Unholy Enthusiasm

When, in October 2009, Christopher Hitchens explained to a Sydney crowd how religion poisoned everything, he opened with a little joke. He’d been delighted, he said, to discover his hotel situated in a locale where, if you took an evening constitutional, you could, without fear of embarrassment, ask a passerby, ‘Am I heading for The Rocks?’ The question had often previously occurred to him—but in Sydney, at least, the answer involved directions.

That was the first of several references to Hitchens’ legendary thirst during a lecture advertised with its speaker, cigarette in mouth, glaring belligerently from posters like a drunk at closing time. Even with laughter still rippling around the hall, I found myself wondering why, in a talk about God, it should matter so very much that the audience knew that, yes, Hitchens really did like a drink.

But it was only later, after host Tony Jones insisted our lecturer recite—twice—Monty Python’s drunken philosophers song, that I thought I understood. Hitchens was opening an event calling itself the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. At some level, the organisers sensed that, insofar as the evening featured only a middle-aged Oxbridge-educated intellectual—indeed, one who’d recently been profiled in Vanity Fair, boasting, like every other tiresome baby boomer, about quitting smoking and embracing exercise—we might struggle to believe that much risk lay in an utterly conventional denunciation of a deity in whom scarcely any of us believed. The arguments against God are, after all, sufficiently well established: as long ago as 1842, Marx was comparing atheists who brayed about their intellectual courage to ‘children assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogey man’. How, then, might a self-styled contrarian provide the frisson required for an evening of danger? The more, perhaps, he hinted at whisky-soaked debaucheries (‘without God, all things are permitted’), the easier for us to persuade ourselves that we were all tremendously daring simply for listening.

These days, Hitchens specialises in slapping a veneer of militancy over arguments either entirely pedestrian or deeply conservative or both, spinning neo-con talking points to épater le bourgeois in print or on television. With the New Atheism, however, he has found his metier, a cause in which posturing, parlour-room radicalism serves as both form and content.

If that seems unfair, consider a brief comparison. In 1884 an earlier unbeliever arrived in Australia. Like Hitchens, Joseph Symes came with a fearsome reputation as a polemicist; like Hitchens, he was a self-conscious provocateur, given to carrying bread in his pocket so that he could enrage believers by, as he putting it, having ‘a chew on the body of Christ’. Symes, too, delighted in disputing with the pious (in 1892 he conducted a monster debate during which he buffeted the unfortunate Christian minister Isaac Selby over no fewer than six nights)—and, like Hitchens, he invariably crushed them.

Symes, however, did not receive an invitation to the main hall in the Opera House to address Sydney’s good and great. In fact, when he sought to speak in the infinitely less grand Melbourne Opera House, the same class of people did everything to prevent him, eventually inducing Victoria’s Chief Secretary Graham Berry to intervene and shut the event down. Nor did Symes attract the fawning media coverage enjoyed by Hitchens, with the respectable newspapers referring to him as ‘that leprous-tongued reptile, Mr Joseph Symes’ and his publication the Liberator as ‘a cesspool of moral (or immoral) filth’. Symes’ stay in Australia constituted, in fact, a narrative of more-or-less constant persecution: meetings cancelled, writs issued, newspapers burnt and so on. He was stoned in Woodend; he was charged for holding Sunday meetings; he was threatened with proceedings with blasphemy. A law was needed to ‘consign such ruffians to the hangman’s lash’, opined the Gippsland Mercury—and most of establishment Australia agreed.

Symes’ fate illustrates a fairly obvious point: that the political meaning of atheism has shifted in a way that few of its contemporary enthusiasts acknowledge. In the 1880s, anti-religious provocations required genuine moral courage. With a churchified establishment enforcing a compulsory Sabbath, Symes’ denial of scriptural authority over Sunday opening didn’t merely goad a few ridiculous fundamentalists but rather offered an immediate challenge to governmental authority, in a campaign in which several of his associates were imprisoned (yes, Virginia: people really went to jail for access to libraries in Australia!). Religion in Symes’ day shaped policy on contraception, divorce, abortion, science, education and an array of issues: religion in Symes’ day mattered.

