe, how
you should comport your life... traditionally religion is in the business of
doing that the whole time."
Samia Rhaman: "That's not confined
to religion. You look at
AC Grayling: "You're quite right about that, but
they all have one thing in common, which is: we know the answer, you've got to
fall in line, and if you don't you're in trouble. You might be as against the
People's Republic of
Samia Rahman: "But that does not
negate religion as a force for good. That does not negate the fact that
religion does call into question individualism, and this idea of rampant
consumerism. Religion offers an alternative to that."
Evan Harris: "But there's a flip side of that
because religions are sometimes, and we must be careful not to generalise,
hostile to a human rights approach, because that implies that there are
individual and alienable human rights that are not consequent on God-given
entities. But I do want to focus on what justifies a faith school,
state-funded, discriminating against a teacher on the basis of their sexual
orientation or their religion. I think what society desperately needs is for
young people, particularly in school, to mix as much as possible with people of
other races and religions. And discrimination in schools for pupils tends to
add to existing segregation based on housing in this country, and so I think
there's a public policy imperative to prevent that segregation and
discrimination."
Jon Cruddas: "My problem is I
just don't recognise this world. Every single one of my very large extended
family is a product of Catholic comprehensive education. I think it's a force
for good in this country, I think it creates wiser, more rounded young people
students who learn about different alternative belief systems and they resist
certain other forces in our societies."
AA: Are you saying that those other forces are all
non-religious forces?
Jon Cruddas: "No, I didn't say
that at all. It seems to me that this debate can be dominated by caricature. I
just think we should have a plurality of different schools."
Evan Harris: "If you have an area with four
schools, three of which are church schools, which often happens, a
non-religious or wrong-religious family has the choice of one. The religious
person has the choice of all four. That is not fair, and it isn't
justified."
Cristina Odone: "What everyone
overlooks is our right as a minority to teach our children the ethics that we
were taught."
Evan Harris: "No-one's stopping you
Religious
education should be about what religions believe, not telling children what to
believe that's the role of the family and the Church."
Cristina Odone: "Religious education
allows children to be brought up with an understanding of a spiritual
framework, and it's not just their spiritual framework. I have a daughter in a
Catholic state school, and what I have been so impressed by is how her teacher,
who's an Anglican, has said: I want you to explore the synagogue and listen to
what they're teaching there, I want you to explore the mosque and listen to
what they're teaching there, and then yes, we come back and we talk about the
differences between the religious systems, but the most important thing is we
learn respect for other religions."
AC Grayling: "Neither Cristina nor Jon, with
respect, are really picking up the challenge that Evan is giving them here. Why
don't you do all this religious education and encouragement in the family
setting and in your church? Why are you, as Evan put it, co-opting the state to
help do it for you? That's point number one. Point number two is this: I
visited a faith-based school and they started by saying, 'At this school we
promote mutual understanding, and tolerance, and conviviality,' and they were
very proud of themselves for doing it. And I said,
that is not something that we should praise you for that is something we
should expect from you as a minimum... It happened to be a Church of England
school, but it had Muslims in it, and Catholics. And I asked each of these
girls, who were all friends I said to the Muslim girl, 'What's going to
happen to your Catholic friend here when she dies?' And I [said] to the
Catholic girl, 'What's going to happen to your Muslim friend here when she
dies?' And so on. Oh, gasps went up from the teachers and the bishop to say
you're being divisive and you're asking an unpleasant question, and I said, 'No
I'm not I'm trying to get them to think through to the consequences of what
they're really committed to believing.'"
Cristina Odone: "Anthony you must
stick to philosophy, do not venture into unknown territory. The Catholic teaching
is not about ours being the only way."
Samia Rahman: "I think when you
enter into such theological arguments, what you have to remember particularly
it's true of Islam and the Qur'an [is] there is a high level of
interpretation of the text, and contextualisation. And I think that's something
that really needs to be borne in mind when you talk about the way that women
are treated in religion, the way that non-believers are treated. There are
various strands of thought... so it's rather unfair to dismiss religion as
being anti-women, homophobic."
AA: Samia, is it unfair for
others to question how people within religion deal with those sorts of issues?
Samia Rahman: "No, that's not
unfair at all. That's something that we, as a faith, are constantly doing
reinterpreting the texts."
