Cheating - 1 December 2009 |
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OK, I cheated. I just mocked the British Humanist Association.
Sorry.
Let me just tidy up the loose ends. Shouldn’t take a moment. Here goes.
The fact that the BHA accidentally picked two Christian kids to front their latest advertising campaign does not, strictly speaking, undermine the logical coherence of the BHA’s stance. To address that question, you’d have to point out a bunch of other obvious things. Like this:
1. Atheism is plainly a religious position, since it makes substantive claims about facts materially significant for religious people, such as the affirmation, ‘There is (probably?) no God’.
2. As a religious commitment, therefore, atheism falls by its own attempted critique of religious one-sidedness, since atheism, no less that Christianity, is one-sided on the question of religion.
3. Another way of saying the same thing: there is no such thing as ‘legitimate neutrality’ on any morally significant question. If you don’t believe me, imagine what might happen to a historian who claimed to be ‘neutral’ on the question of whether the Holocaust took place. People (and, amazingly, there have been some) who attempt such ludicrous equivocation soon discover that this is one knife-edge on which it’s pretty hard to remain balanced.
Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Current affairs, Minister's Blog