In the twenty-first century, the church in Australia simply doesn’t possess such power. The Festival of Dangerous Ideas itself illustrates the point. It opened with Hitchens speaking against God; at a later session, Cardinal Pell spoke up on his behalf (‘Without God we are nothing’). Which of the two events drew more pundits? Which lecturer confronted a more hostile crowd?

There are places today where atheists face persecution—but Australia is not among them. Religious rhetoric might, on occasion, impinge on the public sphere, but even social conservatives seek generally to express their prejudices in secular terms, recognising that appeals to Holy Writ no longer settle debates. The oily piety that Kevin Rudd, for instance, brings to hot button issues (think, for instance, of the Henson debate) seems, despite what he tells the Monthly crowd, less determined by theological imperatives than a deep conviction (shared equally with his secular colleagues) about the electoral appeal of social conservatism.

But the changing political meaning of atheism relates to more than simply the numerical decline of church attendance. With the Liberator so notorious that respectable butchers wouldn’t wrap meat in it, Symes’ subscribers were overwhelmingly working people, autodidacts trying to think their way to a better society. Their scepticism brought them into real and immediate conflict with the powers that be. Hitchens, by contrast, spoke at a $60 event at the Opera House to a crowd that, as you’d expect, was well educated, well heeled, overwhelmingly white and predominantly older—and nothing he said challenged his listeners in the slightest.

In 2010, when a celebrity non-believer fulminates in the broadsheets, at a writers week or on the ABC, they’re staging, more often than not, a confrontation not with those listening but rather with those who aren’t, a challenge issued not so much to our beliefs but to theirs, to doctrines, in other words, accepted by the kinds of Australians who don’t come to the Opera House. Precisely because contemporary religion flourishes at the cultural margins (in the outer suburbs, for instance, or among immigrant communities) rather than amid the taste-setters and intellectuals, most New Atheist presentations contain more than a pinch of bien-pensant snobbery, so that the genteel crowd at a professorial demolition of some scriptural daftness or another leaves smugly satisfied with their superiority over those oiks for whom biblical fairytales still have meaning. That’s why Daniel Dennett infamously suggested sceptics refer to each other as ‘brights’ and it’s why Hitchens, in God is Not Great, contrasts his childhood disbelief with the simplicities of his childhood teacher, a ‘pious old trout’.

At the global rather than national level, the tendency becomes both more pronounced and more pernicious. If religion consists simply of a risible set of falsifiable and ethically wrong-headed propositions, then its adherents are, almost by definition, stupid and dangerous—and the more ardently they cling to their delusions, the more their stupidity and dangerousness grows. Furthermore, there are certain nations where, in these terms, the population seems very deluded indeed—and, wouldn’t you know it, many of them can be found in the Middle East. So if the wild-eyed fanatics chanting Allah akhbar were to be confronted by the pointy end of Western rationality, well, would that be so very terrible?

Certainly, Sam Harris doesn’t think so. In Australia, Harris might not be a name with which to conjure but in the United States he’s one of atheism’s big three, part of an unholy trinity with Richard Dawkins and Hitchens. His breakthrough book The End of Faith begins as a general critique of God but morphs very quickly into a crass apologia for the war on terror and, precisely because Harris lacks Hitchens’ political sophistication, his argument repays closer examination, since it illustrates quite openly some of the implications of the New Atheist methodology.

Harris, of course, excels at Symesian exposures of the contradictions and cruelties contained in the various sacred texts. He quotes, for instance, Deuteronomy on what believers should do if a family member proposes worshipping a different god:

Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone him to death, because he tried to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

As Harris says, this—and the many similar passages in which the God of Love casually commends rapine and murder—goes a long way towards puncturing assertions that religion necessarily provides a basis for morality. But what follows from that?

In reply to objections that only a loopy fringe worries about the wilder reaches of the Old Testament, Harris argues that moderation in religion is scarcely less dangerous than fundamentalism, since the moderate retains, simply by accepting an unprovable God, the anti-rational methodology of the literalist.

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence … The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivalled.

