Truth
A Critical Eye on John Gray
Abstract
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.George Orwell
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 15 December 2004
Dawkins’ God
Someone called John Gray reviewed, in the UK Independent newspaper, Dawkins’ God by Alister McGrath, professor of historical theology at Oxford University, and director of the Oxford Centre for Evangelism and Apologetics, even getting a mention by the Critical Eye columnist in the UK Guardian. He wrote:
In his view of science, however, Dawkins is simple-minded in the extreme. Like Karl Popper, he sees scientific inquiry in highly Romantic terms as the disinterested pursuit of truth. In reality—as has been shown by work in the philosophy and sociology of science over the past 30 years—it is an immensely powerful social institution in which authority is as important as critical discussion, if not more so. As the ultimate arbiter of our beliefs about the world, contemporary science has more than a passing resemblance to the Church in its heyday. This may not bother Dawkins, but it plants a sizeable question mark over his view of scientific inquiry as the ultimate embodiment of rationality.
Gray is some sort of academic, being the Professor of European Thought at the LSE, the trouble being that he cannot think, or he has no understanding of science, as he shows in this short quotation. This cheesy hack, who has never done anything useful in his life, tells us Dawkins has a simple-minded view of science, implying, of course, that a professor of European thought has a much higher-minded view of it. We can be certain that when the hapless wordsmiths and European thinkers of this modern world are berating scientists they are giving themselves toffee and nothing more.
McGrath is one of those utterly incoherent people who think science and religion are compatible, holding doctorates in molecular biophysics and in the history of theology. It has become fashionable for those who find science too hard a discipline to pursue themselves to write desparagingly of those who succeed at it, to seem superior, or sometimes to bet on the Templeton lottery. Regrettably, at a time when science is less valued in the UK than ever (though not in aspiring countries), dunces are heard and get professorships of Faddish Twaddle while science departments at universities are closed down. Instead Faddish Twaddle departments such as European “thinking”, media studies, and science and Christianity—alternative ways of lying acceptably in our terminally declining society—are opened. Drop in a few citations of Kant, or attacks on science in your term papers and you have passed and can get a professorship in Faddish Twaddle and contracts with newspaper proprietors.
The Measure of Truth
It is noticeable that Gray does not like it that science seeks the truth. The truth is what media hacks and theologians do not want. Gray counters science with mysticism. For him, philosophy and sociology are the proper measures of science, not the fact that it works, and actually succeeds in revealing the truth, as its effectiveness proves. Arbitrary musings are sufficient for this eminent European thinker to dismiss science as nothing more than a social institution akin to the Churches and the Press. For them authority counts, and so it must too for science. So, there! (Isn’t he provocative!)
The trouble with the conclusions of profound European thought is that science has a true measure, unlike religion and publicity. It is the real world. Scientific hypotheses are tested against reality, and when they do not measure up to it, they are discarded in favour of a better one. No one denies that authority has a place in science, and rightly too, but when scientific authority is wrong—unlike religious authority—its preferred tenets cannot be upheld against empirical tests. Theology and philosophy have no empirical tests. In science, change is inevitable, and authority, like the House of Lords, can only hold up progress for a while—until the evidence is decisive. The Church held up progress for a thousand years in Europe, and media hacks have always been used to churn out lying propaganda for their paymasters, whether the Murdochs, the Falwells, or the Bushes and Blairs.
Gray continues his propaganda pitch claiming “science has more than a passing resemblance to the Church in its heyday” because it is “the ultimate arbiter of our beliefs about the world”. Well, so it should be, but Gray proves that the hacks of the media barons really have that role, as he well knows—and media barons pay well. Unlike the “Church in its heyday” when everyone had to accept the arbitrary commands of popes and their local vicars or be slowly roasted from their feet upwards, science is non-coercive, and is verifiably true, for those with the patience and intelligence to study it. This may bother Gray and Christian moneybags like Templeton, but it plants no question marks over scientific inquiry as the ultimate embodiment of rationality. If science is irrational, then Gray and his fellow detractors had better tell us why it is so successful. That is what they cannot abide.
