Atheism

There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially Christian belief. Anti-Catholicism used to be the anti-Semitism of intellectuals; now Catholics get no special attention. All believing Christians are regarded as stupid, eccentric or malevolent. Some conservatives will make the case for the social usefulness of Christian values. The conservative asks: if society prospered with these traditions and customs, is it really wise to throw them away without a moment’s hesitation? That is just what the West is doing, especially the Anglophone West. Britain, Australia and even the God-fearing United States are becoming atheist societies. Britain is more atheist

Liverpudlian censorship Sir: I enjoyed Kelvin MacKenzie’s Diary (29 April). The obloquy thrown at him after his criticism of Everton footballer Ross Barkley would be laughable if it were not for the unpleasant undercurrent on Merseyside now. His remark was football banter, not a racist slur as the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, has alleged. What the mayor (or ‘Fat Joe’, as he is known) has failed to do is speak up for free speech. It is — and I deeply regret to say this about my home town — a scandal that newsagents in Liverpool are threatened by violent thugs if they stock the Sun. There was a ‘Ban

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Jonathan Sacks has an impressive track record for predicting the age we are in. In his 1990 Reith Lectures, ‘The Persistence of Faith’, the then chief rabbi pushed back against the dominant idea that religion was going to disappear. In the early 2000s, he predicted a century of conflict within Islam. And he was one of the first religious leaders and thinkers not only to critique multi-culturalism (‘the spanner in the works for tolerance’) but to try to think of a path beyond it. We recently talked over some of this at his house in London, where he lives during gaps in a busy teaching schedule that also takes him to

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Andrew Brown and Daniel Trilling discuss the cult of Richard Dawkins” startat=788] Listen [/audioplayer]The other day I wrote something to upset the followers of Richard Dawkins and one of them tracked me down to a pub. I had been asked to give a talk to a group of ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ about whether there are any atheist babies — clearly not, in any interesting sense — and at the end a bearded bloke, bulging in a white T-shirt, asked very angrily where Dawkins had said there were any. I quoted a couple of his recent tweets on the subject: When you say X is the fastest growing

Few people, don’t you find, are as irritating as those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious? There was a riveting  piece in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine last week about them, featuring people who were both fabulously stylish and spiritual. Among the names checked was a shop called Celestine Eleven (‘when you buy a new dress, you’re buying into a beautiful piece of energy’) and a website called Numinous (motto: ‘material girl, mystical world’). So, you can be spiritual and design-conscious, as in Pamela Love’s pentagram ring, £1,500. What this Gwyneth Paltrow-style combination of spirituality and consumerism involves, apart from the absence of any kind of discernible doctrine,

Does the world have a purpose? The new atheists regard the question as absurd. Purposes emerge in the course of evolution, they tell us; to suppose that they could exist before any organism can gain a reproductive advantage from possessing them is to unlearn the lesson of Darwin. With the theory of evolution firmly established, therefore, there is no room in the scientific worldview for an original purpose, and therefore no room for God. Today’s evangelical atheists go further, and tell us that history has shown religion to be so toxic that we should do our best to extinguish it. Such writers describe the loss of religion as a moral

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Freddy Gray discuss the return of God” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]What was your reaction recently when it emerged that thousands of unborn foetuses had been burnt by NHS trusts? And that some had been put into ‘waste-to-energy’ incinerators and so used to heat hospitals? Revulsion, I would imagine. But why? I would hazard that it is either because you are religious or because your customs and beliefs are still downstream from faith, even if you reject it. Because if you grant that an unborn foetus is not a life and that once aborted it could have no further use, there is at least an argument that