Look at our church-founded top private schools' annuals and you will consistently see half a page allocated at the back to the school's witchcraft purveyor. But one thing you'll never read is mention of God and certainly never Jesus, which would be terribly embarrassing. Rather, it's platitudinous guff about values and, just occasionally, assisting the girls' spiritual development, whatever that means.
Normally I would ignore Tallon as a religious nutter but he brought me into his article, saying he would "gladly debate Bob Jones for asserting that God is a myth", and he "can only presume" I've never "studied the evidence". The "evidence" he then proffered essentially amounted to saying that the universe in all of its intricacy is so amazing, an assertion I wholeheartedly agree with, that only a creator could be responsible. Should Tallon decide on a discipline change he should avoid philosophy, or at least its logic affiliate. They'd boot him out within minutes with that calibre of deductive reasoning. Not knowing why something is, is no reason to invent an answer and flies in the face of science's hard evidence principles.
His marvelling at everything being so balanced ignores the old adage that nature deplores a vacuum and the everyday evidence of nature's constant evolutionary processes in response to ever-changing stimuli. That's explicable logic and it's a cop-out to ascribe primitive mysticism to this. It's also why Christians talk of practising their faith. In other words, perhaps unwittingly, they accept there's not a shred of evidence under-pinning their belief so in lieu, simply have faith that it is so. One could equally have faith on Tallon's "evidence" that the world is controlled by oysters off the coast of Lisbon, indeed it is more likely because at least the oysters exist.
Tallon expressed surprise at the rejection of religion by Helen Clark, John Key and the three Davids (Cunliffe, Shearer and Parker). I can't imagine why, as all are well-educated and plainly intelligent. One would not expect otherwise.
He should note that Christianity's decline, now fortunately rapid, has been going on for three centuries. It had its reign, dominating European life for 1000 years, now accurately described as the Dark Ages, the blackest period of (solely church-induced) stultification in human history.
In the name of religion, superstition purveyors have sacrificed virgins, burned non-believers at the stake, stoned pur-ported sinners to death, and countless other outrages, while all the time baying at the sky. Doubtless they will continue in the future, albeit, thanks to education, in ever-diminishing numbers.
Tallon is free to believe what superstition he wishes but instead of flogging witchcraft at us, I suspect he would be a far happier man were he to take up golf or acquire a mistress or indeed a bevy of them, or anything that's about the here and now instead of fretting about an imaginary afterlife. He certainly shouldn't hang his hat on the promise of eternal existence, for with a smidgen of imagination he would realise that would be nothing less than tortuous.
Finally, in quoting Einstein praising the hardly unique Christian values, he should remember the great physicist dismissed religion as childish. My advice to him is to grow up, or more particularly get up off his knees as grovelling in a church is simply wasting valuable time in the only life he will ever have.
Debate on this article is now closed.
