This morning, I saw the following on twitter:
It’s
one of those pictures of a notable person accompanied by one of their quotes,
thereby lending the words a tremendous sense of import and idolising the figure
who delivered them. Very rarely to either of those elements live up to the
billing lent to them by this format.
This
particular one was tweeted by a fan of Richard Dawkins to the man himself, who
promptly and humbly retweeted it. What makes this activity particularly odd is
that both follower and leader appear to think that they are highlighting
something wonderfully insightful, but the extraordinary thing about the
quotation is that the insight it contains is so blindingly obvious.
Frankly,
what Dawkins has noticed here is just as perceptive as noting that English
people tend to have eggs and bacon for breakfast whilst Americans have
pancakes. Surely it is one of the most blatantly obvious facts about the world that
different cultures have, over the course of the millenia, developed different
responses to the various phenomena and challenges we face, whether that be the
need for calories in the morning, or dealing with human spirituality and
existentialism.
The
discovery that there are different religions and that they tend to be tied to
particular cultures is not revelatory at all. What is fascinating is that those
religions have generated so much extraordinary work in art, literature and
philosophy; that they have inspired such dedication; that great thinkers have
found a lot of common ground between religions and have suggested what the
phenomena of religious faith might actually be about beyond a relatively
primitive belief in a bearded chap in the sky.
However, Dawkins has no
interest in all of this. He finds it better to be smugly superior and
dismissive, whilst being facile to boot. It’s not that he doesn’t have a point.
Undoubtedly, he has a number of valid contributions to make, but you cannot be
considered a genuinely valuable contributor to any debate unless you are
willing to engage with all of it. Dawkins needs to arrest his condescension and
begin to consider the possibility that the holders of religious faith may well
have many valid points of their own, and that they are a great deal more intelligent than
he cares to think.