The seemingly self-evident arguments for God of a few hundred years ago and before have evaporated in the scientific furnace. Scientific understanding of the world eroded arguments for a supernatural creator, and the evangelical apologist, McGrath, can offer no certainty to the Christian believer. Christians always fail in their attempts to build a case for God based on pure science. Instead, they use sophistry and obfuscation to hide the problems of belief yielding a God that is incomprehensible and alien from people’s experience.
The Explanations Science Offers
Science has explanations that work in the real world. It found the earth was incredibly old, casting doubt on the supposed historical plan of God for man’s salvation by starting it so far back in time, long before humanity entered the world, that it looked an absurd plan for an Almighty that created everything there is in the universe in just six days. The extent of space, like that of time, is a peculiarity that did not gel with a God that was supposed to be favouring an inhabitant of one minute and seemingly unimportant planet among its vastness.
Then the earth was removed from the centre of the universe where the anthropocentric patriarchal religions had placed it, as the home of God’s favoured creation. Evolution answered those who argued with Paley that Nature must have been designed. Changing environments selected out only those animals that were best able to breed in them, thus, slowly, over the epochal timescales of geology, changing species from one into another, and spoiling the simplicity of the God-sent plan of sacred history. Even human history no longer looks to have been planned by any supernatural entity. Everything looks to be much better explained by human deeds and decisions, not God’s.
Christians never seem to wonder seriously why the Almighty Designer scribed on His drawing board a world that looks exactly the way it would if there were no Almighty Designer. Having written a personal account, albeit through human amenuenses, of His plan, what reason could He have had for making it differ from what can be observed in Nature with the sophisticated observational tools we now have? People ought to have found that His account was correct. Evidence ought to have corroborated it. If God truly answers prayers, why is it not manifestly verifiable?
Why did God only use methods that would have brought about the world without His intervention at all? If God really existed, as Christians say, and intended all along to interfere in His own creation having set it going, there must be clear evidence that He did interfere in it. If angels visit, why do we not see them? A God worth His salt should be evident in Nature, but he is a psychological Zimmer frame for immature people to use in limping through life.
If God is a purely individual crutch, why should He be stuck with a global role unless it is a scam by those who want to use it to gain power over the psychologically disabled? Weak people might find strength in communal action, but the evidence of history is that unscrupulous manipulators find them ideal to use for their own ends. No Christian seems in the least daunted by this, probably because reading Christian history is the last thing they want to do, being positively discouraged from doing it by their priests and pastors. Religion is rational for these manipulating shepherds. They can get something out of it in life, and the sheep will never know any different.
Would Christians be opposed to science if it corroborated the bible? Of course not, but it does not. Why has God done this? Is God a deceiver or is science wrong? If neither, then it must be that Christians have been deceived by their co-religionists for 2000 years. And if God chose to effect His Creation by evolution, then why did the Almighty being pick such long winded, cruel and wasteful ways of setting up a plan to save a species that has hardly yet existed on earth in geological time? God must be presenting Himself to the world as if He did not exist. It is more scientific, and more Christian, if we are to accept the scholastic William of Ockham, that God does not really exist at all. Nothing objective persuades us that we should believe in God, and Christians are left with their own subjective, psychological need for a supernatural buddy.
If McGrath and Gray do not like these conclusions from their different standpoints, they are perfectly entitled to join the inhabitants of Caligari’s cabinet. They might prefer unreason, but they cannot pretend their arguments are better reasoned. All they can do is continue the obfuscation of their Christian forebears.
So, McGrath doubts that any worldview, atheistic or religious, can be built from a scientific premise. The history and philosophy of science agrees, he says, though he gives no explanation how. He suggests there are difficulties too in deriving theories from observations and in deciding which explanation of alternative ones is best. Again, he gives no further details, though no doubt he expects us all to rush out and buy his books to find out. He concludes that agnosticism is the only safe stance on the issue of God’s existence, explaining that agnosticism is “a principled, scrupulous insistence that the evidence is insufficient to allow a safe verdict to be reached”. It seems fair and balanced to the uncritical reader, but it is like saying that the average human being is half male and half female. There is no central position on the issue, in scientific terms. The science is plain. There is no need of the hypothesis of God, and so scientifically God does not exist.
Understanding Science
We are told Dawkins avers either we know something by proof or we don’t know it at all. Everything is false unless it can be proved. The LICC, a Christian website, considers this “over-simplistic thinking” a confidence trick. Of course, it is, but it is the Christian’s own confidence trick, not Dawkins’ or science’s. Mathematicians prove things, not scientists.
