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Leggi in Italiano

The Parthenon and Humanism

Well, thank you very much indeed, Professor, for that regrettably terse, suspiciously abbreviated introduction. A resolution I’ve made really in the course of today is to come to Tennessee more frequently and more doggedly. It’s not often in the course of a day that you can spend a morning at the Parthenon and then the afternoon in the dining room of Hogwarts School, which is where I now appear to be. Though, from the very forbidding face of the divine confronting me at present, I can take what comfort I will from the fact that Hogwarts School at least teaches sorcery.

The thing I like about the Parthenon and always have liked about it, the reason I diverted so much of my time to writing a book about it, is that it did begin as the temple of a cult of a vanished goddess of Pallas Athena, and it did later become a Roman Christian church, a Byzantine Christian church, after a series of explosions and desecrations involved in both Eastern and Western Christian heresies, and after further explosions and detonations and desecrations, became a mosque. And then, for a very brief period of the 1940s, was a specially consecrated temple to the National Socialist Nazi New Order in Europe, which has a swastika flag on the pediment of the Parthenon, which is a very degraded form of paganism.

It has, after all these vicissitudes, come to the conclusion that I think we all have to come to in the end. It’s become a temple of humanism and of the aesthetic and of the view that the proper study of mankind is man. And it’s nice that in Nashville you can see it with the sculpture on the pediment, especially the horses of Selenia seen from underneath, which, thanks to the colonial depredations of the British Museum, you can’t see in Athens itself.

The Importance of Secular Values

So be grateful for what you’ve got. In fact, as an immigrant to this country, part of the underlay of what I want to say to you this afternoon is be aware of how fortunate you are to live in a country that has a Bill of Rights and a Constitution and a Rule of Law. Never dream of taking this for granted. Never forget how long it took to accomplish, cherish it as best you can.

Even I, who come from a country which doesn’t have a constitution, but instead has a state church headed by a woman who can’t really preach in this church, who’s also the head of the armed forces as well as the state, and whose son, Prince Charles, is about to, we’d learn, possibly convert to Islam, this is what you get for trying to found a constitution on the family values of Henry VIII. Be appreciative, in other words, of what you’ve got.

Now the title that I chose, or that we agreed upon, is obviously, fairly obviously to some of you, stolen, annexed, plagiarized from the essay that got Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley that is, thrown out of Oxford University, wrote a short, rather beautiful essay called The Necessity of Atheism, and at that point you couldn’t attend any university in England, certainly not Oxford, unless you professed a certain kind of Anglican Christian orthodoxy. Those days actually are not very remote from us.

It’s not at all long since these religious tests and censorships were commonplace, even in the academy. What I want to appeal to when I mention Shelley is the tradition of, and also to attack, to reproach to some extent, is a well-known tradition of nostalgia among ex-believers. I think probably the largest community in the world at the moment are former members of different churches, former elapsed members, and it’s very common to hear them say that though they had no choice but to abandon their faith and find their reason, that they feel the loss like a missing limb, like an absence of something fundamental.

The Politics of God’s Funeral

I suppose my first task, therefore, is to say to any such people who are here today, cheer up. The best such book that I know about was written by Michael Harrington, who some of you may remember. He was the author of The Other America, a wonderful study of poverty in this country that is credited with starting President Kennedy’s War on Poverty, President Johnson’s War on Poverty, but read by President Kennedy.

He wrote a book called The Politics at God’s Funeral, a reference that won’t escape you, where he offered a sort of mourning for the departed. Agnosticism says, in a way, that the loss of God is a loss of comfort, of consolation. The agnosticism of many people maintains that belief, however, is optional. At best, it may be unsupported by any facts, but it may not necessarily be inconsistent with them.

Many, many humanists can be found to this day to say that they wish it were otherwise. In other words, that they wish it were true, and that they wish the foundations of faith could be found in reason or in evidence. They regret the fact that it cannot, and they rest their case there. This is not just a paradox for people like Michael Harrington, who were in their day the backbone of the secular, socialist American left.

The Intellectual Gurus of Conservatism

It’s a paradox to very little pointed out, I think, for American conservatism, especially in its modern form. Who are the two great intellectual gurus, if you don’t mind the word guru? Intellectual authors of the American right in our time? Well, there might be an argument about which the top two would be, but in any group of the top three or four, you’d have to include Leo Strauss, and you’d have to include Ayn Rand.

