Ian Boyne, Contributor

There has been a raging debate between secularists and fundamentalists in North America over the place of religion in the public square and the effects of the secularisation of Western society. It's nothing less than a culture war, and the secular elite seems to be winning some important victories.

Hollywood, whose soft power is both incalculable and universal, is definitely pinning the fundamentalist Christians to the wall.

No, I think Hollywood has them on the ground, in fact, a straight knockout. Hollywood has succeeded in projecting conservative Christians as weird, imbecilic, stupid, intellectually challenged with ridiculous, outmoded ethics. They are projected as cruel, sadistic and sinister.

While in the academy, conservative Christians have long been scorned, derided and dismissed as Neanderthal, the scholars don't have any direct effect on the masses. It is those in the popular culture who have to translate their contempt into music, film, television - and they have been doing a fine job.

Christopher Hitchens' scorching attack on the Bible and Judeo-Christian religion, God is not Great, is number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

It follows the recent success of another polemical and offensive atheist, Sam Harris, whose The End of Faith was a best-seller, with his latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation, also a must-read for the sceptics. Richard Dawkins had enjoyed popularity on the New York Times list, too, with his God Delusion.

Other less-known but influential writers and scholars who appear in prestigious and popular magazines and journals have been taking the fight to what is dubbed the Religious Right in North America.

Uneven match

I have usually found conservative Christians to be no match for the atheists and agnostics. It was unfair and cruel for Time magazine to match Sam Harris with Rick Warren in a recent magazine debate. Nor was Francis Collins, though a highly accomplished medical scientist, a match for Richard Dawkins; though Dawkins himself is unsophisticated when it comes to philosophical matters. He is an engaging and enraging polemicist, but his atheistic militancy betrays a lack of wide reading in philosophy, especially postmodernist philosophy. But he is one of the prized fighters in the North American culture war.

I usually find the atheists and agnostics - usually the latter - more sophisticated, intellectually rigorous and probing than their Christian counterparts, conservative and liberal. (Indeed, many of the liberal Christian intellectuals are vacuous and unconvincing, though they are usually better read than the conservatives. Many of them strike me as emotional cowards who can't give up on the idea of the existence of a benevolent God watching over mankind).

Most of us in Jamaica, including many in the elite, are blissfully unaware of this culture war taking place. We are too taken up with our own parochial issues at home - whether it is the entrance of beauty queens into rural politics, Portia's latest outburst on the campaign trail, the latest episode in the Bob Woolmer drama, Reneto Adams' coming out, the battle of the polls, or more serious issues like the juvenile murder of the 14-year-old or the mother-son incest story.

The atheists and agnostics have raised some serious questions about how exemplary biblical ethics really is, drawing especially on some gruesome stories from the Old Testament.

Is it really laudable that God would order the extermination of whole populations, as the Old Testament asserts,instructing that not even the babies on the breast be spared? Is the dispossession of peoples, such as the Canaanites, so that Israel could take over the land really a model for international relations today? Is the taking of 'tokens of virginity' really the way for us to go in terms of determining whether a woman defrauded her husband by claiming virginity before marriage?

Is Phineas really a hero for thrusting a spear right through an Israelite and his lover? Should he really have been made a hero for this apparently ghastly act?

Doubts about the Bible

The standard fare in the polemical assault on the Bible and Christianity throws up many of these stories to cast serious doubt as to whether the Bible is really a book about a good and just God. Hence the title of Hitchens' book, God is not Great.

Indeed, one person wrote in a Time letter recently that he would love to see more people read the Bible, and do so thoroughly, for he says he is convinced that the most effective tool for atheism for thinking people is the Bible itself - a careful reading of all of it; not some favourite New Testament passages and some comforting Psalms.

The Bible unvarnished shows a vengeful, genocidal and cruel God - not someone worthy of worship. This is what the aggressive polemic of the atheists is asserting. These books and articles - as well as views expressed on the electronic media - have been gaining a popular audience and are causing some to deconvert from Christianity.

Many unthinking and 'faith-full' Christians, of course, just dismiss the questions and issues as being part of the plot of Satan to cast doubt on God's Word and to deceive people in these last days. Their faith allows them to believe anything, no matter how absurd or grotesque.

But for some people, who are no longer tied to the institutional church, the questions are popping up and the pastors and evangelists are not able to answer them convincingly.

Questions for secularists

But the secularists have questions to answer, too. Let us assume that the Bible and the whole Judeo-Christian religion has been based on a myth, and a dangerous one at that. With what shall we replace it, and what will give the legitimacy which the Judeo-Christian culture commanded?

If we use majoritarian opinion as a guide to right and wrong, then what if the masses, ruled by their 'untrained emotions', want hanging for certain crimes and legislation against homosexuality? Would the enlightened European elite say that that would be ok as morality is now grounded by what the majority believes?

Or should the secular, sophisticated elite be given a 'divine right', as it were, to decide ethical issues and to pressure democratically elected governments in the developing world to decriminalise homosexuality (for it is now deemed a human rights issue) and to abolish all laws granting capital punishment?

What if the majority in certain African societies want to continue to practise female circumcision, on what basis would anyone decide that that is wrong and should not be allowed?

If people in certain cultures want to practise child-bride customs, legislate arranged marriages or to decide that thieves should have their hands cut off, who is going to decide that ethically that is wrong?

Who has the right to replace the God whom Christopher Hitchens has deemed not great?

If we leave individuals to their individual tastes and desires, then that is anarchy. If a philosophy is not at least workable, then it is of no use.

If God is really dead, the atheists and agnostics had better not tell everybody about it. For their own sake, too, for they might never know what their neighbours will do to them.

What do the atheist men feel about their wives sleeping around on them?

They can't talk about that being against "the law of commitment", for their wives can give all kinds of reasons as to why enjoying the sack with other men could even help improve their marriage.

Their business clients might decide to lie to them because it suits those clients. Why not? Why says lying is always wrong and by whose objective standards?

People refer to secular democracies like Japan and to the European states as shining examples of secular states functioning well. Their crime rates and levels of anti-social behaviour are quite low. But atheists who make this point forget that these societies have been heavily influenced by their religious heritage and long after a society ceases to be actively religious, it still parasitically lives off its religious heritage.

Many of the assumptions made about everyday ethical issues still have deep religious philosophical roots. So Japan, Hong Kong and Europe do not provide a decisive defeater to the view that moral anarchy would result from the adoption of a totally secularist perspective.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com