The trouble with Rod Liddle's programme

I covered Rod Liddle programme here.

Unedited except for my highlights in bold.

Editorial by Terry Sanderson, National Securalists Society

The Rod Liddle programme The Trouble with Atheism on Channel 4 on Monday was, as we expected, biased, dishonest and about as profound as a pancake. We have to make allowances for the fact that it was a polemic, and that Mr Liddle had started out with a contention that he needed to support. So the programme proceeded from the idea that “militant” atheists are really just the mirror image of “fundamentalist” religious believers.

The first flaw in Mr Liddle’s approach was his use of terminology. He bandied about the words “atheist” and “secularist” as though they were interchangeable and synonymous. This is the favourite trick of the religious right, who love to sow confusion about secularism.

Mr Liddle then promoted atheism to the status of a full-blown ideology, with all kinds of sects and belief systems attached to it, and even with a holy book of its own. In fact, “atheism” simply means “without belief in entities called gods”. That’s all, no more.

Practically all atheists are happy to leave it at that and give it no further consideration. They don’t, as Mr Liddle was suggesting, have any desire to force others to abandon their religion, to suppress it or take it away from them by force (and if that doesn’t work, kill them).

There are those of us, though, who feel that religion’s malign influences far outweigh any good it does in the public sphere, and seek to keep it from casting its undesirable cloak over our lives. We are secularists. Some secularists are religious people, who also think “faith” is something that rightly belongs inside your head or in the church or the home. They, too, don’t think that organised religion has a place in parliament or shared institutions, for they know the havoc it can wreak when it seeks power.

Those of us who want to keep the public square a neutral space that all can inhabit without privilege or disadvantage are secularists. Most of us are also atheists, but by no means all. Mr Liddle -- and many others like him -- doesn’t seem to be able to make this distinction.

Mr Liddle suggests that all those who think that evolution is the most likely explanation for the existence of life as we know it on earth are also de facto “atheists”. Suddenly “atheists” have a holy book -- The Origin of Species -- which is beyond questioning, just like the Bible and the Koran are for true believers.

I know of no-one who declares themselves an atheist or a secularist who wants to eliminate religion by force -- although to hear Mr Liddle tell it, anyone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural is a nascent Stalin or Hitler.

Mr Liddle advised us that Stalin and Hitler ran atheistic regimes that resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocents -- therefore, atheism is a lethal as fundamentalist religion. Despite being corrected by Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins (who told him that these were Marxist / fascist regimes, and atheism was incidental and not their moving force) Mr Liddle ploughed on (carefully editing the interviews to ensure that nobody could make a proper case in answer to any of the ludicrous claims he was making).

The atheists he interviewed were challenged and misrepresented and their interviews cut in such a way that they appeared unable to adequately answer Mr Liddle’s supposedly profoundly damaging accusations. Those who supported Mr Liddle’s arguments were, of course, given a clear run, without, in the main, interruption. If I had been interviewed for this programme and treated like that, I would be very annoyed.

The fact the Mr Liddle had carefully extracted the most extreme-sounding responses from the non-believers, (pulled out of context from what I expect were extensive interviews), transformed this programme from being an honest expression of an opinion into being plain distortion. Yes, Mr Liddle has a point of view to put over, and it’s legitimate that he should have the opportunity to do so, but this was a dissembling way to do it.

On the rare occasions that the atheists did manage to give a complete answer, they seemed perfectly reasonable. None of them sounded like the fundamentalist extremists that he was trying to paint them as.

I knew I wouldn’t agree with Mr Liddle’s contention before the programme began (mainly because I’ve heard it a thousand times in the past year from panicky Christian propagandists who are seeing their belief system being rejected by an increasing number of people who have come to the conclusion that it just isn’t sustainable in the modern world). I defend Rod’s right to say what he wants, but I also reserve the right to complain that this programme was so poorly made, badly argued and unfairly edited that it fell below the standards we have come to expect of British television.

See also: http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/talking_point_atheism.html