What is the proper place for religion in Britain's public life?

[rug]

Britain became engulfed in a culture war last week as secularists and believers clashed over the role of religion in public life. Even the Queen intervened to defend the Church of England's role. Richard Dawkins, whose survey about Christianity in the UK ignited the row, defends his position on secularism, faith and tolerance in conversation with Will Hutton of the Observer

Will Hutton and Richard Dawkins
The Observer, Saturday 18 February 2012

Dear Richard

I write in defence of liberalism – a tradition as traduced by Baroness Warsi sounding off in the Vatican about a liberal elite undermining religion's necessary and important centrality in national life as it is by your high profile campaign to convert us all to atheism. There are many dimensions to liberalism – proportionality, due desert, mutual respect, belief in pluralism and tolerance of dissent – but we liberals would no more want to pillory those who have faith than we would want to endorse a philosophy that for all its appeal to rationality does not respect difference.

Thus we are neither the virus of which Warsi complains nor your foot soldiers, even while as a liberal I would defend to the last your expression of your atheist views. You play an important role in our national life in provoking a high octane debate. But I can't join your campaign. Liberalism is a doctrine of live and let live, and there has to be a very high threshold of harm before that liberal principle can be qualified.

Of course when religion is carried to absurd and dangerous degrees – the Tea Party movement in the US or Islamic fundamentalism – I am opposed, but for the same reasons I recoil from any zealot. George Osborne's irrational zealotry on debt and deficit reduction is a much more serious threat to our wellbeing than Archbishop Rowan Williams's Anglicanism. Indeed paradoxically the Church of England he leads is a great liberal redoubt – an institution that embodies proportionality, tolerance of dissent and respect for others along with considerable moral authority.

It is our ally, not our enemy, as we are discovering again in its battle against the devastating and thoughtless welfare cuts and the argument for a responsible capitalism. It is why so many English people support it even while their practice and understanding of Christianity is uncertain. Please don't confuse that hesitancy with their quiet respect – even love – of an institution they understand and feel they need.

Tolerate it and them.
Best, Will

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/19/religion-secularism-atheism-hutton-dawkins

It goes back and forth for a while.

[izquierdista]

1. I've got a suggestion.....

[valerief]

3. Great suggestion! nt

[rug]

4. "Dear Will

"We really agree. I am as committed to liberalism as you. That's why my foundation is campaigning for secularism, not atheism. There are many religious secularists, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King, plenty of clergy, JF Kennedy and indeed every religious American who upholds the constitution.

. . . .

"All good wishes, Richard"

[laconicsax]

2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=ARGLC_BVtHk#t=6m57s

[mr blur]

5. It has no place in our public life.

People's private lives, that's their business.

[Angry Dragon]

6. ..........

[Brettongarcia]

7. Secularism seems more moderate; but the Church attacks it by name, even more than atheism.

For a hundred years the Church has officially in fact, in one cyclical after another, attacked "modernity" and so forth; and it attacks the "secular" even more.

We'll need an entirely different word here. A related but slightly different concept.

One possiblity being entertained by the Church itself? An "anthropology."

What does "anthropology" current mean in Church language? It has two meanings. It might be centered on Jesus say, as the human - anthropic - side of God. But also? This term seems to allow science - the science of anthropology - to enter into religion as well.

And with science? Would come a moderating - almost secular - influence.

[dmallind]

8. I'd settle for what it actually is if we could have it here too

A quaint dwindling half-forgotten amalgam of routine ritual and nice baubles that serves the same role as the weird spaniel that hangs around with junkyard guard dogs. Cute enough to keep as a useless sinecure, albeit a bit grating when it starts making too much noise, but nothing anybody grown up takes much notice of.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Hutton shows himself uncharacteristically ignorant in that

He really can't understand the standard meaning of 'secularism'; and thus is unqualified to debate it.