And all the arguments about the politics and the interstitial politics of the present administration, for example, it’s now become commonplace to point out, sometimes inaccurately or with exaggeration, the debt owed by Paul Wolfowitz in particular and the neo-conservative school in general to Leo Strauss. And you wouldn’t be able to tell in general, perhaps, from the presentation that the Republican Party gives to the country that its intellectual muscle is provided by unbelievers, but such is the case, such is the fact.

The Anti-Theist

Leo Strauss, I think we could define as a non-believer rather than a positive, infidel, or unbeliever. He had a sentimental reverence, shall we say, or respect for belief, but he couldn’t achieve it himself or respect it too much in others. And I suppose Ms. Rand could be described as a Nietzschean in some ways because she thought that religion, all of it, but particularly Christianity, was a religion for slaves.

And I don’t agree with her about that because, if only because for such a long time Christianity was the religion of slaveholders and slave takers and slave traders, as well as, because we must be fair, for abolitionists and campaigners against slavery. Also don’t mistake me, I don’t propose any simple-minded Nietzscheanism here, but I do want to propose the concept of the anti-theist as opposed to the non-theist or the agnostic.

The anti-theist, such as myself, someone who is hostile to the idea of religion, takes no position as between different faiths. We maintain that the pluralism of faith, the extraordinary pluralism of faith and the schism within existing faiths, the number of churches or synagogues or mosques or gurdwaras or temples claiming to possess or open an avenue to the truth and competing with one another, is susceptible of a very simple explanation.

The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way around. If you accept the posture that man makes gods, there is no mystery in the proliferation of gods and religions that has always existed in human society. If you, on the other hand, accept the idea that God made man, such a phenomenon is inexplicable, especially if you add, as so many do, that God made man in his own image.

The Horrors of Theocratic Rule

And if I was a religious person and I heard someone, or spiritual person, and I appear not to have the gene that is required for this, and I heard someone talking this way, I would in that instant recognize profanity and blasphemy. No fellow mammal, no one who I know is at least made in the same image as I am, I know myself reasonably well, is going to tell me he knows what God’s will is.

That must be profane even to the spiritual and the religious. It is certainly very deeply offensive to the active rationalist mind because of its arrogance no less than because of its impossibility. And if I’ve made this simple point of repudiation clear, I still haven’t carried my point about the moral imperative of anti-theism or unbelief, which I’ll now try and carry, or at least to assert.

What then if it was true, without, or shall we say against, you choose, either against the evidence or without any evidence, but what if it was true nonetheless, that somehow ontologically be established as true, that we are all part of a grand divine design? What would that actually mean if it were to be true?

Well, it would mean a regime of permanent supervision and surveillance over our lives and our personalities. That never stopped. That began before we were born, went through every moment of our earthly life, and continued after our deaths an inescapable authoritarian surveillance, control, and supervision.

The Example of North Korea

I’ve been to, I’m one of the very few people who’ve been to and written about North Korea, which has now transformed itself from being an atheist totalitarian state into a fully religious quasi-Confucian state of worship of the reincarnation in the son, Kim Jong-il, of the father, Kim Il-sung. You have only one right as a North Korean.

That is the right to praise your leader and to thank him for everything he’s done for you and everything he’s done for everyone you know, and to continue praising him and thanking him all the time without cessation for these benefits and these shower of gifts. In other words, in North Korea has been manifested the promise of the Christian paradise, the permanent system of praise for something that, after all, you didn’t choose to have.

The Example of Mother Teresa

Professor McDonagh mentioned my work on Mother Teresa. Let me give you an example, because she is, I think, of all the religious figures in the recent past, of the last century, as a matter of fact, the most revered, respected, automatically and axiomatically praised by the secular, by the liberals, by people who granted to her sainthood in its human sense.

Now, why should a woman who is not preoccupied with the things of this world, who doesn’t care enough even to have more than a pair of sandals and a sari, why should she care that the Republic of Ireland, the state of Ireland, the government of Ireland, should have in its constitution, as no other European country now does, a legal ban on divorce and civil marriage or remarriage?

