I was reading the BBC News website today, and I see that Tony Blair has been “converted” to Catholicism in a surprise move which is being questioned by everyone. The main reason for the questioning is his prior stance on abortion, safe sex, and gay marriage, which was all positive. Why is it now then, that he has chosen to go in the opposite direction? Now of course I know that there are a lot of Catholics who agree with those issues, but it is safe to say that the Catholic Church itself is against them, and as Ann Widdecombe said, did he vote for those issues because it was convenient for him? Whatever the case may be, this article led be onto another, entitled “‘Atheistic fundamentalism’ fears”.
In the article, the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan said that the greatest problem facing the world was the rise of “fundamentalism”, which is a fair enough point, but he didn’t focus on the obvious Muslim fundamentalism, or the Christian fundamentalism that has gripped the USA. No, he focused on what he calls “atheistic fundamentalism”, which is a completely nonsensical phrase. The idea of a fundamentalist is someone who has “strong adherence to any set of beliefs in the face of criticism or unpopularity”. That surely gets Atheism out of the picture straight away? How can an atheist have a strong adherence to not believing in something? Christian fundamentalists will say “believe in God or burn in Hell!”…Atheist fundamentalists would say “don’t believe in God…or…well, nothing much will happen either way…just don’t do it!”. You see? It’s utterly ridiculous!
The Archbishop doesn’t come across as a “nice” Christian by any sense anyway. In one quote from the article he talks like a radical anti-secular person…hardly one to make judgement on non-believers:
As well as leading to Christmas being called “Winterval,” the archbishop said “virulent, almost irrational” attacks on Christianity led to hospitals removing all Christian symbols from their chapels, and schools refusing to allow children to send Christmas cards with a Christian message.
Well, as far as hospitals and schools go, they are government run facilities that allow members of any faith to access their services. A Christian would hardly like it to walk into a hospital chapel and find it decorated with images from Islam, or receive a Jewish Hanukkah greeting in a card from their child’s school now would they? Some people really don’t think things through. The separation of the church and state is a good thing. It keeps everyone happy (apart from non-secularists of course). So until the world is united under one religion (and I really hope it never is), we’ll stick with plain hospital chapels and normal holiday greetings in cards.
As for his comment about “Winterval”, he really didn’t do any research about this at all. Birmingham City Council decided to call all activity over the Christmas period “Winterval” to respect people of different beliefs. Christmas was still called Christmas, Hanukkah was still called Hanukkah, but the entire period in which they both happen was referred to as Winterval. It didn’t openly offend anyone, which was what the council was aiming for. However the Bishop completely forgot about other religions and views again, and decided it was an open attack on Christianity.
The reason I decided to talk about this issue was because I stumbled on a blog post by someone called Alex Parsons, an atheist like me, who was dumbfounded by the Bishop’s comments, and the hypocrisy of his statements.
The bottom line is, there is no such thing as Atheistic Fundamentalism. As Alex Parsons says:
Whilst many atheists might not say it so bluntly out of politeness, atheism is the belief in an absence of gods; by definition we see most of religion as untrue and useless superstition. That’s not being an extremist or militant atheist, that’s just being a normal one.
The Bishop should stick to correcting fundamentalism in his own church, and stop blaming innocent people whose only “fault” is that they have looked at the Bible, Koran, Torah, or whatever religious text you have, and seen no logical reason to believe a word of it.
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