(no subject)
Has anyone noticed that in all the riot of opinions about the riots, one usually loud voice has been completely silent? Everyone has something to say. Even those who, unlike me, have not been beating the drum about the rising culture of uneducation in Britain for more than a decade, have suddenly found something to say. Sometimes it was even something interesting and constructive. Sometimes, as with Peter Hitchens squawking at the Welfare State, it was ignorant and stupid. But then, that is what a national debate sounds like.
But there is a voice, usually loud and threatening in this country, that is wholly absent. The atheists, the church-bashers, the anti-Christian trolls that haunt Christian blogs, the Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens groupies, have all suddenly fallen silent. As I mentioned, Peter Hitchens has made an unhelpful and ignorant contribution; but his brother, not as a rule the shiest of creatures, has not been heard from at all. Richard Dawkins is still apparently involved with the tail end of his anti-feminist disaster; certainly he does not seem in a hurry to pronounce upon the latest display of national peculiarities.
It's simple, isn't it? This is a time when atheism cannot be used even as an excuse. Even the inventiveness and the hatred of Dawkins would not manage to find a reason to blame religion for young men and women who destroy their neighbourhood for no reason, setting fire not only to the shops but to the flats of others, and assault firefighters and ambulancemen when they try to help - as if destruction were a value in itself, and it was their duty to force it through down to the last brick. Even the sophistry and prejudice of the New Atheists and their flocks of troll imitators is not up to blaming the Church for hooded young men looking shops of everything they can carry, including even little portions of sugar and cups of tea. If one thing is clear, it is that these young people would treat any religious claim, but especially the Christian one, with contempt. I'm not saying they are disciples of Dawkins and Chris Hitchens; for one thing, most of them can hardly read. But they represent the lower-class counterpart to the evangelizing, destructive, hate-ridden, liberticidal assault upon the Christian religion that the English upper classes have incubated and fostered and flattered for so long. And it would take more hypocrisy than even they are capable of to pretend otherwise.
But there is a voice, usually loud and threatening in this country, that is wholly absent. The atheists, the church-bashers, the anti-Christian trolls that haunt Christian blogs, the Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens groupies, have all suddenly fallen silent. As I mentioned, Peter Hitchens has made an unhelpful and ignorant contribution; but his brother, not as a rule the shiest of creatures, has not been heard from at all. Richard Dawkins is still apparently involved with the tail end of his anti-feminist disaster; certainly he does not seem in a hurry to pronounce upon the latest display of national peculiarities.
It's simple, isn't it? This is a time when atheism cannot be used even as an excuse. Even the inventiveness and the hatred of Dawkins would not manage to find a reason to blame religion for young men and women who destroy their neighbourhood for no reason, setting fire not only to the shops but to the flats of others, and assault firefighters and ambulancemen when they try to help - as if destruction were a value in itself, and it was their duty to force it through down to the last brick. Even the sophistry and prejudice of the New Atheists and their flocks of troll imitators is not up to blaming the Church for hooded young men looking shops of everything they can carry, including even little portions of sugar and cups of tea. If one thing is clear, it is that these young people would treat any religious claim, but especially the Christian one, with contempt. I'm not saying they are disciples of Dawkins and Chris Hitchens; for one thing, most of them can hardly read. But they represent the lower-class counterpart to the evangelizing, destructive, hate-ridden, liberticidal assault upon the Christian religion that the English upper classes have incubated and fostered and flattered for so long. And it would take more hypocrisy than even they are capable of to pretend otherwise.