The Importance of Awe and Wonder

Can I tell a quick joke about awe by the way before I go on? I’ll risk it. And it’s wonderful. Look at the reflection into the future and the past that the Hubble telescope provides. Look at what Hawking has discovered about the extraordinary majesty of this universe.

Realize in it that you can contemplate this without any argument from design, that the argument from design or the argument of an original cause is too paltry to take account of anything so splendid and so various. I’ll give you a single case, that of the event horizon. Who knows what the event horizon is?

And elements of this crusade or jihad, as it calls itself, have managed to form a secret army within the borders of the United States, not just within some of the mosques paid for by spoiled and opportunist Wahhabi princes, mosques into which FBI agents have refused to set foot, but in our prison system, in our armed forces and in some of our ghettos.

And this secret army means to destroy us all, and it means to do it in the name of faith. And what has been the response? In my view it’s been very pallid, almost apologetic. You hear people say, “Well, not all religion’s like that. It’s not fair to judge all faith by that.”

The Israel-Palestine Dispute

Perhaps not. But let me take the example that preoccupies us the most and that may be central to this same argument, the Israel-Palestine dispute. Every one of you knows something about it. Some of you may remember a rather distinguished Israeli foreign minister named Abba Eban.

He was also, for a while, Israel’s representative at the United Nations. He’s now deceased, alas. I used to know Mr. Eban slightly. I remember he used to say in the opening of his speeches—he was a very great attender of and giver of seminars on this matter—he said, “When you look,” he said, “at the Israel-Palestine question, the first thing that strikes you, the very first thing that will strike you, is the ease of its solubility.”

The Threat to Our Society

Now admit to yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, most discussions of the Israel-Palestine dispute don’t begin in that tone of voice. But he went on to say, “What could be simpler? There are two nations, one Arab and largely Muslim, partly Christian, anyway, an Arab nation in Palestine, and there is an ancient yearning for a Jewish national homeland there.

There’s a fair amount of land, neither of these populations are very large. The solution has been self-evident for a long time. We partitioned, and two states, one for each, there’s room for both. And indeed both, in theory, recognize one another as national movements. Well, it is that simple, as a matter of fact.

There’s nothing making it toxic, except what? Except the intrusion of religion into the simplicity, the human simplicity of this argument. Because there are those of us, the Zionist leadership, who think that God gave them all this land, and there’s nothing to argue about with anyone who just happens to live there, who isn’t Jewish.

The Response to Faith-Based Initiatives

And as you are well aware, there’s no shortage of Muslim spokesmen who are more than able to take them up on that claim and say, “No, you have it entirely wrong. This has been Muslim land forever. It belongs to the caliphate that was holy, the empire that will one day come again if the faithful bear witness long enough.

And then there’ll be no need for any Jews here, and they’ll all be destroyed.” And as if this wasn’t decorative enough, there are a number of Christian Zionists who say that actually this would make quite a good launching pad for Armageddon and for the return of the Messiah, since his last visit was so unpersuasive.

The Threat to Our Freedom

And what has been the response? In my view it’s been very pallid, almost apologetic. You hear people say, “Well, not all religion’s like that. It’s not fair to judge all faith by that.” Perhaps not. But let me take the example that preoccupies us the most and that may be central to this same argument, the Israel-Palestine dispute.

The Importance of Secular Values

And I think the situation is extremely serious, and more is required than a bit of bleating about the wall of separation. Further, how is my time? I didn’t bring a wash. I mustn’t trespass on your time, Warr. I think I can cram most of it into five, at perhaps the expense of a few mordant remarks.

After the atrocity that took place, the assault on our civil society that took place in September 2001, there was a ceremony at the National Cathedral, attended by the President, the leaders of Congress, where the official sermon for the United States was preached by the Reverend Billy Graham. Mr. Graham and his colleagues have been found many times to have published obscene and defamatory remarks about the Jewish people.

Conclusion

And this in the country that distinguishes itself above all by being not just the first but still the only nation in the world to be founded on written documents and promises of rights that are innate in humans that are the reward or promise of nobody and to have a constitution that specifically does not mention the word God.

There is no country in the world, in my opinion, and I’ve been visiting a lot of them lately and perceived this as something, there’s no country in the world that wouldn’t be a great deal better off if it was to adopt some version of that constitution and that Bill of Rights.