Dawkins, secularism and the Jews

Daniel also writes:

I have just come across the most extraordinary statement by Richard Dawkins. It is right there on the Guardian website without a sentence even questioning it. Here it is:

"When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place."

So Dawkins, a liberal hero, believes, er, that Jews control world power. And, judging from the Guardian, it is now a part of mainstream debate to say so. Perhaps you think I am over-reacting, but I am a little bit frightened.

Chris Dillow manages some elegant reflections on social proof.

All I can manage is Oh My God.

That was my initial reaction too. Yet on reflection, I suspect I have misjudged Dawkins's statement. It is in fact much worse than Daniel suggests.

Like Professor Dawkins, I'm a devoutly irreligious man. To my mind, religious doctrines - in the words of the late pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, something of an intellectual hero of mine - "constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability". I was in the 1990s a member of the British Humanist Association, whose current President is the columnist Polly Toynbee and which has many distinguished supporters in public life. (Dawkins is a Vice-President.) I allowed my membership to lapse, however, after the BHA's newsletter advanced the proposition that the organisation should lobby MPs to ascertain their views on religion. I was appalled at this, and wrote a letter (which the BHA kindly published in the next issue of its bulletin) explaining why any such proposal violated the tenets of secularism.

The principle of the separation of civil and religious authority is that, as Article 6 of the United States' Constitution declares: "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." The Founders were clear on this. The Virginia initiative of 1788 proposed amending the wording to "no other religious test shall ever be required than a belief in the one only true God, who is the rewarder of the good, and the punisher of the evil". The amendment failed and the principle of "no religious test" was upheld. Its importance was stressed by James Madison, in The Federalist No. 52: "the door of this part of the federal government is open to merit of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any particular profession of religious faith."

In short, the task of a secular, democratic polity is to be indifferent to religion, which is the province of private belief. The US is admittedly not the best example in practice; France, which naturally elects to its highest offices Jews or atheists, is more the ideal. But the principle is essential. Secularism advances that principle and seeks to shore up the barrier between public policy and religious edict. It does not organise as an agency, nor is it a political force, in its own right. That's wrong in principle. (An illustration of how wayward it is too in practice can be seen in the BHA's endorsing the Stop the War Coalition. The notion of a secularist organisation lining up with the Muslim Association of Britain almost made me want to rejoin the BHA just so I could resign from it again.) Professor Dawkins is a substantial asset to the secularist cause in his advocacy of science and reason. His interventions in public policy, on the other hand, are ill-judged and unprincipled - and increasingly disgraceful.