Yet for Harris, all religions might be bad but some are much worse than others—and there’s no prize for guessing which particular faith falls into the latter category. ‘We are’, he explains, ‘at war with Islam’ since ‘Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.’

Do those of the Islamic faith have any genuine reasons for looking upon the United States in a less than favourable light? Apparently not: Harris, inevitably, quotes Paul Berman to explain how ‘in all of recent history, no country on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on behalf of Muslim populations’, while to explain Palestine, he defers to the equally loathsome Alan Dershowitz. ‘No other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights [than Israel],’ Dershowitz tells us, ‘been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace.’

If the Iraqis don’t show sufficient gratitude to the Great White Father in Washington, if the Palestinians complain of slaughter in Gaza, it can only be because of their oogety boogety religion of murder:

In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.

At this point, the careful reader might protest that Harris has already revealed the Bible and the Torah to be awash with rapine and slaughter. Do Christians and Jews also belong to death cults? No, not so much:

Although we have seen that the Bible is a great reservoir of intolerance, for Christians and Jews alike—as everything from the writings of Augustine to the present actions of Israeli settlers demonstrates—it is not difficult to find great swaths of the Good Book, as well as Christian and Jewish exegesis, that offer counterarguments. The Christian who wants to live in the full presence of rationality and modernity can keep the Jesus of Matthew sermonising upon the mount and simply ignore the world-consuming rigmarole of Revelation.

You might think that Harris thus flatly contradicts his earlier argument about religious moderation—and you would be right. But, leaving aside the hypocrisy, a recognition that one can, after all, compartmentalise scriptural injunctions raises the obvious question of why particular verses take on especial significance in certain situations rather than others. In the wake of a homophobic beating in the United States, for instance, some newspapers carried photographs of a young tough tattooed with the biblical injunction ‘Thou shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination.’ The remarkable image crystallised the problem: why do US evangelicals concern themselves so much with Leviticus 18:22 and not at all with the equally strident Leviticus 19:28 (‘Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD), a verse generally take to mean that God hates tattoos just as much as he hates haircuts (Leviticus 19:27), people with flat noses (Leviticus 21:17–18) and different types of cattle grazing together (Leviticus 19:19).

Quite clearly, particular beliefs become activated in particular social and political settings: there’s a historical context for the embrace of biblical homophobia, which is why the fundamentalist campaign against gay marriage does not extend to, say, demanding the death penalty for anyone who curses their parents (Leviticus 20:9). Harris, however, cannot acknowledge this most obvious of points, for his whole project depends upon understanding religion as a set of ideas divorced from history or culture or politics. He sees (in respect of Muslims, at least) the various sacred texts as divine instruction manuals, determinative of how believers interact with the world. That’s why he takes fundamentalists as his paradigm—and that’s why he explains away the conflicts in Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Caucasus as religious wars.

There were indeed religious sectarians in Northern Ireland who understood the Troubles in terms of theological dogma. But, by accepting their explanation of events (rather, than, say that put forward by secular anti-imperialists), Harris casually elides all the historical and social reasons why theological differences that, in other parts of the world count for nothing whatsoever, became in Ireland a matter of life and death. One might, with equal validity, point to the role played by the colours green and orange during that struggle—and then blame the whole unfortunate business on the chromatic spectrum.

The inane insistence on religious doctrine as the explanation for all social behaviour runs throughout the New Atheist corpus, with even the much more genial Dawkins happy to wave away Ireland as a spat over God. That’s why the movement really took off in the years following 9/11.

‘Why do they hate us?’ asked George Bush. If his answer (‘They hate our freedoms’) appealed viscerally to conservatives, the New Atheist reply (‘They hate us because of their religion’) provided an alternative rationale specially tailored for liberals. Thus, in the wake of 11 September, atheism opened the door to an understanding of the war on terror as—of all things—progressive. Here we were: sophisticated, democratic, secular; there they were: medieval, hierarchical, superstitious. Liberals who were too high-minded to invade Iraq for oil, and who found Bush’s braying jingoism phoney and crass, knew that beardie weirdies reading from holy books represented only ignorance and repression—and, on that basis, regime change seemed long overdue.

