Polly cracks another one

Why am I not surprised that Toynbee is the president of the British Humanist Association? The woman collects -isms, or rather wasms, as she seems to be channeling the spirit of her eminent maternal grandfather Gilbert Murray in battle with her no less eminent paternal grandfather Arnold Toynbee.

"Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion", her latest verbose inanity, runs through a list of things she hates about religion with her characteristic blissful ignorance of the extreme thinness of the ice on which she skates. For la Toynbee is a classic illustration of the aphorism by Gilbert Murray's contemporary, the Roman Catholic convert G.K.Chesterton: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

God or not god is a debate for schoolchildren, learning to cope with abstracts. The great divide today is between a fanatical minority of "true believers", regardless of what dogma they espouse, and the majority that seeks to get on with life without feeling any need for a transcendent purpose. Toynbee is on the same side of the divide as the other religions, squabbling over whose "vision" is correct when all are equally blinkered. 

Thus the following stunningly oblivious passage from her exegesis:

Unlike the religious the godless claim no moral superiority.[1] Wise humanists know that good and bad are pretty evenly distributed. [2] Humanity has an innate moral sense, without threats of divine wrath and reward. [3] Good and bad works are done by both the secular and the religious. [4] But wherever the institutions of religion wield real power, they prove a force for cruelty and hypocrisy.[5]

1. This from the high priestess of petit bourgeois moralising about every subject under the sun.
2. Toynbee and her kind believe good and bad are relative concepts - if something serves the cause of international socialism it is good, or at least not as bad as the same thing done in the name of some other belief.
3. This is a declaration of faith, and hypocritical to boot. Toynbee and her kind believe it is necessary to create a "new man" because they find the old model unsatisfactory. Thus she is a devotee of "targets", with their respective punishment and rewards, as a means to that end.
4. If you discount the Christian metaphysical heritage, on what can you base any absolute standard of "good" and "bad"? And for whom? Is it the greatest good for the greatest number? If so, who decides? Why - Polly Toynbee and friends, that's who. 
5. And wherever a minority has seized power in the name of socialism, they have instituted persecution and mass murder that have made anything the God religions ever did pale by comparison.