From: "CE" 


> In the US, the religious Right numbers about
> 35 million. Recent polls show that about 30
> million Americans define themselves as hav-
> ing no religious commitment.


Based on The World Factbook, roughly 29.8 million Americans have no
religious affiliation. By comparison, there are 155.2 million Protestants
and 71.6 million Roman Catholics for a total of 226.8 million Christians.
That means there are more than seven times, 7.6 to be exact, as many
Christians and atheists in the United States.

>
> But whereas the religious Right is a formidable
> body whose constituent churches and move-
> ments have salaried administrators, vast funds,
> television and radio outlets, and paid Washing-
> ton lobbyists, America's non-religious folk are
> simply unconnected individuals.
>
> It is no surprise that the religious Right has
> political clout and can make a loud noise in the
> American public square, whereas the non-reli-
> gious voice is muted.

The non-religious voice is far from muted. There are public awareness
campaigns for many groups with objectives that are distinctly counter to
those of Christianity. These organizations do have paid staff, enormous
public clout and tons of money.

>
> There are two main reasons for the hardening
> of responses by non-religious folk.
>
> One is that any increase in the influence of reli-
> gious bodies in society threatens the de facto
> secular arrangement that allows all views and
> none to coexist. History has shown that in soci-
> eties where one religious outlook becomes
> dominant, an uneasy situation ensues for other
> outlooks; at the extreme, religious control of
> society can degenerate into Taliban-like rule.

Yes, it can. And a non-religious control of society can degenerate into the
same thing. Have you forgotten the communist countries? These are hardly
models of toleration and acceptance of opposing viewpoints, unless you
consider protesters being run over by tanks an acceptable reaction by a
government.

The fact is that totalitarianism can be attached to a wide variety of
ideologies. It's simplistic in the extreme to take one or a few examples of
totalitariansim attached to a certain belief system and then suggest that
this belief system leads to totalitarianism.


>
> Faith organisations are currently making common
> cause to achieve their mutual ends, but, once they
> have achieved them, what is to stop them remem-
> bering that their faiths are mutually exclusive and
> indeed mutually blaspheming, and that the history
> of their relationship is one of bloodshed?

So, you're suggesting that we should eschew peaceful cooperation among
faith groups and instead dwell on past problems?
>

> The second reason why secular attitudes are hard-
> ening relates to the reflective non-religious person's
> attitude to religion itself.
>
> Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intel-
> lectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality
> as belief in the existence of fairies.
>
> This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who
> have deep deep religious convictions and attach-
> ments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth
> is that everyone takes this attitude about all but one
> (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been
> claimed to exist.
>
> No reasonably orthodox Christian believes in Aphro-
> dite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh
> the Elephant God or the rest of the Hindu pantheon,
> or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on
> - and officially (as a matter of Christian orthodoxy)
> he or she must say that anyone who sincerely be-
> lieves in such deities is deluded and blasphemously
> in pursuit of "false gods".
>
> The atheist adds just one more deity to the list of
> those not believed in; namely, the one remaining
> on the Christian's or Jew's or Muslim's list.

This is clearly illogical. A solution cannot be shown to be incorrect
simply because other attempts at solutions to solve the same problem are
incorrect. If there are 15 students in a classroom and all but one fail to
arrive at the conclusion that 1 + 1 = 2, this does not make that one
correct answer wrong. It is irrelevent if  other students found the answer
to be 16.758 or 19 % or 42 lbs. per square inch.

It is true that a believer should be prepared to back up any claim of the
existence of God or gods and any other religious claims. A person can
certainly, legitimately take an atheistic stance when confronted with what
that person thinks is insufficient evidence or incorrect reasoning to back
any of the many religious claims. A believer making a religius statement
has an obligation to be able to back up those religious claims.

It's illogical, though, to suggest that because a certain percentage of
other religious claims are false, then the other religious claims must also
be false.


> Judaism, Christianity and Islam are young religions
> in historical terms, and came into existence after
> kings and emperors had more magnificently taken
> the place of tribal chiefs. The new religions there-
> fore modelled their respective deities on kings
> with absolute powers.

Judaism pre-dates its acceptance of kings, so your observation would seem
to be incorrect.


> But for tens of thousands of years beforehand
> people were fundamentally animistic, explaining
> the natural world by imputing agency to things
> - spirits or gods in the wind, in the thunder, in the
> rivers and sea.
>
> As knowledge replaced these naiveties, so deities
> became more invisible, receding to mountain tops
> and then to the sky or the earth's depths. One can
> easily see how it was in the interests of priest-
> hoods, most of which were hereditary, to keep
> these myths alive.

