What atheists see in an English breakfast
By Peter Mullen
Have you noticed how the prevailing cult of secularism in this country is becoming more aggressive? It is not the Muslims, Jews or Hindus who are "offended" by Christmas displays; but the establishment religion of atheism is using adherents of other faiths as a stick with which to beat hated Christianity. The secular elite really does loathe Christianity — and for the reasons identified by T S Eliot in 1934:
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin and other unpleasant facts They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
I heard the presenter of a Radio Four science programme look forward to the day when "creationism" is completely banned. The vehemence of his desire that this should happen quickly was spat out with malicious glee. The atheists think they have won the intellectual argument about design in the universe, but they have not. Gerald Schroeder, a leading physicist at the Weizmann Institute, tells us what modern science says about the nature of the physical universe: "The world we see as solid is made solid not by matter but by ethereal forces carried in photons — themselves a theoretical construct — travelling immense distances between the nuclei and surrounding electron clouds. The world of atoms and molecules consists of wavelike particles separated from each other by voids, held in place by never seen massless photons, travelling at the speed of light among particles that are not only particles but also waves. If you can conceptualise this melee in an intelligible way, I have an urgent suggestion: Publish!"
The Neo-Darwinian flat-earther Richard Dawkins says: "Just because something looks as if it was designed doesn't mean it was in fact designed." I would turn his dogma the other way round and say: we know there is design in the world because we ourselves design things. And it is entirely implausible that our idea of design could have arisen in a world that was chaos, undesigned.
Dawkins — with his "we are nothing but our genes" — is like the man who won't believe we had eggs, bacon and fried bread but insists all we had were protein, carbohydrates and fat. Or to give another example, Dawkins is like a man who went to a symphony concert and you asked him what he heard. And he replied:"Oh, sound waves in different frequencies." When you tell him that's a damn silly answer, he is of course shamed into admitting that what he really heard were Beethoven's Fifth and Shostakovich's Tenth.
In a vivid sentence, Professor Fred Hoyle once said: "Life evolving by chance has the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a scrap yard and leaving behind it a fully-formed jumbo jet."
re we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go! The Church of England is to invite thousands of people from across the country to join the Arch
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bishops of Canterbury and York for a historic event next year to mark the bicentenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The archbishops will lead the "walk of wimcss" through London to culminate in a large-scale act of worship. The event, organised by the Church's Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns, forms the main part of the Church's "wider awareness campaign" Making our Mark, set up following the General Synod's formal apology earlier this year to the heirs of those who were enslaved.
What is this Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns when it's out? The New Testament might tell us that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, but the dear old C of E must have its CMEAC. I wonder where all this apologising mania will end? Should Lancastrians say sorry to Yorkshiremen for the Wars of the Roses and Italian ice-cream sellers apologise for the Roman Empire?
But as for the slave trade, we have apologised already — 200 years ago — and in the best and most practical way possible: by abolishing it. As a result of the ban, British captains who were caught continuing the trade were fined £100 for every slave found on board. Some people involved in the anti-slave trade campaign, such as Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Fowell Buxton, argued that the only way to end the suffering of the slaves was to make slavery illegal. And in 1833 Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. In summary, the slave trade was abolished by Christian parliamentarians and abolition was enforced by the Royal Navy.
Can we have an end to public acts of pre-emptive self-abasement, please? The worst aspect of this planned archiepiscopal march for a freedom that was longsince secured is the syrupy jargon. It is claimed that the event will enable "the healing process" to commence. Leaving aside the fact that the healing process has had two whole centuries to get itself commenced, what kind of a limp-wristed expression is "healing process" anyhow? I know, it goes with those other sugary phrases "moving on" and "closure" — the sickly breath of bureaucratised sentimentality.
A theologian at Lancaster University gave us "Thought for the Day" the other morning. He too was on about the slave trade. More or less implying that it wouldn't happen these days. The assumption — one commonly made — is that our society is much progressed and better by far than the moral pygmies of bygone ages. This is not Christiun teaching. It is Enlightenment moral progressivism or "getting better all the time", as the Beatles used to croon. So many alleged Christian teachers seem to have quietly dropped the dogma of Original Sin.
Progressivism is not even true. Does the epoch of the atomic bomb, the gulag, Rwanda, two world wars, napalm and the death camps really consider itself morally superior to times past? Besides, the fact is that there are now more people in slavery than ever before, more even than 200 years ago. In Europe slavery is commonplace, particularly in the disgraceful people smuggling that goes on to supply the sex industry. There are other kinds of slavery alongside this: the wholesale submission to drugs and pornography. Mainly this is the result of the collapse of the notion of absolute Christian morality in our bien peasant European societies.