Westwood vs Williams

Rowan Williams has some helpful things to say about religious education and in relation to atheism. He shows he is no slouch in the thinking game -so how amusing to read in today's Guardian Vivenne Westwood saying "Anybody who's religious is a nutcase. No, they're lunatic. He [Philip Larkin] said that when he read the Bible, he couldn't imagine how even one person in the world could believe that crap". Atheist 'fundamentalism' can be as unthinking and flagrantly dismissive of others as any other.

It seems that Rowan's main point is that atheism isn't a single system of thought but usually a protest and to understand it requires knowing what is protested against. Ie "Which God don't you believe in?"

The other interesting thing he highlights is how the thinking behind the report on RE seems to fall back on tacit assumptions of secularism to the detriment of other ways of viewing the world -the same old problem we always face in institutions that claim to be secular as a way of being neutral about religious claims but in fact demand the subservience of religions to their secular viewpoint. We cry 'foul'! Or if we are more circumspect we might echo what +Rowan says here "the notion of a default position for the human mind or self, poised to decide its ‘values’, is a dangerous fiction".

He does a good job of meeting the problems implied by a strong form of incommensurability in relation to matters of faith and reason.