I really don't get it. Every time there's an event that brings forth a manifestation of religious belief by large numbers of people, some militant secularist or other will give out an opinion that would be jejune coming from an intelligent sixth-former. Back at the turn of the year, in the aftermath of the tsunami disaster, Richard Dawkins was telling believers to 'get up off [their] knees, [and] stop cringing before bogeymen'. Now, this past week, Polly Toynbee, in criticizing the record of the Pope, writes of the reaction to his death as 'essentially a Diana moment'.
Of course, Toynbee may make whatever assessment of John Paul II's life she wants, though I don't myself think she and other severe critics timed things well. But how she can speak in so trivializing a way of world-wide reaction to the death of the head of a church whose 'deeper power' she herself characterizes as lying 'in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers' is mystifying to me.
As I've said before, the rationalist and secular critique of religion is one I entirely share. I have done since I started to contemplate these matters seriously. I do not think there are any good evidential or other reasons for belief in a supreme deity, much less a benign and all-powerful one. But to speak now, in the face of a historical experience stretching over millennia, as if religion is no more than a silly mistake of silly people - answering to no real human concerns, meeting no deeper needs, all just froth - is (not to put too fine a point on it) silly.