Today’s New Statesman goes to town on the topic of God.

Sholto Byrnes makes a barely comprehensible argument that is summed up in the subhead as:

For most Europeans, a belief in God may have given way to a belief in democracy, law and human rights. But the Almighty remains the source of our secular freedoms

Huh? Even without reading further, this fails to make even the most minimal amount of sense.

I think the first sentence is what a more philosophically erudite blogger might call a category error. I’ll try for some definitions to see what these already totally distinct ideas have in common. Hmm. Democracy is system of government. Law is a set of social rules. Human rights are socially agreed standards that we all hope get applied to us by our rulers. Maybe he’s referring to the fact that we invest these different ideas with an element of idealism?

We don’t think they made us, let alone the universe. We don’t pray to them. We don’t hand over big money to people who claim they can intercede with them. We don’t believe they gave their only son to be crucified for us. We don’t feel obliged to prostrate ourselves before them several times a day. They aren’t known for healing the sick or making the lame walk. We don’t have to assemble once or more a week in a temple to Human Rights and listen to dull readings. We certainly don’t believe that they will take us up in an almighty rapture.

in fact, they are such poor gods that even the smallest of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods would knock them out with a single raised eyebrow. There is no sense in which belief in these ideas equates to belief in a god.

I’ve laboured this screamingly obvious point because it encapsulates a whole flawed current line of argument – that the social and political ideas that still remain to us from the Enlightenment are just another form of religion. They bloody aren’t. So there :-p

How else to explain the new religions that we have created for ourselves? A religion of science, whose priests make proclamations imbued with a certainty that their empirical branch of learning cannot justify; a religion of rights which, however much we may instinctively agree with it, has no more coherent proof than that it is “self-evident”; and now, perhaps, a religion of ecology whose ministers thunder as self-righteously as any 17th-century Puritan preacher.

Rubbish, for so many reasons that it’ would be too boring to labour them any more here (although the blog reserves the right to do so, more entertainingly, I hope, in the near future. Sorry. I’m just annoyed at this right now.)