Thoughts on Dawkins - 1 - What is Religion?

It is a while since I read the New Atheists but I was having a discussion with someone recently about them and a number of thoughts came to mind about their arguments that I thought I'd put down here.

This is really to help me clarify my thinking - I find I don't really know what I think until I put it down on paper and have a look at it.

Here goes with the first post.

1. What is religion?
Reading the New Atheists there appear to be all sort of skewed definition of how we define religion. If you read social anthropology or writers about different religious traditions you’ll see it is actually pretty difficult to come up with a broad set of categories to define religion, it is actually quite complex with lots of debate.

However as is typical of Dawkins he appears totally ignorant of any of the facts or issues in this, and just comes up with his own definition at the start of The God Delusion in which he separates out a belief in a non-personal God and a belief in a personal God. He doesn’t even consider the issue of the Greek conception of the divine as being beyond time and space, being all good and all powerful and so forth, in relation to the Judaic notion of a personal God who appears to exist in time has emotions such as regret - both descriptions co-exist within Christianity but how they relate is the topic of a long tradition of theological and philosophical thought, it which it could be argued it is better to see the two as poles on a sliding scale of conceptions about God, or even different ways in which we relate to God, rather than two opposites.

He certainly doesn’t attempt to address how the issue relates to eastern notions of religion - Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism etc - nor even how it relates to the Islamic notion of God as totally transcendent.

In any case, Dawkins simply assumes the two notions can be defined in opposition to each other and simply separated out, he then proceeds to bracket off any belief in a non-personal God as not a “true” belief, irrespective of whether such a belief has been accompanied with what we might term traditional religious practice - in other words someone “being religious”, and pronounce that the rest of the book would concern only the notion of a personal God.

Hitchens can be even more cavalier in his definition - claiming that religion is simply superstition and the irrational, therefore anyone who acts irrationally is religious - and by this definition manages to include the ideologies of Marxist states such as the USSR and China in spite of their clear adherence to atheism.

Sam Harris similarly distinguishes early on in his book Letter to a Christian Nation those who simply have mystical experiences and are not dogmatic in their religious assertions, with “real” religious people who are.

In each case the author clearly tacitly acknowledges that religion as commonly understood is not going to conform to the sort of criticisms that are going to be thrown at it in the subsequent argument, therefore they have to re-define religion in such a way that it now becomes not what most people call religion, but some new definition of “religion” invented by the author, which can of course only lead to mystification and confusion when they then start making pronouncements about religion, because of course it will only be about their own made-up definition of religion they are talking about, whereas it will read as if it is referring to what is commonly understood as “religion”.

This really seems a sort of “double-think” strategy to allow the sympathetic reader to simultaneously keep both definitions in mind. For most of the time they can think that the arguments apply to the public definition of religion, but when cornered with counter-arguments and evidence or when the claims become too preposterous, they can switch back to the second definition.

I would also add that such a definition that in-effect means when I speak of religion I only mean the bad things in religion, seems to conform to any sort of bigotry or hate-speech. When the Nazi’s wished to define the Jews they did so with a combination of definitions, which included images of rats and vermin. Similar arguments can be made over other racist language and definitions - how for example gypsies/travellers are defined/presented by those on the extreme right. An analysis of this sort of hate-speech in terms of how the enemy is defined is distressingly similar to how the New Atheists define their “enemy”.