Creationists On the March

I have been watching the More4 series of programmes by Richard Dawkins taking on the ideas of organised religion. Over recent years the Left has had a problem with religion. For a long time, after the defeat of the religious Right in Britain in the 1960's over their attempts to retain censorship, and maintain medieval laws on blasphemy, fought out in the Courts over Lady Chatterley, and Gay News, we thought that one of the basic elements of bourgeois democracy, the right to Free Speech had been well entrenched. Moreover, as even the basic elements of Education provided by the Capitalist Education system, and the context of a modern industrialised society, in which the basic tenets of science were absorbed by the mass of population were enough to lead the vast majority of people to recognise that the words contained in a Book written by a number of different authors more than 2000 years ago, were not an adequate explanation of how the Earth had been created, or how Man and other animals had developed. In fact, for many it gave rise to the necessary question - if that bit of the Bible was not true, why believe any of the rest of it?

As if to emphasise that fact, even the religious leaders, and the teachers of religion in school, found themselves in a quandary of how to respond to such questions, when the body of evidence for science was so great, and their own beliefs so unsupportable. They shifted ground to argue that the Bible had to be read as allegory rather than literal truth. Even the "Gospel Truth", was apparently now only relative.

But, it is a good lesson that nothing ever progresses in a straight line, and even ground won that seems solidly defended, can come under attack, unless it is regularly maintained, reinforced, and seen as a bastion from which to move forward. I remember when I first left school coming up against a lay preacher in the Town Hall where I was working, and he was a fundamentalist. At first, I found confronting his ideas a bit of a novelty, but ultimately they are a bit like the trolls, who frequent the Internet. In order to have a rational discussion there have to be certain rules for debate. The troll, and the fundamentalist are different. The troll has no fixed views, or if they do they do not form the basis of their trolling activity, which is merely to engage in argument for the sake of argument, and to prolong such debates for as long as possible, by whatever means possible. The fundamentalist does have fixed views. But what they share is a closed mind. The former is not interested in an exchange of views only arguing, the latter is not interested in an exchange of views either, but only conveying theirs. Both will defend their position by similar means, essentially just denying any truth put to them, whilst asserting their truth without any credible evidence.

A few years later, when I was teaching I had a worse experience, as a number of apprentices I had in a class were Pentecostalists, and as a teacher I could not just walk away from a class discussion with them, simply on the basis that there was no rational basis for discussion with people who will reject any evidence no matter how strong, and simply assert in its place there own prejudices. In the US, as Dawkins programmes demonstrates this is a problem, in a way that it is not here - yet. The scientist Craig Ventner, whose company decoded the human genome, said in a lecture a year or so ago that it was ironic that the US is the most technologically advanced country on the planet by far, and yet around 40% of its population still believe that Man walked with dinosaurs, and that the planet is less than 10,000 years old, a belief they hold to as a result of holding the Bible to be absolute truth. In parts of the US, teachers are physically hounded out if they teach Evolution and real science in schools.

In Britain, despite the State encouraging the development of Faith Schools, financed by rich religious zealots, such views are still a small minority. But, minorities can become majorities. The Lefts problems have been further enhanced as a result of its own bankrupt politics. Having failed to build a revolutionary Party based in the working class, and having cut itself off from the existing Workers Party, the left in its search for new recruits dedicated itself not to the struggle for Socialism, but a struggle against Capitalism, and what was seen to be its Evil Twin, Imperialism. As a consequence sections of the left such as but not only the SWP accommodated themselves to some of the most reactionary political forces on the Planet, in the form of various clerical-fascist governments, and movements, solely on the basis of a spurious "anti-imperialism". These forces may not have been worse than the Christian clerical-fascists in the US, who adopted their own forms of terrorism against those they opposed such as the doctors performing abortions, or the homosexuals. But, having given the forces of Political-Islam such Left cover, the advance of those forces, the challenge to Free Speech that they brought forward, acted to also provide cover for the other religious zealots to put their heads above the parapet too. If blasphemy against Mohammed was not to be allowed, then why should it be allowed against Jesus?

I agree people should be free to believe whatever nonsense they like. Galileo should have been free to argue his viewpoint after all when the majority of the planet thought he was a nutter. The problem, however, seems to me to be this. We are socialists, Marxists even, we have a view not just of how the world is, but how it should be. We do not wish just to have the right to hold those beliefs, but to convince others that they are correct. That means also then creating a world and society according to those values. In that world people might be free to hold whatever beliefs they continued to have, but the dominant view would prevail.

Someone who continued to believe that freedom could only be achieved through a free market for instance might be free to put that into practice in terms of employing themselves or maybe even a few other people, but many Marxists (I wouldn't be amongst them) would see it as the function of the state to prevent such people from say owning a large enterprise that exploited workers.

In short what I am saying is that if you have a world view the whole point is that if you hold it sincerely then you DO want it to be put into practice, and not want it to be something you just take out to read every so often. The problem secularists are now having with religion is that for a long time they have got used to religionists being hypocrites, people who hold their religious beliefs as a token, who even at the highest levels of the Church have effectively given in to Science, and compromised their beliefs. It is the shock of now confronting people who assert their beliefs, and their right to try to structure a world according to those beliefs as determinedly as socialists put forward their beliefs and try to create a world according to them.

Socialists would be appalled if anyone suggested that they should not try to implement their beliefs in practice, so why should socialists expect religionists to be any less appalled. This makes the answer difficult. No secularist wants to allow religionists to impose their views on society, but to deny the right to put those views into practice sets a dangerous precedent for socialists. Just as legitimately could a bourgeois society refuse to allow socialists to put its views into practice, could argue against the formation of Trade Unions, Co-operative organisations etc. or any other practical application of socialist ideas.

The answer must surely be not to look at measures which effectively amount to censorship and limitation of freedom, but to once and for all destroy the arguments upon which the religionists stand.