Richard Dawkins's 'The God Delusion': Religiosity is too widespread to be pinned on believers.

In ‘The God Delusion’ Richard Dawkins makes a good scientific case for rejecting the existence of God. He argues that He would have to be infinitely more complex than the universe He is supposed to have created, so where (the Hell) did He come from in the first place? He also sets out (Dawkins that is, not God) – if at an unheavenly length – the many foul acts that besmirch the Bible and other holy books, and that have since been perpetrated by religious fundamentalists down the centuries. He also makes a great case for science and scientists, who by and large are able to change their views when evidence contradicts them.

Some reservations, though:

Dawkins is convincing about the matter of the genesis and development of life but not about the genesis of matter, which this scientifically dense but otherwise literate reader can’t recall him addressing (in this book at least), or about the development of the human race, which in my view has pretty effectively rewritten most of the books about evolution that even Dawkins has read, to the extent that some of his attempts to reconcile human peculiarities with natural selection appear a bit ... guessy and unscientific.

In chapter 7, ‘The ‘Good’ Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist’, Dawkins addresses the common counter-argument that the greatest crimes have been committed not by religious bigots but by atheist regimes (he mentions Hitler and Stalin and not Mao or Pol Pot, but what’s a few million?). He makes a weak attempt to paint Hitler as a religious man and the worship of Stalin as analagous to faith in Christ, ignoring the fact that Nazi racism was based as much on bad (but paradigmatic) science as on blaming Jews for the murder of Christ, and not only that Stalin’s dogma was explicitly atheist but that some of the most persecuted and obdurate of those he incarcerated and murdered were believers who both retained their faith and were living (and dying) human examples to many others who had none. Highlighting Hitler’s Catholic upbringing and selected quotations from speeches from the early 1920s is no good if you ignore both the fact that Hitler was a supreme political liar and his own statement (in ‘Mein Kampf’ - so far more likely to be true) that he actually had no problem with Jews until he actually met one, which says a lot more about something else in the man and about a cultural racism which had long moved beyond the religious.

Nor, given Hitler, Stalin and the rest, is it possible to believe Dawkins’ assertion that there is a consistent, if sometimes erratic, historical direction in the 'Zeitgeist' - a term he uses horribly freely - towards greater liberalism. Perhaps some readings in discourse theory might have come in useful here: have these Zeitgeists not been ... exorcised? In fact the 20^th century is unique both for the number of innocents who were murdered and for the bogus justifications that were made for the carnage, few of which had anything but the most vestigial remnants of religious underpinning. Surprisingly, there is little mention of the real professional murderers but only the blip in this liberal teleology represented by American religious conservatives and the Taliban, who appear to share the same bed even if they rarely break sweat together. That's not good history.

When, Dawkins asks, has anyone ever murdered people in the name of atheism? That's not the point.

Christmas Newsletter 2012

Fuck me, has it come around again already?

Jeez!

Leap Before You Look

Dear Bell’s Scotch Whisky,

Several times during the build-up to Christmas I've heard your radio advert on Tawk Spawt: "You can raise money for charity by abseiling down a cliff, or bungee jumping off a bridge ... or drinking a glass of Bell's! 10p from every bottle sold goes to Help for Heroes."

You appear heavily to suggest that the last method of raising money is the one we should go for. But something isn't quite right.

Let's say that I could raise £100 (at a very conservative estimate), net of associated outgoings, for taking part in the above-mentioned precipitative activities, with about a month spent fund-raising plus about half a day hanging off Beachy Head.

However, if I'm to follow the fund-raising course you recommend, in order to make the same amount I'd need to drink 1000 bottles of your product at give or take 15 quid a go and at an unredeemable total cost of about £15,000 . If I chose the same period of a month, though on doing the maths I probably wouldn't, I'd need to drink 30 bottles every day.

I mention this because you conclude the advert with a second recommendation: that I enjoy your product responsibly.

I don’t want in any way to suggest that you cynically abuse people's desire to help wounded ex-soldiers and bereaved families so that you can make a quick buck during this season of goodwill, or that you think that we are all stupid.

