Filling the God-shaped hole with psychobabble and angry rhetoric

Books bashing religion are all the rage in our bookshops. Patrick West and Ed West examine two of the most prominent titles In Defence of Atheism: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam by Michel Onfray, Serpent's Tail £18.99 Believe it or not, there are some atheists out there who don't bate religion. Some of us don't go red in the face, start hollering and bang our fists on the table at its mere mention. When told of Christ's divinity some of us don't even kick the furniture and start throwing chairs around the room. We are what Michel Onfray calls "Christian Atheists": those who don't believe in God, but believe in Christian values and generally think religion can be a force for the good.
Judging by the torrent of invective currently spewing from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Ludovic Kennedy and the ptoverbial Man in the Pub, one would be forgiven for thinking that the only people more permanently angry than atheists are jihadists and American postal workers.
Michel Onfray is of the same disposition. Religion is stupid, irrational, starts wars, is anti-life and childish. The Catholic Church supported Hitler, backed colonialism, and killed Galileo. The Jews are bad because they want their own country, while the behaviour of Muslims speaks for itself. And so on.
There are many non-believers who recognise organised religion's shortcomings, and indeed its historical crimes, but who also find these polemics embarrassing at best and disgraceful at worst. Onfray does for the philosophical Left what Michael Moore does for the political Left: by indulging in hysterical rhetoric he detracts credibility from the cause he champions. .
Yet Onfray is even worse than his British comrades. He fails to . recognise the good that has come from organised religion and doesn't acknowledge that there could have been no Enlightenment without Christianity, in which Providence became secularised as Progress, the Soul became the Individual, and the idea of being equal under a loving God was reinvented as egalite and fraterniti. But these shortcomings are compounded by the fact that he is French. This is not an ethnic slur, merely an observation that Onfray conforms to the stereotype of the Left Bank poseur given to attention-seeking hyper bole. Think Foucault, Baudrillard, pungent cigarettes, sitting in cafés, moody photographs in black turtle-neck jumpers. That kind of thing.
"In science the Church has always been wrong about everything," Onfray states tersely a sentence not even worthy of a rebuttal. Similarly, "Christians insist that the world is 4,000 years old, no more, no less", may . come as a surprise to the millions • of Catholics who agreed with John Paul II when he said he had no quarrel with Darwinism.
Then there are the short sentences, unrelenting misanthropy ("human credulity is beyond imagining"), the contentious maxims, the "radical" dot-dot-dots instead of proper punctuation... and the exclamation marks!
Coupled to this is Onfray's adolescent penchant for employing military and erotic metaphors. Speaking of the influence of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, he says: "At last the battlefield was cleared and a new space set free. On this virgin metaphysical terrain an untested discipline saw the light of day."
There are also the childish, fantasy-land sections peppered with academic jargon and hideous marketing-speak: "Meeting the Other would be an opportunity to build interpersonal relationships here and now, not under the gaze of God or gods, but under the eyes of the protagonists only, a meeting of their minds , and their inherent natures. In that event, paradise might function less as a fiction having to do with heaven and more as a rational ideal here below. Let's dream a little."
It is said that everyone should read Joyce but no one should try to write like him. Onfray is a example of why the same rule should apply to Nietzsche.
In Defence of Atheism is a misnomer, too. The book doesn't do what it says on the cover; it is principally a bad-tempered attack on Christianity. Onfray criticises the modem order without proposing what should replace it. As Onfray is of a postmodern disposition, he states that there is no such thing as free will and therefore choices or morality. It's one thing to call for an atheist world, but do we want an amoral one?
The three Abrahamic religions are subjected to equal vitriol, something of which Dawkins et al are similarly guilty. Like it or not, we all know which religion inspires the most violence today. Naturally, these "brave" polemicists mainly go for the safe target: Christianity.
Christianity does have its extremists today, but their worst actions consist of murdering about a dozen abortion doctors in America and saying horrid things about homosexuals. Christian extremists do not fly planes into buildings or cut peoples' heads off and put the footage on the internet.
