Published by Justin Lewis-Anthony on 11 Feb 2009 at 11:11 pm
3MT : Eating at another’s table
Atheists are self-invited guests at the dinner table, and the only reason they don’t realise it is because they don’t know history.
The old joke: how do you upset the dyslexic atheist? Tell him there probably is a dog.
The modern joke: how do you upset any other atheist? Tell him he can’t come on Thought for the Day.
The commentariat are going through one of their periodic paroxysms about BBC Radio 4′s Thought for the Day. It is patently unfair, in a scientific, rationalist and secular society, that the 2 minutes and 42 seconds of TftD are reserved for people with a religious outlook on life. Are you saying, BBC, that only religious people think? Are you saying, BBC, that only religious people are moral? And anyway, at the last count (mine own), there were only six religious people in the whole of the country. Atheists pay the licence fee too!
And yet, if anyone has the temerity to suggest, as Giles Fraser did in The Guardian, that such protests are piggybacking on the roles and institutions of religion, then all hell lets loose. My beliefs are not defined in contrast to anything; I don’t need the idea of God to be an atheist; “atheism has neither doctrines nor creeds nor anything of the sort. It only has a name because theists with their superstitious beliefs have – historically – convinced the gullible that their delusion is some sort of societal norm.”1 We’re just one short step from the usual Dawkins-ish rhetoric of “sky gods”, “spaghetti monsters” and “imaginary friends”.
How little history these free-thinkers know. The father of positivist humanism, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), introduced his ideas in a little book with a significant title: Catechism of positive religion (1852). Here he wanted to show how science would inevitably supercede religion, and to help it on its way, the adherents of positivist humanism should have their own “liturgy, hymns, prayers, and a calendar of philosophical and scientific ‘saints’”. By following these rituals, the positivist humanist would “cultivate altruistic sentiments in the service of humanity.”2
One hundred and fifty years ago Comte advocated the mimicking of the rituals and practices of religion in order to further his atheological ideas. Today, his intellectual descendants want a share of the TftD pie. The atheists, the humanists, the free-thinkers, and the professional rebellionists want to sit at the same table, and sup the same fare, as the religious. There is a handy word to describe this attitude: someone who sits at another’s table to eat another’s food: it is Latin, and derives from ancient Greek: SITOS, meaning “food” and PARA meaning “by the side of”.
Parasite. That’ll do nicely.
- “Perklet’s” comment [↩]
- Thomas Dixon, “Scientific atheism as a faith tradition: An Essay Review of The genetic gods: evolution and belief in human affairs by John C. Avise (1998)”, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33, no. 2 (July 2002): p. 345. Available here. [↩]