It is a perennial truth that Christians wilfully refuse to understand science, or cannot. What these ignorant people cannot get is that there is no need of hypotheses that serve no purpose. There is no need of the hypothesis of God, and so the scientist cannot accept God exists. It is not a question of proof. It is a question of evidence and necessity. The scientist does not have to prove that something exists for which there is no evidence. There is no evidence for God, and no need of the hypothesis of God, and so scientifically there is no God. The Christian scholastics warned against theologians inventing unnecessary entities to effect their theological proofs, but did not notice that God was Himself unnecessary. Scientists accept the principle, but Christians cannot.
Final adjudication on the God question lies beyond reason and experiment.A McGrath, Dawkin’s God
So, it must still depend upon credulity and deceit, as it always did. Indeed, we do “live in a post-secular time”. McGrath, Gray and their ilk would wish us back to sacraments, banality and deceit, as we were in the middle ages when the Church ruled.
In reality, it is the absolute conviction that we are demonstrably right that is the hallmark of infancy, not the religious claims that Dawkins rubbishes. Thinking adults live by faith.Nick Spencer, LICC Website
And faith is, of course, the Christians’ absolute conviction they are demonstrably right. Ho hum!
Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.Hebrews 11:1
As if to prove his theological approach to science, Gray goes on to criticise Dawkins’ inventing the notion of memes as a parallel to genes in popular thought and gossip, and having a role in cultural evolution. Gray calls it a theory, as if it had already been absorbed into the scientific corpus. If this hypothesis is to be accepted, it has to be tested against the real world, and who would do this other than the sociologists that Gray seems to admire as opposed to the scientists. Of course, Gray is not talking about scientific sociologists—those who actually study society—he loathes anything scientific. He is talking about philosophical sociologists who chose to let loose their philosophical vultures on to society hoping for some juicy bones to pick over.
His “European thinking” is empty criticism and nihilism—carping criticism of what he cannot understand. In Gray’s continental wide brain, memes cannot be right because, if they were, science would be “little more than a succession of random ideas”. Does he mean here to admit that science is not a succession of random ideas. It must therefore be a succession of non-random ideas. It is therefore rational and must mean something. Wonderful, this European thought stuff!
A New Messiah?
Gray has been described as one of the most provocative, original and heretical thinkers today, particularly in his critique of secular humanism. You could have said the same about Auberon Waugh. A certain type of right wing hack likes to write outlandish nonsense to provoke a reaction. Immediately, the uncritical Right have a new messiah. Gray is perfect for the role. He thinks religious faith is thriving, and the secular faiths of the Enlightenment everywhere are in retreat. It would be hard to uphold in the UK and Ireland, where traditional religion continues to fade.
He effects to be disdainful of Christianiy besides science, but the LICC describes him as sympathetic to “the concept of sin, which he sees confirmed not only by history but also by psychoanalysis and sociobiology”. This source adds, “his willingness to take the fight to liberal humanism is both bracing and refreshing,” and “to recognise and even champion the concept of sin… for those with eyes to see …is not only liberating but the first step towards salvation.”
Humanity is flawed. The doctrine of the Fall is right. Education and technology cannot alter human nature. One would like to know how anyone, even a European thinker, can judge how humanity is flawed. Are fowls and felines flawed too, or is it just humanity? What is an unflawed human like? Is Gray himself more flawed, as flawed or less flawed than the rest of humanity, and unless he is not flawed and so is excluded from humanity, can we believe anything that he writes?
Perhaps he is thinking—after all, he does it professionally—of the US elections, and the impact of Islamic cracked pots. Even in these cases, though, it is hard to maintain that we are seeing anything other than a desperate Battle of the Bulge, a final attempt by patriarchal religions to revisit past glorious victories. Both the Christian fundamentalists in the US and the Islamic fundamentalists are motivated by demagogues who hate liberalism. Gray joins in with these Straussists and Qtubists in attacking the fruits of the Enlightenment, apparently without, er, thinking about it, but novelist John Banville, reviewing Gray’s work in the Guardian, tells us he is dismissive of the Straussist neocons in the USA, calling them “Washington’s new Jacobins”:
The danger of American foreign policy is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished.