AC Grayling: "I don't know any Muslim woman priests, I don't know any Catholic women priests, or
actively gay priests in those areas. So the evidence [is] that organised
religion I'm sure there are dissenters is not good news for women and gay
people, even in their own church. But when it comes to public policy they argue
for discrimination, and I think that's a problem. And religions say, 'Oh, women
are too good for this we place them on a pedestal.' Religions tend to place
women beneath a pedestal, in the words of Woody Allen, and it's very hard to
identify any religious state, or heavily religiously influenced state, that
doesn't have real difficulties for women and gay people."
Jon Cruddas: "Look, the notion
that you have a very prescriptive belief system that you singularly attach
yourself to, if you are part of one denomination or another, is a total
falsehood. These are complex issues they ricochet through all of these
religions. It's the absolutism, it's the intolerance that dominates this new
atheism, which I will react against, actually, because it's so illiberal, and
it's so metropolitan as well
"
Evan Harris: "I want to touch back on that, if I
may, because you're able to say what you just said there can be these
debates, and disagreements, and flexibilities within faiths and between faiths
about these matters only because you now live in a functionally secular
society. Had you lived 300 or 400 years ago, you wouldn't be."
Jon Cruddas: "When I listen to
Dawkins or Sam Harris, or Hitchens, it's the
absolutism, it's the intolerance. They sound like religious fundamentalists
there's no respect, no tolerance, no fluidity."
Samia Rahman: "Religion is often a
leap of faith for many people, but so is atheism. I see atheism in a similar
way that it is a leap of faith, because we're
talking about the unknowable."
AA: Can I ask a question on that point? Perhaps to Evan. It's interfaith week this week, and one
thing that I think is interesting is that religion... fulfils a very human
need. If there were no religion, what would exist instead to fulfil that need?
Evan Harris: "The agenda that I have, which is to
see a secular society, involves people having absolute freedom to believe, but
not impose it on others, and maximum freedom of discourse to have this
discussion. So I think the real question, the public policy question, is: do we
believe that we should separate the Church and religion? Should we end
religious privilege, and try to maximise individual freedom of religious belief
and the ability of religious organisations to organise themselves so that they
do not discriminate against or limit the freedoms of other people outside of
that religious organisation? Why do we have a constitution that says to William
and Kate, if they have children, that if it's a girl that girl will have to
wait behind other male children, and if William had married a Catholic he would
have to leave the succession? That is wrong and our religious state doesn't
want to change that."
Jon Cruddas: "We haven't talked
about the deeper questions that we're trying to raise. What is our culture,
what are we seeking to resist in terms of the relentless destruction of it? I
joined the Labour party because it was built around a notion of duty,
obligation, service, commonality in terms of the search for a better
world."
AA: I would like to discuss all of those issues more
but before we do that, you are a Labour politician and you do have to answer
questions surely about whether religion's influence oversteps the mark within
Jon Cruddas: "I do. I don't
accept all of the creeds of our leaders in our Church, to tell you the truth,
because I am a rebel in these things but I just refuse to accept this
caricature that is dominant in terms of these debates. I just think, let's
focus on nuance."
AA: Jon, do you believe that lots of the good things
that you see Catholicism perhaps giving to you through your life would have
existed without religion?
Jon Cruddas: "No I don't. I think
that it was basically through the diaspora and the
role of religion, in terms of cohering and retaining a certain belief system.
That was absolutely critical in terms of the whole genealogy of my
family."
Cristina Odone: "Anushka's
question was, what would we have instead of religion
in order to have a good society [and] I think communitarianism
which is what Jon was talking about. And Cameron has his big society. I really
believe he's struck a nerve and I think that what is so important is that when
you start examining these two concepts, these two competing concepts, what do
we find? That they're all incredibly similar to the religious framework: it is
about charity; it is about loving others; it is about respect, it is about
volunteering. It's about not being materialistic."
AC Grayling: "Don't keep hijacking these notions
as if [they are] monopolised by religion. You and I, Jon, will probably agree
on very, very many points, politically and socially. I have exactly the same
attitude to the need for society to be richly and deeply moral. In fact
humanism, which is the idea that we premise our understanding of ethics on our
best, most generous and sympathetic understanding of human nature and the
complexities of the human condition, is a very ancient tradition which pre-dates
all the major religions in the world today and which they have adopted. What
one wants to do is to concentrate on those commonalities, get rid of the
doctrinal differences and divisions."
