Myth of Creationism Weakens the Vital Morality of Religion

Summary

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AT THE beginning of this year's Edinburgh Festival, a great debate was staged at the Usher Hall. The proposition was that "The New Europe Should Prefer The New Atheism". The speaker for the motion was the columnist Christopher Hitchens, who blames religion for most of the evils of the 21st century world. And it was strange, on a drenchingly wet Saturday morning, to see the old concert hall filled with what seemed like a mixture of diehard academic atheists, and slightly eccentric religious types convinced that their own account of reality should obviously be shared by all.

Now as someone who had the good fortune to be brought up in the liberal wing of the Church of Scotland, I should make it clear that I cannot side with either of these groups. The atheists, for example, make a profound category error when they imagine that religion "causes" wars. Any serious analysis of, for example, the Northern Ireland conflict, shows that what religion actually does is to provide a moralistic gloss for classic political disputes over territory, resources, social justice and national identity; and so long as those grievances remain, the wars will persist. In dismissing religion as an invariable force for evil, such atheist thinkers also utterly ignore the thousands of unsung and unspectacular situations - from the Iona Community onwards - in which true religious understanding actually serves to promote peace, and human development. And it is impossible to be an intelligent student of either Islam or Protestantism without noting the connection between the emergence of those radical religious traditions, and the evolution of free scientific inquiry as a key element of world culture.

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Myth of Creationism Weakens the Vital Morality of Religion

If militant atheists are foolish, though, in their failure to recognise enlightened forms of religious thought, their misjudgment pales to insignificance compared with the strange belief-systems of religious f...

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