A column by Nick Cohen at The Observer reminds us that, far from secularism rotting a nation’s moral core, countries which are more secular tend to be more benevolent internationally and more tolerant internally.
The occasion for this reflection is the Pope’s upcoming visit to Britain, which has prompted Dawkins and other noxious atheists to point out that the Pope has condoned many Very Bad Things, most importantly the molestation of children by priests who were shuffled around rather than arrested. The rhetorical trick that has really upset the nation’s Catholics, however, is the suggestion by Dawkins and Geoffrey Robertson QC that there are grounds for the police to interrogate the Pope for enabling and covering-up the crime of child molestation.
Two interesting things to note – firstly, it never ceases to amaze how often religious conservatives lay the blame for the “vice” and shallowness of modern society at the foot of secularism and/or progressivism, instead of where it rightly belongs, consumerism. For example, Cohen quotes the Catholic Edmund Adamus complaining about the “ever-increasing commercialisation of sex,” in Britain, a place which has become a “hedonistic wasteland” that turns women into objects for the sake of “sexual gratification.” Depending on your definitions and attitudes towards hedonism and feminism, these comments contain varying grains of truth. But considering the correlation Cohen mentions between secularism and support for women’s rights, it does not appear Adamus has controlled for all factors.
Secondly, while Cohen acknowledges the less impressive human rights record of officially secular places like China and Cuba, in the comments readers were also quick to bring up the Soviet Union. The idea that atheism somehow fueled the horror story of the Soviet Union is an idea I run into often, and one that will require a future post to discuss more fully. But suffice to say here that while indeed, Communist dogma and Marxism were overtly hostile to religion and this hostility helped justify many horrendous acts of tyranny, atheism itself was not a primary rallying cry for those carrying out the Bolshevik Revolution nor was it a great motivator for the dictators who proceeded to commit so many crimes against humanity. Pick up any average book on the Russian Revolution or the years of Stalinist terror and you will find much about power politics, much about ideological rigidity and brainwashing, and much about economics, but very little about how much the Commies hated religion. That they did so is true; that it mattered much is doubtful or at the least, debatable.
