Michael Coren Journalist for Life
There are many fronts launched against the pro-life movement and one of them comes from militant atheism. In actual fact the argument against abortion doesn’t necessarily have to have a Christian or religious foundation and atheists can certainly be pro-life. But the reality is that some of the most extreme supporters of abortion are also the most God-denying. Their champions are well-known: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and, increasingly A.C. Grayling.
The author of The Good Book: A Secular Bible and The God Argument is one of the English-speaking world’s best-known atheists. He’s less witty than the late Chris Hitchens, less respected than Dawkins, but he does have style. The flowing blonde locks, the occasional attempt at the common touch, the leftist professor persona. But sometimes his comments appear so banal as to be part of a mock Twitter account, the product of an ersatz and satirical critic. Not so.
Religion makes him angry, he says, “because it causes a great deal of harm and unhappiness.” Well of course it does. As does love, sex, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, the written word. Thing is, it’s not love, freedom and the rest that themselves cause harm and unhappiness but humanity’s perversion and exploitation of them. The same applies to religion, or at least to the Christian faith. One would be hard pressed to genuinely argue that the actual words, teaching and example of Jesus are the cause of darkness and suffering. A diamond is in itself beautiful. Smash that diamond into someone’s eye and it causes agony.
He has also said that, “charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we’re doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don’t like it.” Good Lord – sorry A.C. – where have you been living? Atheist regimes in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Marxist Cambodia, for example, slaughtered believers beyond counting. The atheists in question may not have been English and civilized and awfully posh and all that, but they were still atheists and their visceral as well as intellectual detestation of Christians in particular was atheistic. Even today some of the secular triumphalism on display in Europe and North America is astounding. In Canada recently a Catholic school lost a high court case because it dared to teach one of its pupils religious education. A Catholic school, funded by tax dollars from Catholic parents, told it could not be Catholic. The boot is certainly on the other foot, and its name is Jack.
Then there is his 2012 baby, the New College of the Humanities, where the wealthy come to be educated. With all of the ethnic and class diversity of a Florida country club, the place charges a colossal £18,000 a year for tuition and has been condemned as a direct attack on the public education system that Grayling, a self-described “man of the left” is supposed to uphold. Terry Eagleton wrote that, “for that kind of money, I would demand a team of live-in, round-the-clock tutors, ready to fill me in about Renaissance art or logical positivism at the snap of a finger. I would also expect them to iron my socks.”
Yet it’s not enough that Grayling condemns religion, mocks those who still believe, and has started his own university – the hirsute haranguer feels obliged to play God and give us an alternative theology in his slice of literary vainglory, The Good Book. Even Richard Dawkins, whose hubris is positively hilarious at times, hasn’t gone that far. It’s a strange work in that in its attempt to dissuade readers from religion it quotes and references so many writers who were inspired by religion. While describing itself as a humanist or secular bible, it is only convincing or even readable when it calls for qualities such as love, charity, empathy, courage and kindness. All the outward manifestation of grace, in fact, that are demanded in the New Testament.
Many of the reviews of the book were extremely damning, and Grayling dismissed them as “hilariously hostile.” What he didn’t admit was that the most critical were not from Christians but agnostics and that there is nothing funny about intelligent dissection of jejune and self-indulgent writing.
Another enemy of the vulnerable and the sanctity of human life. How they shout and how wrong they are.
Michael Coren can be booked for speeches at mcoren@sympatico.ca.