“The Sharpest Young Opinion Formers are Atheists”

Damien Thompson at the Daily Telegraph sets the record straight. As always, my comments are in blue, emphasis in bold:

“…But the crucial point is that the sharpest young opinion-formers are atheists. This is a development that seems to have been missed by the old boobies who pass for bishops in the Anglican and Catholic Churches. It’s a rapid and startling change in our religious landscape and not one that is going to be reversed.

The average bright 25-year-old Briton isn’t looking for supernatural solutions to existential problems. [True.] Senior churchmen speak of the “spiritual hunger” of the young. [True.] That’s wishful thinking. [Probably.] The next generation don’t believe in God. Few of them frame their arguments as rabidly as Richard Dawkins; they don’t all use the word “atheist” – “humanist” is cooler – but that’s what they are. [True.] If they worship anything, it’s “human rights” or, in the case of Johann Hari, Laurie Penny and Owen Jones, themselves. [Damien has it down exactly-he is saying what we are all thinking. The average bright 25 year old Briton (Americans are slightly different, but not much) isn’t looking for supernatural solutions to existential problems, nor do they have spiritual hunger because thinking in a metaphysical way, or admitting of anything existing which is not merely reducible to the mechanical cause/empirical scientific explanation behind it, has been consigned to superstition more or less officially. Once this happens, even if an individual has the movement of soul, desire for or curiosity about God, the door will immediately be closed by the intellect because Comte helped us realize with the law of three stages that we are passing from the metaphysical to the empirically scientific. When spiritually prompted, he thinks “That is just the man of the last stage inside of me (click if you don’t know what that is). We must move on now for fear of being laughed as in the Parable of the Madman with the lantern.”

Their attitude towards Christians ranges from indifference to hatred. This is partly thanks to the paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church.We can argue about the extent to which this has been misreported, but not about the fact that crimes against children were covered up by bishops (and not just conservative ones, either). These crimes were seized upon by academics, writers and opportunistic publishers to create an indestructible caricature of institutional Christianity. [Very true. Look at the cartoon section of any British or French newsweekly.]

One reason that caricature isn’t challenged is that this is the first generation of young people whose parents didn’t go to church themselves. Their religious education consists of nativity plays, visits to Sikh temples and lectures about energy-saving light bulbs. [This is the reason for this blog. I believe there are good reasons behind being a Catholic and that most in my generation were never exposed to any good arguments because, as Damien says, it was more important to learn that Sikh’s are nice people too, Jesus loves you and how to save energy because that’s also what Jesus wants. Forget about Aquinas or the great thinkers of the Western world, they were part of the last stage and make your head hurt. We can teach highschoolers Calculus but not how to think beyond mechanism, they might get ideas that aren’t in line with the mechanistic philosophical system we have collectively already decided is the best: None (except science which is an application of a philos. system). Whew.]

But that doesn’t make the new atheists stupid, [of course not] despite their intergalactic levels of conceit. The brightest of them are far, far cleverer than the bishops, who (if you ignore the puzzling anomaly of Rowan Williams) are men of middling intellect – and that’s being polite, in the case of the Catholic hierarchy. All that drivel about “religion in the public square” makes me want to convert to a more rigorous creed, such as a Prince Philip-worshipping cargo cult.[LOL.] I was going to suggest that, for all the good they do, the bishops might as well join Giles Fraser and write Guardian leaders for a living. But, frankly, they’re not up to it…” [I do agree with him that they need to be more assertive. I’m not sure that it’s lack of brains as much as it is lack of decisiveness and virtus. We need a Fulton Sheen in Europe, someone to stir the pot and get people thinking again.]

Read more here. 

Thank God for schools which still teach the liberal arts, else this world would be in a right bloody mess intellectually. Or more of a mess anyways. They are like the monks in the desert that copied manuscripts, preserving western thought through and after the fall of Rome. Libraries may burn but individual collections remain.