Unfortunately for Harris, outside the United States, his career in the vanguard of imperial atheism laboured under a couple of unfortunate disadvantages. First, he proved himself something of a crackpot when, amid his polemic against faith, he off-handedly attested to the reality of psychic phenomena and then announced that ‘there may even be some credible evidence for reincarnation’. (The End of Faith is a very strange book!) Second, and more importantly, Harris’s American-style liberalism did not necessarily translate well abroad, particularly in countries with a stronger left and thus a certain resistance to the transformative potential of pre-emptive war.

Hitchens, by contrast, learnt his politics as a Trotskyist, and so could more confidently access a rhetoric plundered from the progressive tradition. For Hitchens, the war on terror was, at a various times, about disarmament, about solidarity with the oppressed, about feminism, about liberation. Yet the struggle against religion remained fundamental, with the coinage of the meaningless portmanteau word ‘Islamo-fascism’ handily implying a battle waged simultaneously against Allah and Adolf.

Now, there’s nothing inherently new about apologias for colonial adventures framed in terms of the backwardness of the natives and the foolishness of their religion. During the classical age of imperialism, it was a very familiar liberal argument: the East India Company would overcome the prejudices of the dusky Hindoo, the despoliation of Africa would liberate the dark continent from animism and superstition, and so on.

Back then, however, the beliefs of the subjugated were generally contrasted not with atheism but the God of the West: decent chaps agreed, for instance, that sati, the practice in which widows were forced to burn on the funeral pyre of their husbands, would be overcome only by shepherding Hindus into Christianity’s kindly embrace.

But these days, as Terry Eagleton notes, God has shifted over from the side of civilisation to the side of barbarism. Precisely because, in the West, the enfeebled mainstream churches do not present a credible alternative to anything much at all, the old rhetoric works better if Christianity appears in the deficit column of the ledger, an example of backwardness rather than an instance of progress. By giving the traditional critique of native unreason an atheist twist (in which, rather than being foolish for refusing Jesus, the darkies are foolish for believing in God at all), Hitchens can free the old trope from colonial connotations and drape it, more or less credibly, in the vestments of radicalism.

But the liberals who nod along judiciously to his bluster about the Islamo-fascist threat (they’re setting up a caliphate, don’t you know!) rarely consider how an anti-religious conception of the war on terror leads Hitchens and the other imperial atheists to even more nakedly eliminationist positions than those adopted by the extreme right. The most conservative elements in the Bush administration—the people who openly saw the conflict simply in terms of US geopolitical hegemony—could, at least in theory, arrive at some accommodation with those locals willing to knuckle down under occupation. But if you interpret the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as skirmishes in a broader struggle against an international death cult, any result short of extermination became tantamount to surrender: there is, as we have learned, no such thing as ‘moderation’ in religion. Hence Hitchens’ rejoinder to those who quailed at the bloodiness of the siege of Fallujah, which, according to non-government organisations, killed between 4000 and 6000 people, and destroyed 36,000 houses, 9000 shops, 56 mosques and 60 schools. ‘The death toll is not nearly high enough,’ he said. ‘[T]oo many [jihadists] have escaped.’

Wisely, his keynote presentation at the Opera House eschewed the ‘exterminate the brutes’ rhetoric in favour of more traditionally liberal jibes against creationists and cardinals and other stage villains. Elsewhere, however, he has been notably less restrained, on one occasion famously expressing a ghoulish enthusiasm for the atheistic effects of cluster bombs:

If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops … then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

A rhetorical flourish? No, a logical corollary. That’s why Sam Harris, who understands religion in the same fashion, draws similar conclusions. As we’ve noted, for him, even religious moderation poses a ‘threat to our survival’—and thus The End of Faith concludes its denunciation of the evils done by believers with a ringing defence of … torture. ‘Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism,’ Harris intones, ‘the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary.’