There is a huge distinction between imagining that evil can be trapped in some confined space and bombed into permanent destruction, and dealing with separate problems as they arise, whether considered evil or not. Gray calls the crypto-imperialist policies of the Straussist, “von” Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, “Hobbesian pragmatism”.
So, Gray decries the “war on terror”, but, whereas he sees Al Qaida as an attack on western liberal values, despite himself he joins the neocons and the Straussists he professes to dislike in their disdain for the Enlightenment—the best thing that happened to the people of Christendom in its 2000 year existence—thus assisting in undermining liberalism. He is sensible and progressive on the need to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if Islamist terror is to be curtailed, but seems not to associate the whole issue with neoconservative policies consciously taken—regressive, reactionary policies, utterly contrary to liberal enlightened policies!
Objecting to Progress
Gray (Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions) also objects to the Enlightenment idea of progress, considering it to be merely the Christian message “emptied of transcendence and mystery”. He absurdly classes NeoPagans and apparently even liberals as nothing but “missionaries of a new gospel more fantastical than anything in the creed they imagined they had abandoned”. Only a professor of Babelic thought could come to this conclusion.
Gray uses tendentious phrases rather than any sort of logic to persuade his readers that progress is a “recent creed” (for example). Gray wants no one to have any such belief. He seems to want us to accept that one step forward is inevitably accompanied by two steps back. It is automatic, mechanical. No gain will last. There is nothing to be done about it. Rather any gain will be lost in the next generation.
Christianity had no notion of progress, on earth at any rate. What is progressive in Christianity? Christians get their reward post mortem, and meanwhile must endure the tribulations of life as best they can by praying and singing hymns. The Christian world is nothing but a test ground to allow God the Farmer to separate the wheat from the chaff. The world is wicked, polluted by evil, and Christians can hardly wait to leave it and join their figment in fantasyland.
For many centuries the churches of the world forbade interference in human life. Humanity was filthy and disease ridden, and God’s will was not to be challenged. Anyone with a modicum of analytical grey matter can see that the Enlightenment idea of progress was utterly different from the Christian idea of salvation. Despite this, Gray thinks Christians are better educated and more profound in their thinking than liberal humanists, according to Banville.
But, once modern science showed it could improve the quality of life, people put their hopes of a better future into science and progress. For Gray, the reason why this is an illusion is that only religion—though it is itself an illusion too!—can explain human nature and the inadequacy of human knowledge, not science (are you following?):
Like older faiths, progress and the Religion of Humanity are illusions. But whereas the illusions of older faiths embody enduring human realities, the faith in progress depends on suppressing them. It represses the conflicts of human needs and denies the unalterable moral ambiguity of human knowledge.
Science is apparently at fault for eliminating falsehoods that older faiths “endure”. At the same time Gray concedes that progress is real, but only in the science he disdains as much as other products of the Enlightenment. “In ethics and politics it is a superstition.” To back up his views, being familiar with straw dogs, he sets up straw dolls. Agents of the Enlightenment thought history was strictly linear, he says. If any did think this, scientific historians now certainly do not—an example of progress in thought.
Now Banville reveals that Gray concedes that progress also happens in other areas besides science. The unfortunate example he cites is that judicial torture has been abandoned. This parochial European professor of thinking has not thought about the judicial torture introduced into the world by the Straussist US administration. He also allows that dentistry is a great boon, and so it is, if you can afford to pay for a dentist who actually does his job properly, and does not deliberately destroy your teeth to ensure future business for dentists. Scientists, unless they are anarchists, will accept that laws, among others to control dental sabotage, are necessary, but, in a flash of gestalt, Gray makes the astonishing discovery that:
Human knowledge grows, but the human animal stays much the same.
If this is a permanent law, presumably Gray’s conclusion is that human knowledge is worthless, but perhaps it is not forever true, Gray having no more time than anyone else to judge. The point about a brain—as opposed to having all experience hard wired in the genes—is that the brain allows considered change of behaviour. Such behavious is flexible, and so will change as often as necessary, but social changes must be slower, requiring individual change to be co-ordinated. They occur when a population gets to expect and trust that they will. Is 300 years of the scientific revolution enough time?
