The Rev. George Pitcher has opinions about Richard Dawkins. Particularly, he takes issue with an offhand and somewhat informal remark about “destroying Christianity”.
I daresay that’s the pithiest turn of phrase Dawkins could immediately bring to mind, to describe the grandest of atheistic endeavours, in the context of whether secular attempts to undermine Christianity might somehow result in an even less desirable resurgence of Islam to take its place. He’s often written about this in more depth, and with more nuance, but he was snatching for a snappy set of words, and assumed his crowd would basically know what he meant.
I can understand the Reverend’s discomfort with the phrasing of this idea, of course. But he manages to turn a simple standing up for his belief system into something utterly objectionable. To illustrate why Dawkins’s comment is so atrocious, he suggests:
Try ‘If we win and, so to speak, kill all the Jews’ as an alternative. Doesn’t really work, does it?
I have real trouble imagining that Pitcher is so idiotic as to have believed that Dawkins was calling for genocide as the loftiest of all godless goals. It’s entirely obvious that actual mass murder of believers isn’t anywhere near the agenda of even so-called militant atheists. Instead, it appears to be a shameless intellectual dishonesty by which he equates the rationalists’ attacks on religion – a war of ideas, based on speaking persistently against the privilege of religious thought – with genocidal slaughter.
In decrying the totalitarianism that seeks to “destroy Christianity”, Pitcher ignores his religion’s own history of worldwide death, destruction, and conquest, and rather pitiably tries to pin the “brutality” label on someone who is simply not too shy to defy his worldview.
Pitcher’s move seems akin to the soccer / football ‘flop’: fall on the ground, act the victim of a terrible offense, try to provoke a judgment from referees—or here, the public—that your opponent has committed some terrible foul.
I hold no great… ahem… *faith* that theism will go the way of the (USA) Whig Party any time soon. But as you say, THAT is how we want to “destroy” Christianity: to impeach it, to assail its ideas, to reveal its devastating faults, make it as unpopular as Zeusism or Jovism; a ‘war’ of persuasion; a ‘destruction’ by popular assent and free choice in which bad ideas pass into history.
The aim of secular isn’t the destruction of any religion, least of all Christianity, the aim is to remove blind faith from governance, whether its the Rick Perry belief in prayer or the bland Church of England style, there is no room for religion in modern government.
The suggestion that slapping Christianity down will give Islam chance to fill the viod shows only that the author of that statement has no understanding of secularism.