AA: Anthony, you wrote recently that you believe that
the influence of religion is negative. Can you just explain how you came to
that conclusion?
AC Grayling: "I accept that religious faith on the
individual level can be something that sustains and succours people as can a
deep commitment to the communist cause, the psychological prop of identifying
yourself with something is a well-established fact. But when you look at
history what you see overwhelmingly is division, you see conflict, you see the oppression of the individual. And I think on
balance it's been a very bad thing that religious organisations have had such
power over human individuals and societies for centuries."
Samia Rahman: "What I find
difficult is often the discourse of religion versus secularism and 'is religion
a force for good?' becomes wrapped up in this idea of demonising the other. I
think, as a Muslim, we do feel this rather keenly. Not wishing to enter into
this sense of victimisation but there is quite a marked Islamophobia
which exists, not just in the
Evan Harris: "I'm not sure from my study of it
that Islamophobia is founded on objections to the
Muslim's belief in one God, or indeed in the Prophet. I think much of Islamophobia is racism dressed up as anti-religion and I
think Muslims are victims of that I'm with you 100% but I don't think it's
because of an anti-religious feeling."
Jon Cruddas: "What interests me is the future debates, the coming cultural
wars, the framing that you see. Mosque in Manhattan, how that's linked to
certain evangelical movements in this country, linked into the English Defence
League, linked into a virulent form of Islamophobia
and unless there are more radical religious elements in this mix I think you're
going to see the terms of debate radically move and be caricatured between a
religious debate and a metropolitan, liberal debate and there is no space in
the middle. And we have to occupy those spaces."
AC Grayling: "Is part of the solution more Muslim
schools for Muslims?"
Evan Harris: "
Cristina Odone: "What you call
segregation some people call community and what us Catholics felt during the
IRA days here in
AC Grayling: "You describe that as a solution to a
difficulty that [the] community in question faced, but in fact it's a
consequence of the ghettoisation that had already
occurred beforehand. Had there been no such divisions there would have been no
driver for people pulling up the drawbridges around those ghettos. When I think
about four-, five- and six-year-old kids in kindergartens and primary school,
they don't know that they're Catholic, Muslim, Protestant or anything else.
They're just children. They get on with one another, they don't care about skin
colour or creed or ethnicity or even language. My little daughter went to a
school where there were 36 different languages spoken, an absolute rainbow
place, it was wonderful. It takes a lot of energy and effort to teach those
kids that they're different from others... that other people are not the same
as them, perhaps not as good as them. And that's a tragedy."
AA: We haven't touched on the religious right in
Jon Cruddas: "That's a thing that
worries me... Unless there is a more radical religious contribution that can
drown out or crowd out the religious right and the way they are systematically
framing cultural debates across mainland
AA: I want to come back to the question that we're
asking: is religion a force for good in the world?
Cristina Odone: "I think,
absolutely, yes it is a force for good in the world and the challenge for our
society is to take the good that religion offers and excise the bad."
Evan Harris: "The key question is not whether
religion is a force for good in the world. For policymakers it is: to what
extent can we change things in respect of religion? What we should seek to do
is take organised religion out of the state and out of politics in terms of
privilege so that there is a level playing field for all religions and
none."
Samia Rahman: "I think religion
and the practice of religion is a complex journey for many people and I think
that needs to be recognised. You have a minority of extremist Christians or
extremist Muslims and the overwhelming majority of peaceful believers do not
share that point of view. The moderate view is drowned out."
AC Grayling: "I think that a good world would be
one in which people approached one another first and foremost as fellow human
beings with whom they share far more than they have differences. Thinking of
the people you encounter in the world as fellow human beings means that you put
that fact before their gender, their sex or sexuality or their political
orientation or their religious views or their social background or how much
money they've got. And if we were to think in those terms, and I think of that
as a fundamentally humanist approach to the world, it would be much more of a
global community."
Jon Cruddas: "I agree with an
awful lot of that actually. You see there is, once you reach beyond caricature,
once you reach beyond the absolutism within which this new atheism is framed,
there's a lot that can be respected across this whole divide."
Anushka Asthana
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 November 2010 00.12 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/nov/21/is-god-good-debate