Back in the dungeons of the Inquisition, who would have imagined that, one day, men would be made to scream in the name not of God but of unbelief? Hurrah for the triumph of reason over backwardness! The irony in all this is that nothing in recent decades has fanned religion as successfully as Harris’s war on terror. In the years since 2001, all across the Middle East, secular movements and regimes have come under increasing pressure from various shades of Islamism. Is it really so hard to understand why?

In 2003, during the initial stages of the Iraq invasion, one of those pellets that Hitchens admires so much killed a fourteen-year-old Iraqi boy named Arkan Daif. Naturally, for the rest of world, Arkan’s demise didn’t register amid all the other collateral damage in Iraq (perhaps as many as a million excess deaths to date); equally naturally, for his family, his death was all-consuming. In his book Night Draws Near, Anthony Shadid describes how Arkan’s relatives turned, in their grief, to religion, with the traditional dictates of an Islamic funeral busying the family and providing a structure to cope with their anguish.

Since time immemorial, the loss of a child turns parents to the consolation of faith. But in Iraq in 2003 Arkan’s death represented not a private tragedy but a particular manifestation of a generalised catastrophe. Shadid explains:

During those days of war in Baghdad, there was often a sense of the apocalypse that the weather had seemed to foreshadow …

The Muslim funeral rite was sadly routine in Iraq, but equally dignified and unhurried whenever it was performed. During the bombing, in times so precarious, such traditions began to assume new meaning; they were constants, filling time, busying and distracting relatives when their grief was greatest. At once formal and intimate, like the Arabic language, the rituals brought consolation and solace as the world outside grew ever more threatening and unpredictable.

Under attack, with your house in ruins and your son casually slaughtered, it is not logic that you seek, for any rational assessment confirms that what’s happened can’t be undone. Now, as our New Atheists will bray, prayer really won’t guarantee your family’s safety. But with shock and awe raining down on the city, neither will anything much else—and, under such circumstances, miracles appeal precisely because they’re impossible.

If we’re worried by the growth of religion, if we see God as a delusion, how to respond to Shadid’s description? Would anyone suggest that berating Iraqis about how, according to the Koran, Mohammed married a nine-year-old girl and was thus a pedophile would turn the Daif family and others like them away from Islam? Or is it not obvious that ending the random slaughter of Iraqi kids would do more to foster secularism in that country than any amount of undergraduate atheism, especially that churned out by the people who cheered on the attack that sent shrapnel into Arkan’s young body.

Religion, says Marx, is the opium of the masses, a quotation that the New Atheists inevitably drag out, since it seems to confirm their approach. They, of course, see God as a kind of spiritual chloroform. For them, he’s a magician’s trick played on the weak-minded: that’s why, if you reveal the hidden trapdoor behind the theological stage, believers will simply melt away like an audience walking out on a bumbling conjurer.

But Marx’s argument was altogether different. Here’s the notorious opium quote in context:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

The passage expands and completes the metaphor. As anyone who’s been to hospital knows, opiates aren’t simply a source of befuddlement. Whatever their side effects, they provide genuine relief from pain. Accordingly, if you’re unhappy about a sick friend’s morphine habit, you begin by treating their underlying illness—you don’t simply snatch away their prescription.

If God doesn’t create us, then we create God—and we do so because something about how we live makes him seem indispensable. Religion isn’t overcome simply by demonstrating the intellectual fallacies that underpin it. It’s overcome by changing the conditions under which God seems necessary: as Marx puts it, ‘the struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion’.

The New Atheists do, to a certain extent, link material reality to religion, but only in the crudest fashion. They generally identify faith as the legacy of a pre-scientific era, with the deity who sits in clouds and sends down thunderbolts prefiguring a more accurate understanding of lightning. That’s why they contrast religion with modernity: as if, with the rise of science, God became superfluous, and thus easily dispelled with a few zingers about the Pope or Muhammed.