The counter-Enlightenment is fascism, and fascists are aware of it. It is up to scientists, liberals and free-thinkers everywhere to stand against this deperate last thrust of dying patriarchalism and privilege. Upholding nonpatriarchal religions and atheism, and demolishing the lies and pretensions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are necessarily part of this battle.
Atheists
Gray says atheists are often more dogmatic unbelievers than Christians are dogmatic believers, absurdly claiming that skepticism is an integral part of Christian thinking. It is an integral part of the thinking of the many Christians who have lapsed or are lapsing, but just because an occasional educated Christian like Pascal is slightly skeptical about some things is hardly to uphold skepticism as part of Christianity. As soon as it becomes so, Christianity will cease to exist.
Gray dozily gets to his conclusion by confusing skepticism with doubt. Many Christians are necessarily apathetic doubters. They question many Christian tenets but not actively, so they simply pass them by in doubt but not skepticism. Skepticism is the true basis of atheism, on the other hand, because the atheist is scientific enough not to believe in anything for which there is no unequivocal evidence, let alone proof.
Yet this dunce of a professor thinks there should be all degrees of intermixing of belief and unbelief. He must do because he finds Christians who have left the Christian fold, as he puts it, while keeping some sort of belief, but cannot find equivalent atheists. He cannot see, poor man, that atheism is like pregnancy—you either have it or not. You cannot be a bit pregnant, and you cannot be a bit of an atheist. An atheist has considered the evidence for God as carefully as possible and finds it impossible to accept. Any “atheist” who is a bit of a believer cannot be an atheist. Gray is a professor of thinking but cannot get as far as this elementary fact. He goes further, implying that atheists are not open to mystery. This rancid old bone is often dug up by Christians and their defenders against critics. Nature is far more wonderful and mysterious than anything merely imagined by congenital knee benders.
Gray goes on to tell us that most religions do not require belief but simply practice. Is it really possible to practice any religion without believing it, or at least that something will come of it? Gray cites Hinduism, but Hindus believe sillier things than many Christians, such as the miracle of plastic elephants drinking milk offered to them. Buddhism, he says, considers doctrine unimportant and truth ineffable, but Buddha founded an atheistic religion, and most scientists would agree that any fancied ultimate truth is undiscoverable. For Jews, apparently practice is more important than belief, so again we need to know what they think they are practising. Sufis are apparently the same, but even Gray cannot understand Sufism, professor of thinking that he might be. It is a huge carcinoma of limitless chaotic speculation centred on a solitary attractor—the unity of everything with God.
Gray is a seriously ignorant man for a professor, especially at a college like LSE that once was prestigious. Standards have indeed declined. He thinks Christianity has been deformed by Hellenistic philosophy when it is actually a hybrid of Hellenism and Essenic Judaism. It is Hellenism above all that distinguished Christianity from Judaism. So, undeformed Christianity simply is Judaism, albeit not the Judaism of the rabbis which is itself a revision of the Judaism of the time of Christ.
Continuing on his supposed analysis, which overwhelmingly seems made up as he goes along, Gray asserts that atheists are believers in the perfectly good God. He cannot seem to understand that unbelievers perfectly content in their own condition have to argue with Christians in their own terms. Inevitably then, a discussion between a Christian and an atheist is about the Christian conception of God—the almighty and perfectly good one. This is a peculiar God, Gray says, because other religions did not have it.
He proceeds to show off his utter ignorance again. The gods of the Greeks were all amoral. He is using the word morality in the sense that Christians use it—to denote an attitude to lasciviousness—and he speaks of the Homeric gods. But the Greeks had perfectly moral gods too, and in the full sense of the word. Indeed, the Christian Son took on the characteristsic of several of these gods, like Apollo, Orpheus and Asklepios.
Gray turns to the Gnostics who, he correctly tells us, believed the world was ruled by a lesser evil god called the Demiurgos. Quite so, and the Demiurgos was the Creator—the very God of the Hebrews that Jews and Christians held to be a good god. Both Gnostics and Christians cannot be right about this God, if He is constant as Christians believe. Christians will claim they are the right ones because their God ensured they survived while the Gnostics did not, not a convincing reason when many Christian clerics admit the Devil has all the best tunes. Moreover, these Gnostics also believed in a perfectly good and purely spiritual God who was too good and pure ever to defile Himself by appearing in corruptible mortal flesh. Flesh was indeed ruled by the Demiurgos, the Creator of the world, but it was the supreme perfect spiritual God Gnostics looked to. Amidst all this, he fails to mention that the Jewish type of perfectly good god actually was modelled on Ahuramazda, the Persian supreme God. Here was a truly good god, because all evil was created by His evil twin, Angra Mainyu, the basis of the Demiurgos and of the Christian Satan.
