Don't Tar Me With Your Brush

This is my blog, where I can rant if I want to. So...

On Radio Four last Sunday I heard a program about faith schools, their advocates and their opponents (23/07/06, Sunday Best - A Class Apart). One man interviewed was the Reverend Steve Chalk, who runs a religious charity which is taking over the running of Enfield Academy and other schools. I was quite warming to his apparent broadmindedness until he was explaining how very broad the education in schools needs to be, how indoctrination needed to be avoided, by incorporating, alongside teaching about Christianity, teaching about Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism..."and that other great faith, Secular Humanism."

Right! Lets go through this, once again, for the hard of thinking. The absence of faith is not the same thing as another kind of faith. Positions which do not start from the premise that there is a God are not equivalent to those that do. To not assert a thing is not the same as to assert a thing. The difference between a non-theist position and a theist one is really quite easy to fathom - it's right there in the language, so there's just no excuse for this twisting of that language in order to assert that the lack of faith is just a special kind of faith.

So let's just think about what "faith" means here. Whenever I try to boil it down, what I am left with is that it is all about believing something for which there is no evidence, or which contradicts the evidence, or which is otherwise impossible. I really can't bring myself to see this as in any sense a virtue.

Theists often try to defend their position against reason by asserting the presence of faith in other modes of thought, and generalising from there. The deterministic nature of Marxism is an example commonly given. The fallacy of this, though, is that identifying an error in one mode of thinking, which is also present in another, does not indicate that it is not an error. Furthermore, to identify aspects of faith in one aggressively antireligious system is not a demonstration that all modes of thought not including a God work the same way.

Which brings me back to the reverend's vocabulary - not all atheistic thought should really be classified as Secular Humanism. However, Secular Humanism as a very specific philosophy is not followed by more than a few intellectuals, as compared with the teeming millions in the theist yoke. Yet Mr Chalk describes it as a "great faith". This is a common trick which works by encouraging people to group all atheist thought together under one umbrella, the easier to disparage it.

Does all this matter? Well, it does to me. In a country and at a time when faith schools are such an issue, it matters greatly that even apparently moderate advocates of faith schools can't help but display their religious chauvinism wrapped in doublespeak.