Foghorns In The Mist

Our Maddy of the Sorrows is back with another of her hand-wringing pieces. This time Madeleine Bunting is being sorrowful that real debates about religion are being drowned by the foghorn voices of the “New Atheists”. Funny that, I always thought that foghorns served a useful purpose of warning sailors lost in the mist that there were dangers ahead.

It’s a strange piece. She quotes approvingly folks such as Alain de Botton, John Gray, Karen Armstrong and Mark Vernon – all of whom seem to me to be taking the simple trusting faiths of the faithful into a looking-glass world where it becomes de rigueur to believe six impossible things before every breakfast. Indeed, Madeleine apparently believes the same:

Intriguingly, where Gray, Armstrong and Vernon all end up is with the apophatic tradition of theology. Apophatic is a word no longer even in my dictionary, but it’s a major tradition of Christian thought, and central to the thinking of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas: it is the idea that God is ineffable and beyond powers of description. S/he can be experienced by religious practice, but as Armstrong puts it: "In the past, people knew we could say nothing about God. Certain forms of knowledge only come with practice." It makes the boundary between belief in God and agnosticism much more porous than commonly assumed.

Bunting quotes Armstrong as saying:

What "belief" used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of "love", "commitment", "loyalty": saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles.

I’m all for the idea of “love”, “commitment” and “loyalty”, but these I try to express towards my fellow human beings, not towards some mythical monsters. Frankly, I’d far rather be warned about life’s dangers by the sound of foghorns than be seduced by the cruel songs of sirens.

Update: As usual, Ophelia dissects Bunting’s piece to reveal the nonsense and stupidity within. Oh, and perhaps it’s just me, but do I detect just the faintest whiff of sour grapes in Maddy’s crack that “Richard Dawkins could stump up for the crates of champagne out of his sumptuous royalties from The God Delusion”?