Gray’s ignorantly made point is that unbelievers talk only of the Christian version of God, when they should be talking about all these others as well or instead. He cannot recognize that atheists can see no evidence for any of this supernatural menagerie, but as noted already, the dominant idea in our society is the one discussed—the Christian one. That, for Gray, is an atheistic failing, not bigoted special pleading.
Gray also tells us that Epicureanism, for example, does not have its own atheists opposing it, so atheism is not a universal view. The reason is that religions like these are themselves atheistic. Their God is not an anthropomorphic waggler of his finger in history but is an unconscious Order, the rules of the cosmos that even the lesser gods like the Olympians had to obey. This is a sort of non-sentient God that scientists and atheists can accept, and to pretend that in fairness atheism should be against perfectly rational order in the universe is simply an example of this doltish biased thinking. He seems to think he has a great discovery in realising that atheism is singularly concerned with the Christian God, but besides that God being the one atheists face in their exchanges with Christians, it is the sheer absurdity of it that invites special contempt. So who cares that there is no universal religion called Atheism? Only the ever thoughtful professor Gray. Atheism is nonetheless universal because it is the refusal to believe that figments of the imagination can autonomously create and manipulate the world.
Moral Values
Gray goes on in his desperation to show that atheism is not a suitable alternative religion to Christianity. No moral values follow logically from the denial of the Christian God. Typically Gray accuses those “who pontificate on the evils of Christianity” of not knowing much about its history, or of history at all. The people who know not much, or actually nothing, about Christian history are the target of atheistic scorn, the vast majority of professed Christians. If they knew a fraction of the truth, they could not possibly be Christians, but the churches are careful to keep the truth from them, or to present is as a negigible flaw for which they have apologised. Christian history is grotesque. It is Satanic!
To prove his own ignorance and deceit, he says “the worst 20th-century crimes against human freedom were committed by atheist regimes”. The atheistic regimes were those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, apparently all hostile to religion. Communism certainly is atheistic in rejecting the Christian anthropomorphic God, although the communistic dictator, Stalin, learnt his skills in a Christian seminary where he was training to be a Christian priest. Hitler was brought up as a devout Catholic by a devoutly Catholic mother and never denied, but always affirmed, his personal faith. His Nazi regime did mutually beneficial deals with German Catholic politicians and the Vatican—as did Mussolini—and agreed to enforce a Christian education in schools. How then was this regime of the Nazis hostile to religion?
And Gray’s final words on this is that the outcome of these regimes was mass killing “on a scale that none of the world’s traditional faiths has ever rivalled”. If this is true at all, it is only because the Christians in their heyday did not have the technology for such mass killings, but Christian leaders today do not seem shy of using what weapons of mass destruction they have. The popes had to rely on fire and the sword but succeeded in killing uncountable numbers over many centuries. The admirers of Luther—who included Hitler—with the Catholics killed myriads of people they designated as witches, and so agents of the Devil. Like being accused of terrorism today, there was no defence, and the best outcome to expect was a long imprisonment and loss of all your possessions. Gray insists there is no such thing as progress and Christians evidently are proof of it.
We discover that “humanists echo Christians in believing that humans are radically different from other animals in that they are capable of controlling their destiny”. In what way can Christians control their destiny? One only! The core of Christianity, as all the patriarchal religions, is obedience. Christians do as they are told by their spiritual mentors the crooked priests and pastors whose living depends on it. It is, though, the Word of God that they have to believe, though they only have the priests and pastor’s word that belief is God’s Word!
Apparently naturalists like religion because it is natural, but here is one who does not regard religion as natural but simply an extremely frightening, and therefore compelling, scam, for simple, gullible people, at least in its Christian form. Human beings are not all clever. That is natural enough, but they are also not all educated. That is not natural in a society able to educate them. Many human beings are therefore neither clever nor sophisticated, and are open to being duped by those human beings who are unscrupulous and cleverer. Christians call them their shepherds!
