Just been listening to Dawkins on the radio. This time he was enjoying himself on a programme about Mary, the mother of Christ in Christian theology:
“One of the amazing things is that there’s not just one Mary. There’s Mary of Fatima, there’s Mary of Knock, there’s Mary of all sorts of other places; and these people seem to think they’re different Marys. It’s as though you haven’t just got a polytheism with one Mary and all the saints, you’ve got about a dozen Marys. Pope John Paul II believed that when he was narrowly saved by an assassin’s bullet[*], the bullet was deflected from the vital part of his heart not just by Mary but by Mary of Fatima, as though there are lots of different Marys. I mean the polytheism is just too good to be true.”
This is a common criticism of Catholicism, often advanced by those who haven’t stopped to think about the difference between revering something and worshipping it.
I’m not Catholic. Never have been. But I’ve worked in offices and in big companies. Oftentimes, the senior management types will have ‘personal assistants’ – secretaries, of a modern kind – people who take their calls, arrange their lives, and generally see to things. The PA often sits in an ante-room. By necessity, they have the ear of the manager. But the PA is still not the manager.
In much the same way, Catholics believe that the saints – those humans who have been sanctified by virtue of their faith and their deeds – reside in Heaven with God, and can intercede with Him on our behalf. In other words, offer a prayer to a saint, and you’re asking that saint to have a word with God for you and see if they can arrange matters as you’d like them. That’s quite different from praying to the saint because you believe they have the power to change the world directly. Now if you’re a polytheist, as I am, then you acknowledge a number of gods, and recognise that each of those gods has power over their own particular domain. If you want to win a battle, offer prayer to Mars. If you want love, speak to Venus. If you’re worried about domestic issues, Vesta’s the one. And so on. That’s polytheism, because each of these gods is a god in His or Her own right. That’s not the case in Catholicism, as any Catholic would tell you if you bothered to ask them.
(To offer Dawkins the maximum possible benefit of the doubt, it might well be that the Roman Catholic attitude towards saints might possibly have evolved from ancient Roman polytheistic practices, but that’d be speculation on my part and I certainly wouldn’t base anything significant on the idea.)
But what I found particularly interesting is the contrast between Dawkins’ attitude towards ‘Mary worship’ here, and his attitude towards Hinduism in his 400-page polemical tome The God Delusion. In that book, he says of Hinduism, a polytheistic faith:
“[Hindu polytheism] isn’t really polytheism but monotheism in disguise. There is only one God – Lord Brahma the creator, Lord Brahma the creator, Lord Vishnu the preserver, Lord Shiva the destroyer, the goddesses Saraswati, Laxmi and Parvati (wives of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva), Lord Ganesh the elephant god, and hundreds of others, all are just different manifestations or incarnations of the one God.”
It’s interesting to see how he seeks to re-work a polytheistic faith so that he can include it in the rather narrow definition of ‘religion’ on which he bases most of The God Delusion, yet cheerfully re-works Catholicism so that he can declare it polytheistic when it suits him to do so.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Dawkins is a hugely intelligent man and, The God Delusion aside, a gifted writer. It’s just a shame that he so often allows his contempt for religion to lead him into such inconsistencies.
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[* I'd be picking nits if I openly chuckled over the idea of the Pope being "saved by an assassin's bullet", funny as it is. Even the rather superior Richard Dawkins is entitled to make the occasional slip.]
