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More Papal Bull!

Published in Express
13 December 2007 • 643 words

Newspaper reports of Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical testify to his misuse of language. His lumping together of terms for purposes of condemnation are designed, in this case, to induce confusion between the concepts of “atheism” and “secularism”.

Atheism, says the Pope, is attractive to people who see no hope of alleviation of their worldly suffering; but “belief” in “God” brings hope, and atheism has itself brought untold suffering to the world.

This affirmation is replete with the dishonesty that characterises all religious propaganda. First, it propounds an illicit justification of religion that has always been advanced in the absence of proof of the existence of God – namely, that people are better off believing than not believing. This may be an argument for the usefulness of religion, but it is not an argument for its truth.

Secondly, atheism, in the strict sense of the term, cannot exist. It is now accepted by science that theories can never be proved, only disproved: a “valid” scientific theory is only one for which no disproof or refinement has yet emerged. This is all the more true of negative theories: the non-existence of “God” is unprovable. But so is the non-existence of dwens and lagahoos. An “atheist” is simply someone who places no more credence in the existence of “God” than he or she does in the existence of dwens or lagahoos.

It follows from this that the true atheist will never attempt to impose his or her views on others by any means but reason. The evils wrought by the Marxist regimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites occurred not because those regimes were atheist but because they proclaimed atheism and enforced it by persecution. Atheism was their religion. They were officially atheist but not secular, for secularism proclaims nothing but seeks solely to re-fashion all pretensions to absolutism under the banner of experience, reason and tolerance. In stark contrast to both religion and Marxism, it is secularism and scientific relativism that have made possible, and sown the seeds of, coexistence of values.

The horrors wrought by Soviet communism were a passing phase in world history, while the horrors wrought by and in the name of religion have been a permanent feature of it. The Catholic Church has perpetrated over the centuries more evils than twentieth-century communism, and for the same reason. Present-day Islamic terrorism and the brutalities of Islamic theocracies are part of the same phenomenon.

Secularists, on the other hand, can never be terrorists, because they cannot be absolutists or fundamentalists. Religion leads inevitably to terrorism, but rationalism has tolerance built in. Rational atheism, recognising as it does the illegitimacy of absolute dogma of any kind, can never lead to violence.

True atheism is a rational condition, but it is not the whole of rationality. Secularism too is rational, but atheism is not a necessary component of it. What the Catholic church fears is not atheism, but secularism, which is not a metaphysical but a political creed. It is quite simply the attempt to banish from public policy any reliance on the supernatural. Many secularists are atheist, many are not. But all secularists, while supporting freedom of religion as part of freedom of thought, reject all ideas of its philosophical necessity and seek its exclusion from any position of privilege in the structure and function of society.

A necessary consequence of this must be a considerable diminution of the political power of churches. The Vatican knows this and is using every possible means to resist it. Hence the persistent attempts of Benedict XVI to circumvent rationality by promoting “God” as the only source of hope in a cruel world. He thereby seeks to obscure the only empirically valid observation concerning the relationship of religion to society: that the most religious societies are the most backward, and the least religious are the most advanced.

T&T Humanist Association

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