The Jews have a rabbinical tradition which was hereditary to a large
extent. Roman Catholics, the largest Christian denomination, have a
priesthood but it is not based on heredity. Although I'm not sure, I think
the immans are also not based on heredity.

> With such a view of religion - as ancient supersti-
> tion, as a primitive form of explanation of the world
> sophisticated into mythology - it is hard for non-
> religious folk to take it seriously, and equally hard
> for them to accept the claim of religious folk to a
> disproportionate say in running society.
>
Yes, it would be hard for anyone who dismisses beliefs as superstition to
take religions seriously. Prejudice is indeed a difficult thing to
overcome.

> This is the more so given that the active constitu-
> ency of all believers in Britain is about eight per
> cent of the population. A majority might have vague
> beliefs and occasionally go to church, but even
> they do not want their lives dictated to by so small
> and narrow a self-selected minority.
>
> The disproportion is a staring one. Regular Church
> of England churchgoers make up three per cent of
> the population, yet have 26 bishops in the House
> of Lords. Now that religion is bustling on to centre-
> stage and asking for everyone's taxes to pay for
> faith schools and exemptions, this anachronism is
> no longer tolerable.

Why? The concept of general taxes is that everyone puts in money into a
pool to pay for things that are needed by people in society even if the
group that uses the service is relatively small. Services for senior
citizens come to mind. Although the very oldest senior citizens comprise a
small percentage of the total population, they use a fairly large chunk of
healthcare dollars in public healthcare systems such as in Canada. Services
to minorities are another example. Although a population of immigrants may
be small in terms of the total population, a society may - and several do -
decide to provide for a wide variety of tax-funded services. I may never
have a car but pay the same proportion of my taxes for road construction
and repair. I may not have children but pay school taxes for others'
children to be educated.

The alternative to general taxes is the user-pay method whereby only those
who use a service would pay for it. If you would oppose the funding of
faith-based schools on the principle that general taxes should not be used
for a minority of the population, then you're essentially arguing for a
user-pay method of funding government expenses. Under this method, parents
of children in faith schools would cover the full tuition and other
expenses for their children's education in such schools - or these schools
would cease to exist.

For you to maintain integrity, though, you'd then have to apply the same
principle to other aspects of government funding. Would you be willing to
have tolls on all roads and pay for them whenever you drive? Would you be
willing to have police officers respond to your call only if you could
afford to pay them? Would you want the fire department to send you a bill
for putting out the fire to your home - or refuse to put out the fire until
you make financial arrangements to pay for the service?

Clearly, there are reasons why the method of general taxation came into
existence. There are many services for which it would be impractical to go
with a user-pay system. Education has been such a service in many
countries, with private education and semi-private education sometimes
co-existing alongside it for those who want extra services that the state
is not willing to fund.


> And all this is happening against the background
> of atrocities committed by religious fanatics in
> America, Europe and the Middle East, whose
> beliefs are not very different from the majority of
> others in their faith.
>
> The absolute certainty, the unreflective credence
> given to ancient texts that relate to historically
> remote conditions, the zealotry and bigotry that
> flow from their certainty, are profoundly danger-
> ous: at their extreme they result in mass murder,
> but long before then they issue in censorship,
> coercion to conform, the control of women, the
> closing of hearts and minds.

Of course, you don't by this mean to describe all religious believers, do
you? I'm sure that you're just referring to the very few "religious
fanatics."
>
> Thus there is a continuum from the suicide bom-
> ber driven by religious zeal to the moral crusader
> who wishes to stop everyone else from seeing
> or reading what he himself finds offensive. This
> fact makes people of a secular disposition no
> longer prepared to be silent and concessive.

In wanting to put a stop to faith-based schools or the importance given to
religious texts, these people of a secular disposition would be committing
the same injustice. They would be trying to tell other people what to
think, what books to read, and which kind of schools they can attend. How
is that form of trying to control others any different from religious zeal?

>
> Religion has lost respectability as a result of the
> atrocities committed in its name, because of its
> clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for
> its efforts to impose its views on others.

Actually, no, it hasn't. Worldwide, the number of believers is up. Church
attendance in North America is rebounding. And the slice of the pie of a
group that's more than seven times as large as the other should be quite
large, just to be fair.

> Where politeness once restrained non-religious
> folk from expressing their true feelings about
> religion, both politeness and restraint have been
> banished by the confrontational face that faith
> now turns to the modern world.

I'm sorry to hear you feel you need to be impolite and unrestrained to make
your points.

> This, then, is why there is an acerbic quarrel go-
> ing on between religion and non-religion today,
> and it does not look as if it will end soon.

Well, that's too bad. Why don't you come over for a coffee or barbecue
sometime and we'll try to smooth things out?

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