Concessions must always be extracted from the great mythic source of power and injustice, the heterosexual male

POOR old Richard Dawkins is in the wars again. He was recently ambushed on BBC after forgetting the full title of Darwin’s ‘Origins of Species’, and last weekend he gave another wretched interview, of the kind in which he seems to specialise, to ‘The Sunday Times’. No profile of him ever describes his manner of speech without declaring that he either “harrumphs” or “scoffs”. And so I was expecting the cross, humourless and slightly mad professor when I did a public interview with him during the Listowel Writers’ Week last year. Instead, a very pleasant Richard Dawkins turned up. The talk was scheduled for an hour. After an hour and a quarter, I took a vote if we should continue. The unanimous response was Yes. I had to call a halt after two hours, because the venue had to close. It was a really pleasant evening, with a really pleasant man.

But I don’t agree with him – or his friend, the late Christopher Hitchens – about the consequences of the godless world that they espouse. Kindness, goodness, common-sense, rationality, prudence: these are not the values that will result from the departure of organised religion, now called “faith communities” in the latest absurd twist in the language mutilation of political correctness. PC is just one corner of a politico-moral triangle – its other apices being dogmatic secularism and cultural authoritarianism – which is taking the place of religion.

Within the broad atheology of PC, lie the interlinked dogmas of feminism-egalitarianism-environmentalism, and so on: you can fill in the gaps yourself.

Now, I’m not a very convincing arguer about the dystopia that I believe awaits us in the post-religious world. This is because I myself don’t believe in a benign creator. “Natural selection” – the weeding out of the lame, the slow, the halt, the blind, via an early and often terrible death – is surely the cruellest means of creation possible. It is also a violation of the injunctions towards mercy that most religions contain. So, the paradox is this: if a society accepts that this unspeakably evil world, based on food-chains of murder and cannibalism, was actually invented by a hypocritical god who demands of us higher standards of behaviour from us than he has shown in creation, it will probably turn out to be a kindlier society than the intellectually consistent one that accepts that there is no god, and therefore no satisfactory explanation for anything, from the single amoeba in the pond to the billion-star galaxy in the sky.

This is making a patronising hypocrisy into the defining virtue of a philosophy; yet the evidence is irrefutable. Most of the greatest genocidal monsters in the world – Hitler, Mao, Stalin – were professed atheists. No professed theist has ever done such butchery. And China, which uniquely of any great civilisation has no culturally dominant, ethically based religion, also has the bloodiest history.

Humans probably have a genetic need both for god, and the sense of community which results, which is why atheists in groups seem to have a religion-shaped hole in their psyche. The jargon of post-theistic elites in Britain and metropolitan America (though not its heartland) reflects this need, for it is infested with new and entirely spurious communities to replace the “faith-community” of religion. And just as we have adopted baseball terms (left-field, hardball) without knowing what they mean, we have also imported this new language. Professor Kevin Kiely last weekend referred to the “poetic community” and Feargal Quinn to the “online community”. An article about obesity referred to “weightloss community”. The term “gay community” has now been enriched by the Gay Lesbian Bisexual & Transgender Community, which is surely the solar-powered Rolls-royce of Pc-speak.

BUT what “communities” are these really? Poets detest one another nearly as much as journalists do (which is why no journalist ever tries it on with that concrete-airship, “the journalistic community”). Online is no more a “community” than a knife-fight in Finglas. “Weight-loss community” is like saying “bald community”. And as for GLBTG, well, in my younger days, at 3am, and with enough booze inside of me, I could have qualified for most categories, or at least certainly tried. Lust is not a community, it’s bareback bronco-busting at a hormone rodeo.

Most importantly, godless, secular societies over time will inevitably lack the common sense that comes from the Ten Commandments. Hence, amid all the usual unscientific mumbo-jumbo, a ‘man’ in Britain was last week solemnly reported as having given birth to a baby. Christian Democrats in Sweden have just dropped their opposition to the compulsory neutralisation of sex-change applicants. (Think about it).

Meanwhile, the campaign to outlaw gender pronouns in Swedish and replace them with a new and legally obligatory gender neutral pronoun (“hen”, actually) proceeds apace. And urinals have been removed from some government buildings in Stockholm to ensure that men do not have more toilet facilities than the women. Why not install comparable open-access female urinals? Because in this post-religious world, concessions must always be extracted from the great mythic source of power and injustice, the heterosexual male (ie, the godhead) and granted to the former “slaves”. Good.

So just sit back and enjoy the lunacy to come.