Matthew Parris shares my indignation:
A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.
[…]
Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave? […] I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.
Of course it is these “occupants of the reserved pews”, these representatives of “the thinking parts of a religion”, who excoriate Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for the “crude” conception of God which they attack. “Dawkins is merely betraying his ignorance of the sophisticated aspects of theology,” they sneer. “If he is going to criticize religion, he should engage the best arguments, and not these crude populist forms.” But their silence in the face of arrant superstition exposes their hypocrisy. Either they disbelieve this nonsense, in which case they should join the secular world in calling it by its proper name, or they actually believe it, in which case their criticisms of Dawkins are inexcusable. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.