If there’s one thing that repels British people from the Republican party, it’s religion. Right-leaning commentators over here can be found expressing ambivalent feelings about the GOP, some even openly supporting the Democrats, and the main cause for this is the religious right.
Religion is also the issue likely to inspire in the smug, self-satisfied leftists their most vitriolic and arrogant rhetoric. Palin saying that she believed the war in Iraq was God’s work was taken as some ante-diluvian primitive ritual invocation.
However, such sentiments accompany how the truly religious think about their life. Someone with a religious faith that is important to them considers morality to be governed by God. When the non-religious person says she thinks the Iraq war was justified, and the religious person says she thinks the war was justified by God, they are both giving the results of their moral deliberations. It’s just that the religious person considers the good to be God’s will. There is nothing sinister about this, unless you think there is something sinister about religion as a whole.
Another issue which is taken as evidence of the inferiority of the religious mind is the issue of creationism. It is considered by the left to be a sign of absolute idiocy to be a creationist. However, all Christians believe that Jesus died and then was resurrected. The belief in the creation of the world in seven days is no more absurd than that.
Arrogant attitudes to religion are rife in our society, and the bearder-in-chief is Prof. Richard Dawkins. Here is a rather wonderful, and rather long, video of him debating with Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford. I’ll let you judge who comes off better.
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