School of logic

A.C. Grayling is against government-funding of religious schools. Me too. It's a shame therefore that in arguing the case, he should allow himself a paragraph like this one. (The word 'Anousic' is a neologism Grayling uses to mean 'religious', as he later goes on to explain).

Anousics are people who variously believe in ghosts and alien visitations, in the dead coming to life, in magical occurrences, in forms of cannibalism, in obsessive rituals and incantations, in strange psychological observances and sexual perversions, in weird ancient myths, which they regard as true accounts of the origin and nature of the world, and in personified forms of evil and malevolence; who traditionally employ and always threaten torture and execution for those who do not accept their theories, who to gain their ends sometimes engage in war, massacre and murder, and at other times use bribery, brainwashing, and techniques of preying on the poor, sick, depressed and traumatised. They sometimes hide their true face behind masks of charitable works, and even encourage their recruits to think this is their real nature; but their record is overwhelmingly against them otherwise.

Note the syntax here: 'Anousics are people who variously...', and then [are people] 'who traditionally employ and always threaten torture and execution for those who do not accept their theories'. It's strange, that. I used to have a piano teacher who was a devout Christian, and I'm pretty sure she never threatened torture or execution against anybody. I've known some religious academics too in my time, all of them folk of a liberal-minded kind, and I don't think they 'always' threatened torture and execution for people not accepting their theories. I don't think they ever did. I don't think any of them 'sometimes engage in... massacre and murder'.

OK, so Grayling is writing of the religious en masse. If something is true of any of them, he feels entitled to attribute it to the religious ('Anousics') without qualification, under the generalizing 'who' and 'they'. But why would he want to do this, other than to gain an illicit argumentative advantage? How would he feel about the proposition that atheists 'always threaten torture and execution for those who do not accept their theories' because there have been atheists who did just that? The claim that the religious 'sometimes hide their true face behind masks of charitable works, and even encourage their recruits to think this is their real nature' is plainly a lumping-together kind of move, telling us that even the apparently good believer is dissembling his or her true nature behind a mask. The same tactic could of course be used to suggest that anti-religious liberals like A.C. Grayling are no better, deep down, than the architects of repression who served atheistic totalitarian regimes. But it wouldn't be any more valid or compelling if it were so used.

So what is this - just knockabout stuff? I don't know. What I do know is that Grayling is a philosopher aware of the need for care with words. He starts his post with the claim, 'Everything you are about to read is true'. And one of his avowed purposes in choosing the word 'Anousic' is to indicate that religious people are 'illogical'. The paragraph I've quoted does no honour to either truth or logic.