The Secular Delusion

Andrew Brown reports on the rise of Calvinism in China. I don't think that was in the secular-progressive game plan. It gives a timely endorsement to this book review by John Gray - and to the book, of course, though it does seem a little too Americentric. Either way, the point is that the humanist fantasy that modernity necessarily entailed the decline of religion was always absurd, now it is demonstrably so. As John points out, religion is on the rise among the most defiantly modern people. You can say this is a bad thing, but you can't say it can't happen, as so many have done. This is an important point. Dawkins's The God Delusion was attacked because he plainly knew nothing about theology. His defenders said that was not the point, theology was irrelevant if God was, indeed, no more than a delusion. Okay, but as Calvinism in China (and many other resurgent faiths) demonstrate, to say God doesn't exist therefore I'm not going to think about him in any detail is to cut yourself from the world as it is. Or, to put it another way, to say that God is merely a delusion - and no more than that - is to imply you have some higher standard of understanding than the merely human. But there is no super-human realm in which ranks of Dawkins's 'brights' bask in the brilliant glare of unbelief. They're here, in this world, and they also have their delusions of which the most bizarre and eccentric is their faith in the imminent death of religion.