Gray seems to think he has made a discovery in that Marxism is a Christian heresy. It is his own education that is sadly lacking. How long will it be before some university appoints an I-Speak-Your-Weight machine as a professor. They could hardly be worse than Gray. He goes on to say concerning a religion of human emancipation:
It is impossible to imagine a political religion of this kind developing… in the context of Judaism, which has never made the universal claims central in other monotheistic religions.
Who then were to be “the light of the gentiles” and the rulers of the future commonwealth, in Jewish expectation? The Jews, of course. Gray is a bombastic simpleton, who spouts nonsense from his elevated and obviously undeserved seat. He obviously regrets never making it to the Papacy, a job for which he tries to establish himself eminently suited, even though, in false modesty, he declines to admit his suitability.
Christianity is the fount of Marxism and communist revolutionary movements for the simple reason, denied by Christians naturally, but plain to any unbiased reader of the New Testament, that Christ was a communist revolutionary himself. So, it is hardly surprising that Christian millenarian movements showed similarities with revolutionary movements in general.
Desperately trying to find false analogies between secularists and Christians, Gray tells us that “communists, Nazis and others” were ready to die for their cause and so were no different from the Islamic martyrs or the Christian ones of a previous age. He cannot see that there is a huge difference between someone willing to die for a better life for others—to die altruistically—and someone dying for the selfish, albeit deluded, reason that the reward is an eternity in paradise. Secularists die knowing there is no reward for them, but that a future generation might benefit. Without people willing to die for a cause, Gray and other pompous haranguers would never have gotten into their fancy positions in academe even if they had been born at all.
Gray apparently looks forward to a time when there is neither belief or unbelief! Presumably we shall all have been lobotomised by the fascists who ultimately emerge when religious apologists join with Enlightenment haters to destroy the liberal values that have given us our relatively free-thinking world. These people aim to return society to the dark ages, and without our vigilence they will succeed.
Ideological Fellow Travellers
Gray ends up berating the US Straussists, but since they extol the virtues of lying, and Gray takes a stand close to, if not identical to the Straussists in their manipulation of religious belief and hatred of the Enlightenment, it looks suspiciously like deliberate misinformation.
The continental thinker tells us that Socrates lacked the very idea of God because he lived in a polytheistic culture, and the concept of a single, all-powerful deity later propagated by Christianity was unknown to him. The thinking man’s hack is as muddled as we can expect. If he is intelligent at all, he is being deliberately obfuscatory. Of course Socrates had an idea of God, but it was not the absurd anthropomorphic Father of Christianity. God was order, and reason in the cosmos. It was “Nous”, “Physis” and “Logos”, and it came from the same source as the Christian God—Persian Zoroastrianism.
The Greek philosophers often spoke of God as well as gods, but the latter were simply to placate the mob, who were attached to Homeric and Hesiodic stories of Athenian polytheism, though the upper class regarded them as fairy tales. The sinister followers of Leo Strauss aim to continue the patronising of traditional religionists—here, the Christians—to use them in their political ambitions. Is Gray a Straussist himself? He certainly brackets liberalism—albeit with the prefix neo!—with communism as “illegitimate offspring” of Christianity. Christianity itself, was, of course, the illigitimate offspring of Judaism which was the illigitimate offspring of Persian religion. Lo! Religions evolve too!
You have to wonder where Gray really stands in the world. He does seem to have some liberal sentiments, but seems to prefer a broad but hazy view to a close, high resolution one. He prefers his telescope to his microscope, but puts it too often to his blind eye. In an LSE forum, Gray enters a plea for strong states able to resolve future conflicts irrespective of “serious and sometimes deeply humanly damaging loss”. Any liberal idea of resolving such conflicts by negotiation are a “disabling illusion” because liberal societies will think they can reconcile deep-seated disorders when they should be using state power to contain them. Containment, Gray repeats several times will require “dirty hands”! He barely obfuscates his Straussist wish for fascist government to come out of the supposed war on terror. The ideology of fascism was worked out by Charles Maurras in the country where the Enlightenment originated—France. As a hater of the Enlightenment, Gray can only be considered as a fascist along with his ideological chums, Maurras and the Straussists.