Yet a moment’s thought reveals that religion has always been protean, serving utterly different functions in different eras and different conditions. Christianity means something quite different to, on the one hand, the Anglican vicar who vaguely imagines Jesus as a kind of giant Englishman, pottering about among the roses of creation, and, on the other, the sixteenth-century Anabaptist rebel leading a peasant rebellion. If modernity sweeps away some religions, it fosters others in their place. In twenty-first-century Australia, most of the traditional churches have entered into a slow but steady decline, in part because their languorous rituals simply cannot cope with the frenetic pace of a hyperindividualised, neo-liberal society. The dour Wesleyian divinity that Joseph Symes confronted in nineteenth-century Melbourne has, accordingly, been supplanted by what Marion Maddox calls the Market God, that fearsome idol whose mysterious whims deliver prosperity or plunge us into destitution.

Yet, as Maddox argues, because the free market ‘sabotages family and community life and tears away safety nets’, the Market God has ‘had to make Olympian room for another deity, one who brings … a renewed sense of the security that the Market God took away’. The shriller evangelical sects grow, she suggests, as a complement to a marketised world where a significant proportion of the population feels isolated, unhappy and starved for any purpose or communion beyond cold cash transactions. Hillsong does not represent some quaint legacy of the past: it is, rather, a quintessentially twenty-first century-phenomenon, as modern as derivatives trading or internet pornography.

Something similar might be said about Islamism. Since 2001, religion has grown in the Middle East not simply because, for families like the Daifs, it offered solace in the face of personal misery, but also because it provided a way of understanding what was taking place in the world—and, even, perhaps doing something to change it. With the secular left across the region seen as impotent at best and, at worst, corrupt and complicit, Islamists could present themselves as a dedicated, ascetic and self-sacrificing alternative.

Given that the most obvious non-religious options were either Ba’athism or various forms of Stalinism, it’s not so surprising that resistance to occupation in Iraq took on an Islamic colouration. The same story recurs again and again. What did the Taliban have going for them? Not a lot, except that unbelief, in the Afghan context, meant Soviet occupation, and the pious Talibs seemed less venal than other warlords. Western liberals might find the election of Hamas in the Occupied Territories utterly baffling, given the organisation’s enthusiasm for sharia law. But the mystery of Hamas’s popularity becomes less perplexing when we consider that, during the assault upon Gaza, Fatah—the voice of Palestinian secularism—was privately urging the Israelis to extend the incursion, hoping that prolonged war would settle their factional rivals.

Insofar as religion is, in certain contexts, on the rise, it reflects, more than anything else, the failure of secular alternatives in the face of intolerable conditions. That is what makes the self-satisfaction of the New Atheists so repulsive. If, in Australia, happy clapping evangelists are making inroads among the youth, it’s not because the kids today are more stupid or gullible than their parents. In fact, the Hillsong-style congregations tend to be entirely at home with technology, and the young men and women drawn to them have, via the wonders of the internet, more information at their fingertips than any other generation in the history of the human race. Rather than smugly telling ourselves that the new religionists can’t grasp our clever arguments, should we not consider another, less palatable, alternative: that they understand quite well what secular liberalism offers—and they don’t find it very attractive?

To make the point another way, if, like Marx, we see religion as simultaneously an expression of alienation and a protest against it, where then does that leave the New Atheism? Do Hitchens and Harris and their ilk provide any kind of alternative to a lonely kid in the suburbs of Sydney? Or do they, with their Opera House lectures and their unholy enthusiasm for permanent war, counter the sigh of the oppressed only with the smug sneer of the oppressor?

The nineteenth-century freethinkers were not exactly secular saints. Symes, in particular, was a difficult and querulous figure, whose lectures often contained a degree of lordly patronage. Nonetheless, his atheism, whatever else might have been wrong with it, at least entailed a genuine crusade against some of the more obvious evils of his era. In that light, one of the slogans he formulated seems more relevant than ever. ‘If you are going to offend,’ Symes suggested, ‘do so thoroughly.’

Respectable Australia in the twenty-first century considers all manner of things sacred. But God, by and large, is not among them. If you want to cause thoroughgoing offence, you might, for instance, try speaking up against the Israeli apartheid state and its Australian partisans, on the basis that a modicum of justice for the Palestinians would do more to counter Islamism than the umpteenth plonking repetition of atheistic arguments already old a century ago. But that, of course, would be much less profitable than standing in the Opera House to tell the glitterati about how little you’re scared by the bogey man.