The death of Christopher Hitchens earlier this month was an irksome reminder that some of the people who are most preoccupied with the idea of God are those who don’t believe in any such thing.
It is the unbeliever’s conundrum that the knowledge that God does not exist is not sufficient for personal peace. It often comes complete with a messianic zeal to rival and even beat that of true believers. Nobody who has ever been caught in the conversational crossfire between proselytizing believers and unbelievers, intent on scoring points and on the conversion of bystanders, can fail to know this. Try interrupting the flow of argument with the rejoinder that you couldn’t care less either way because the existence or otherwise of a God makes no difference to your life or behaviour, that you would be pleased to have definite proof of God but not unduly disturbed to have definite proof of the contrary, and you will find that believers and unbelievers are united in a rare moment of incredulity as they chastise you for your indifference.
You would assume that, in that position, somebody who doesn’t believe in God or religion would be indifferent to both, just as you are, but this is not quite the case because what we are talking about here is not so much lack of belief in God and religion as opposition to both ideas. And opposition, by definition, is not indifferent. It is passionate and committed and that is why so many unbelievers find themselves engaged in battle after battle, trying to win people over to their cause.
Christopher Hitchens was possibly the most attractively eloquent unbeliever of our times, acquiring an enormous following even among those who singularly failed to agree with him. There is something unfailingly compelling about arguments that are so well made, which are so strongly rooted in reason and logic. Hitchens tended towards the liberal in his thinking, but he was championed and lionised by the illiberal, the authoritarian, even the fascist, who glossed over the distinction between arguing against religious faith and arguing against the continued existence of religion. To say that somebody is credulous to believe in the tenets of religious faith, and that religion is responsible for many of the world’s ills, is not the same thing as saying that there should be no religion.
The truly liberal view is the ‘live and let live’ approach: whether you are a believer or an unbeliever does not bother me as long as your beliefs, either way, do not impinge on my own choices or those of others. That has long since come to be my own view. Discussions for or against religion bore me and I think that by now we should have moved way beyond that. In contemporary democracies, religion is not a threat to individual choices, life or liberty and so it should not be treated as though it is. Similarly, unbelievers should not behave as though they would, if they could, pose a threat to the fundamental human right of freedom of religion.
Some unbelievers fall into the trap of being just as illiberal and domineering as extreme believers, wishing to impose their views and beliefs (for passionate opposition to religion is a belief system in itself) on the rest of society, while realising that they cannot do this. I cannot agree with their opinion. While being not at all religious myself, I enjoy various manifestations of religious belief and think that they add to, rather than subtract from, society. This is all the better and more interesting if the religions are multifarious. I do agree that the over-riding domination of society by a single religion which shapes most aspects of life is unpleasant and poses a threat to human rights and liberty, while also stifling growth, but secular democracy guards against this and we live with no such worries, even though we can observe them elsewhere.
The president of the Malta Humanist Society said, when Christopher Hitchens died, that Hitchens showed us that a world without religion can be a better place. I don’t think that statement was quite accurate, and might be a misquotation. Embedded in it is the implication that Hitchens wished for the eradication of religion, when his arguments were all to do with the futility of belief. He argued for the falling away of that belief, through persuasion.
Even so, we have no way of knowing that a world without religion would be a better place. It would certainly be a far less interesting place. Societies where religion was forcibly eradicated – such as the Soviet Union – were certainly not better, but that is mainly because of the concomitant totalitarianism which is a prerequisite for such a ban. Societies where interest in religion has fallen away naturally over the course of the 20th century – Europe and North America – are certainly better than they were when religion dominated the state of play but, then again, that is mainly because of the concomitant secular democracy that is a prerequisite for free decisions on whether to be religious or not.
Rather than arguing for or against God, for or against religion, I think it makes far more sense – even at a personal level – to reason instead in terms of honesty. When people work hard at convincing others about these subjects, whether it is for or against, I can’t help thinking that it is they themselves, first and foremost, whom they are trying to convince. People who are content in and convinced of their belief, or the lack it, are indifferent to the beliefs of others because they pose no threat.
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