Monday, January 3, 2011
"Popes, Atheists, and Freedom"
"Secularists should recognize that the Pope's fight is their fight," says Daniel Henninger in this op-ed. He's right, I think. A taste:
For some, the Vatican's efforts on behalf of Christian minorities in Islamic countries or among China's population of 1.3 billion is regarded as worthy and admirable, but only a footnote against the grand sweep of current geopolitical concerns. Iran's bomb, China's economic importance and all that. This is a mistake. In these times, the pope's agenda is the civilized world's agenda. The pope's agenda is individual freedom. . . .
It has been odd in recent years to see prominent atheists make so much effort to diminish Judeo-Christian belief. In the modern world, and certainly in the U.S. from the Pilgrims onward to the Bill of Rights, religious practice has been bound up in the idea—now the principle—of individual freedom. I don't think secularist arguments alone for individual freedoms have sufficient strength and fiber to stand against their current opposition. Benedict's fight for freedom and that of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo are the same. Wojtyla and Walesa proved that once already.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/01/popes-atheists-and-freedom.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
Henninger says: "It has been odd in recent years to see prominent atheists make so much effort to diminish Judeo-Christian belief."
I think it is odd to maintain that only religious believers have the right to proselytize. Evangelical Christians and Catholics are battling over who gets Africans. I don't see any atheists there trying to get their share of the converts. Christianity's goal is to convert the world. I can only begin to imagine how much effort and money is poured into evangelizing non-Christians and re-evangelizing lapsed Christians. A handful of "new atheists" have written a handful of books, and they are seen as a threat to Christianity. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has over a billion members, and the pope has created a new office to re-evangelize the world. The difference in scale between what Christians do to attract and maintain believers and what atheists do to convert believers into nonbelievers is staggering.
Perhaps what is being reacted to is not "prominent atheists" making an effort to diminish Judeo-Christian belief, but secularization in the West, which is a force more powerful than all the Sam Harrises, Daniel C. Dennetts, Richard Dawkinses, and Christopher Hitchenses combined. You can answer the new atheists, but how do you answer secularism?