Irate debate

Knives out for Richard

Dr Giles Fraser is priest-in-charge at St Mary's Newington. I don't know what that means, exactly. I don't know what that means, vaguely. He writes a Guardian column, and, regularly, that column is all about Richard Dawkins. Fraser has a hard-on for digging out the absolutely dig-out-able Dawkins.

Has the doctor got professorship-envy?

Dawkins has descended into a marginal, aggressive atheist world where his one-trick pony proclamations became tedious years ago. The most apt and ironic description is preaching to the choir. Then preaching to them some more, then even more, and more...

Tony Adams, in Addicted, describes learning the lesson along the way to recovery, along these lines:

“Tony. You can't say that!”

“But you say you want absolute honesty.”

“There's absolute honesty, and there's the brutal truth.”

Dawkins has become the Mastermind contestant, specialist subject, the brutal truth. I'm black and white by nature, and I like to see high-horse, high moral ground types who bang on about the importance of truth squirm when confronted by the inescapable facts that yes, their bum does look big, not just in that, or today, but in whatever, whenever. I'm right in Jack Nicholson's corner in A Few Good Men:

“I want the truth!”

“You can't handle the truth.”

In the war of words between Dawkins (blue corner, hardline repeat brutal truth offender) and Fraser (red corner, god-bothering secret lovechild of Dara O'Briain and Bill Murray), it's interesting to compare and contrast the approaches:

Hard science, disdain for the politics and popularity contests of life from Dawkins. Lots of facts and numbers. A disturbing ability to be right and cheese 99% of people off at the same time.

At the pulpit, the equally indigestible Fraser, who comes out with gems like this:

“It so happens that, when it comes to eugenics, religion has a much better track record at defending the human than science or leftwing progressives.”

Which may be the case. When it comes to eugenics. Which is a pretty narrow field of operation.

The unpalatable truth Fraser chooses not to share is that in just about every other field, religion's track record's poor. The Inquisition tortured and murdered plenty of people, among them some that dared to be right about the earth actually orbiting the sun. Fanatics persecute artists, writers and musicians, because their god tells them to.

Of the two, Fraser's writing is easier on the blood pressure. But his position: choosing to believe in made-up stuff, and made up stuff that makes people live in misery, that promotes suffering, bloodshed, poverty, and inequality, isn't a starting position from which winning is possible.