And don't mention Northern Ireland. Loyalist paramilitaries there, for instance, barely even go to church, let alone believe in God. Indeed, it is when they find religion that they stop being terrorists.
Today's militant atheists really are their own worst enemies. They do not comprehend a basic marketing strategy: you do not insult people to whom you are trying to sell your "product" to. If you are angry and unpleasant all the time, if you won't change the subject or your mind and you call people stupid and rude names, they are not going to listen to you. Deodorant manufacturers do not use the slogan: "Hey, smelly!"
Similarly, rather than persistently harassing religious believers, Onfray and company would be best advised to tell us what's so great about not believing in God, rather than going on and on about why believing in Him is so unspeakable. I genuinely would like to know.
In Defence of Atheism is an absurd book. It does, however, tell you a lot about the mindset of militant atheists, which is why it should be read. Beg, borrow or steal it, but please don't buy it. These people should not be encouraged. PW God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion by Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books £12.99 God is having a hard time of it right now. With Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion already top of the British book charts and Michel Onfray's In Defence of Atheism leading the French bestsellers, Christopher Hitchens now wades in with his own attack on the Almighty.
A recently naturalised American, Hitchens comes from a mildly Anglican Hampshire family and was educated at a Methodist school, so he hardly suffered the sort of bells-smellsand-beatings upbringing that makes good misery memoir.
Yet despite flirtations with Greek Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism, as well as that wackiest of all cults Marxism he has always been hostile to the idea of religion.
Hitchens's writing is beautiful, his turn of phrase aweinspiring, and his arguments mature and simple: there is no "why does God let earthquakes happen?" His thread is moral rather than theological: not only are all Holy Books based on the flimsiest of evidence, but religion actually makes people behave inhumanely. Religion poisons everything, as he says.
Most of us cannot argue with the author on the evidence front; that's why it is called "faith", rather than "fact-. But his portrayal of religious types as bloodthirsty sectarian psychopaths does not work; good stereotyping has to be based on a widespread, if not universal, truth.
He asserts that, "I can say absolutely why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance." Perhaps in Fallujah I might feel the same way, but how many people in inner cities cross the road when they see a group of lads coming out of a church service? How many times do we read the headline "Another Hassidic Gang Slaying in Stamford Hill"?
"In Belfast I have interviewed people whose relatives have been killed by rival religious death squads," says Hitchens. Personally I somehow doubt that "Mad Dog" Johnny Adair was murdered over the issue of transubstantiation, nor did any killers on either side whip themselves into a frenzy during church services. In the Loyalists' case it was usually the pub. In the scheme of things dark spirits are responsible for far more of Ulster's woes than the Holy Spirit.
Likewise, Hitchens mentions the Tamil Tigers without conceding that the nominally Hindu group is ethnic and secular in motivation. He refers to the war-mongering Buddhist and Shinto priests of Imperial Japan but not to the peacenik Christians of Nagasaki . One has to assume that these are deliberate omissions that do not fit his argument.
On the issue of slavery he fails to concede that religion played any part in its abolition. Instead, Hitchens argues that because 18th-century atheists were naturally reluctant to admit their atheism, we can conclude that most of the good guys in history were on his side. This seems a bit like the Mormons retrospectively converting their dead ancestors.
Religious leaders everywhere are corrupt, chauvinistic and hypocritical, although Hitch is prepared to concede that Martin Luther King was a good man. Except: "In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian." For an apostate of Marxism that seems awfully close to the "false consciousness" dogma. Surely if Dr King believed he was a Christian, and behaved in a way he believed to be Christian, then be was a Christian just as David Koresh was a Christian, Bin Laden a Muslim or, for that matter, Pol Pot a Communist.
Stallies Russia and Kim's Korea are religious states in Hitchens's eyes, because they centred on personality cults: by that argument religion cannot win.
Of course evil men say God is on their side. As the Mark Steel joke goes, no Crusader ever told his followers in disappointed tones: "Sorry lads, I spoke to the Almighty, and I'm afraid he's backing the Turks on this one."
Religion gives people inner strength whether they use it for good or evil is up to their non-divine consciences. Man is not great, after all. EW