But others might - if they’re not already pissed.

Yours abstemiously,

Peter Roberts

On accountability and responsibility

The more the panic at the BBC develops – the Director General resigning after a few weeks in the job, being given twice his contractual pay-off for doing so, and with suspensions and stand-ins all over the place – the more I ask why George Entwistle went in the first place, even after his craven interview with John Humphries on 10^th November and his admission that he took insufficient notice of the Newsnight crisis once it had started to develop.

There has been a lot of talk – not least from Entwistle – about his ultimate ‘responsibility’ for what happened. In fact, he is ultimately accountable for what happened. As he noted, the Newsnight programme went through the various checks that existed long before he became Director-General. Both the journalism and those checks were done in a sloppy and unprofessional way and didn’t keep to basic standards, but others were responsible for them.

As a manager, accountability incorporates responsibility if you set up structures and/or procedures that are flawed, fail to reform them when you detect problems - whether inherited or your own, or fail to have sufficient oversight of those that are in place. The first doesn’t apply to Entwistle; the second can’t yet apply as he had only been in the post for a few weeks. The third is more arguable, but I believe a new person in a huge job should be allowed to make errors, if only for the purpose that they learn from and don’t repeat them. Also, in theory a fire could develop anywhere in the BBC’s vast forest, but one cannot expect the DG rather than the system he or she oversees to pick them up.

Finally, with regard to the second point above, accountability is an active thing: it is about putting things right, and the new DG was not been given this chance. If he had been given that chance, and had failed, then we could have started talking about his responsibility.

Meanwhile, let’s panic. What else is there to do?

In praise of maps

What wonderful things maps are. No symbol of our loss of innocence is more beautiful.

Maps changed our world - that line of mountains, those headlands at each end of the bay, the horizons beneath which we carried on our lives - and the lands and people beyond it. The world was flat until maps appeared in all their essential flattiness.

Now Mankind could fly without leaving the ground, could burn his wings without crashing to earth. The world became of three dimensions. While always compromised by its curvature, maps are things of revelation. Even the most prescriptively and deliberately drawn leave as much to be imagined as read, while large scale topographical maps are a wealth of the unstated but discernible. And they are never up to date. Maps contain within them the tools with which we can question both what we see and what we understand.

For this reason maps should be treated as kindly as books, and we should resist the shallow, utilitarian prescription of satellite and other devices, for to travel is better than to arrive - whether you think you know where you're going or not.

But would Petraeus betray us?

I hope I'm not alone in thinking it ridiculous that David Petraeus has resigned as head of the CIA because he had an extra-marital affair. That's between him and his wife and family.

It doesn't matter whether he was good or bad at his job, since the 'rule' would apply to the good as well as the bad, and could apply to any organisation or post.

Nor does it say much about the suitability of his character for the high post he occupied, if that is the reason. John F. Kennedy was himself an adulterer, Winston Churchill a drunkard and Adolf Hitler a teetotal vegetarian who wept to music and couldn't abide cruelty to animals (and in that sense he was a man whose time has come, a modern role model if ever there was one).

That Petraeus had it off with his biographer might make people want to read the book with care, but it's not as if he was popping over to Iran to call on Mrs Ahmadinejad and leaving his papers in the wardrobe, is it?

Meanwhile, there is no doubt tumult everywhere in Langley, Virginia, and you don't have to love the CIA to see the danger of following the principle elsewhere.

It's just daft.

The Meaning of Life

At the end of the day and when all’s said and done,

And the finishing post at the end of life’s run

Can be glimpsed in the distance – just over the hill

That we all one day roll down whatever our will –

We fall to consid’ring the meaning of life,

Its purpose and pity, its trouble and strife.

Thus exercised, surely we can but conclude

With a shrug of the shoulders, a sagging of mood,

That the nearest to knowledge, the furthest from doubt,

The best guess we have as to what it’s about

Is the Hokey-Cokey:

Knees bend,

Arms stretch,

Ra Ra Ra.

That’s what it’s all about.

Yes, that’s what it’s all about.