Christianity, Islam & Atheism Reflections on Religion, Society & Politics Michael Cooke 2 Christianity, Islam & Atheism About the author Michael Colin Cooke is a retired public servant and trade union activist who has a lifelong interest in South Asian history, politics and culture. He has served as an election monitor in Sri Lanka. Michael is the author of The Lionel Bopage Story: Rebellion, Repression and the Struggle for Justice in Sri Lanka (2011). He has also penned when the occasion demanded a number of articles and film reviews. He lives in Melbourne. Published 2014 ISBN 978-1-876646-15-8 Resistance Books: resistancebooks.com Contents 1.Genesis............................................................................................5 2.The Evolution of a Young Atheist .............................................13 India...................................................................................................................... 13 Living in the ’70s down under.............................................................................. 16 Religious fundamentalism rears its head............................................................. 20 3.Christianity: An Atheist’s Homily ................................................21 Introduction – the paradox that is Christianity................................................... 21 The argument....................................................................................................... 23 It ain’t necessarily so: Part 1................................................................................. 23 It ain’t necessarily so: Part 2................................................................................. 26 Running Pell-mell against secularism.................................................................. 31 The spectre of the religious right in ‘God’s own country’................................... 38 The bunyip that is Christianity down under....................................................... 41 Conclusion: What are we fighting against?......................................................... 44 4.Islam: Flowers & Thorns in the Garden ..................................46 Setting the scene – it’s imperialism stupid........................................................... 46 The argument I will be making............................................................................ 50 Dr Waleed Aly: Defender, explainer & occasional critic of Islam...................... 50 The hullabaloo surrounding the hijab................................................................. 53 The gold standard................................................................................................ 56 Radical Islamists: Jacobins & Leninists or just plain old religious fanatics?........ 59 Save our religious souls from secularism............................................................ 62 The reinvention of imperialism........................................................................... 67 A defence of sorts of radical humanism.............................................................. 69 Conclusion............................................................................................................ 71 5.Atheism: Its Attendant Joys & Sobrieties ................................72 Enthusiasm & scepticism...................................................................................... 72 The argument....................................................................................................... 75 Darwin’s mastiff................................................................................................... 75 4 Christianity, Islam & Atheism The atheist delusions of Christopher Hitchens................................................... 80 The philosophers’ atheist..................................................................................... 85 The irrationality of some liberal critics when it comes to atheism..................... 88 Critique of Grayling’s liberal atheism/humanism............................................... 89 On Stalin & Hitler................................................................................................. 91 'Science works' — but for whom?........................................................................ 93 On theology & the existence of God.................................................................... 95 Conclusion............................................................................................................ 96 6.Conclusion ....................................................................................98 Bibliography .....................................................................................103 Notes ..................................................................................................110 Acknowledgements ........................................................................122 1. Genesis God, at the beginning of time, created heaven and earth. Earth was still an empty waste, but already over its waters, stirred the breath of God. Then God said, Let there be light; and the light began. God saw the light, and found it good, and he divided the spheres of light and darkness; the light he called Day and the darkness Night … And God said, Let us make man, wearing our image and likeness; let us put him in command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on earth. So God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God.— The Book of Genesis1 In a single blinding pulse a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity (a point or region in space time in which gravitational forces cause matter to have an infinite density) assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. The first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into even finer wafers) produces gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast … In three minutes, 98% of all matter there is or will ever be produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful too. And it is done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich. — Bill Bryson2 In both the Biblical and the modern scientific account3 it was seemingly from nothing that the universe we inhabit was created. In one version it took six days, in the other the time it takes ‘to make a sandwich’. One version is beautiful in its simplicity and majesty of its prose. The other has a fearful beauty in its almost impersonal force but is prosaic in its telling. One version has been a generator of countless pieces of literature, art and theology, many of which are sublime artefacts of Western civilisation. The other has no such artistic pedigree but has influenced not only how we view the universe but also our view of how we evolved as a species. In one, the world is created by the breath of God; the other is hard to visualise in tranquillity and probably too 6 Christianity, Islam & Atheism complex to fully apprehend. No tolerance of disparate world views can give both versions a commonality of purpose. For one is a story devised in the Bronze Age (approx. 3600-1200 BCE), the latter is a modern and scientific explanation. In the Bronze Age facts were not collected, analysed, sanctified and collated like the contents of a filing cabinet. It was a world where creation myths were given a metaphysical aura of being the paramount explainer of the world; in ours it is science. The Bronze Age was a world of great complexity and sophistication but also one inhabited by gods, demons and unexplainable natural events. Ours is a more materialistic, sceptical and literal age. Some religious believers, who were not disturbed by the advance of science, and who did not wish to lose their contact with the numinous and the unutterable, turned the Bible into metaphor. Genesis became an account of what happens when our human ego gets the better of us and we lose sight of our fallibility. Most of the current crop of atheist writers seem to disregard interpretation; in their binary world the story is simply untrue, and no attention is paid to its moral and cultural aspects. Radical social commentators acknowledge the moral in the tale and point out that the story has an enduringly dark aspect: the loss of Eden and our innocence, the latter being a lack of awareness of sexuality. Being banished from paradise we inherited the carnality of sex and its capriciousness — our desire for it and fear of it. In the eyes of the Church sex was something to be avoided and if that was not possible, confined to procreation in the marital bed. Intertwining this fear of sex was misogyny. This was because the devil in the guise of the serpent tempts Adam’s partner Eve (born from the rib of Adam) first and then Eve tempts Adam; as a result we are exiled from paradise. The question then is not whether the tale is true (it is not) but what use is made of the tale. It is not simply a tale of man’s hubris but the beginning of misogyny in Western discourse, the constricted role of women and the fear of human sexuality that was and still is one of the meta-narratives not only in Christendom but also amongst other religious groups in our secular world. Being of the left, I consider that religious belief is a personal matter best explored in one’s home,