Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

source: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1816,Are-the-New-Atheists-avoiding-the-real-arguments,Edmund-Standing-ButterfliesAndWheelscom via Stephen Law

HASSNERS.org highlights

HASSNERS.org comments: I am reminded of what AC Grayling said at the Darwin, Humanism & Science 6 June 2009 conference: 'that the story of Christianity could be told in 10 minutes.' Here Edmund Standing does that job here: First, let's take a quick look at the basic biblical narrative..

As Stephen Law says 'Great article'. I particularly like Edmund Standings' comparison between Scientific Method and Faith viz.

'Theology turns the scientific method which we have followed since the Enlightenment upon its head. Where scientific research may start with a reasonable proposition based on prior evidence (a hypothesis) and then examine further data to see if this proposition is factually accurate, or may simply lead to the discovery of data which no-one had previously predicted, theology starts with the acceptance of ideas that have no factual basis or for which the evidence is appallingly weak and proudly proclaims acceptance of these ideas on the basis of 'faith' as a virtue, and then goes on to attempt to make these a priori beliefs appear intelligible and rational. In other words, the 'results' of theology have been arrived at before study to confirm them has taken place. The theologian does not approach the basic tenets of Christian faith as possible truths to be tested for logical consistency; he or she instead begins with the conclusion that a series of internally incoherent, pre-scientific, and fantastic 'beliefs' derived from 'faith' are true, and then attempts to dress these beliefs up in the clothes of intellectual credibility. Theology is not in this sense a proper academic pursuit, but is instead the attempt to mask superstition in a fog of pseudo-intellectual verbiage.'

Reposted from:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=280

by Edmund Standing, ButterfliesAndWheels.com

Recently, the popular and successful books of atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens having been receiving some public criticism from religious quarters, with the most recent coming from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

According to Williams, in their discussions of Christianity, the religion critiqued by Dawkins, Hitchens and others is not a religion he recognises as his own, and these authors are arrogantly and erroneously trying to tell Christian believers 'I know what you mean' when in fact they don't, which is apparently 'annoying' him. The basic claim from Williams and others is that these atheist writers simply haven't taken the time to properly study what it is they are writing against, and they should study some theology and address the 'real arguments'.

Given the fact that I have studied theology and attained a BA in Theology & Religious Studies with First Class Honours, I presume Williams would not claim that I have no idea what I'm talking about, yet I still concur with the conclusions of Dawkins and Hitchens.

In the following article, I shall briefly outline the basics of Christian belief, and using his own words demonstrate what Williams holds to be true. My conclusion is that Dawkins and co have not failed miserably in their representation of the Christian faith, and that their lack of in-depth theological study in fact does nothing to harm the veracity of their arguments.

First, let's take a quick look at the basic biblical narrative:

There is an indescribably powerful and intelligent being called God who is in existence prior to the dawn of time. For whatever reason, he decides to create the universe and pays particular attention to planet Earth. Having created the universe, Earth and all the species on it (through 'creating' the Big Bang and 'guiding' evolution in the Williams style of interpretation), he decides to focus all his attention on a collection of tribal groupings in the Middle East, in particular the Israelites who are his 'chosen people' and who he obsesses over, while apparently ignoring the rest of the world's population. He lays down numerous often primitive and arbitrary moral and ceremonial laws, then gets involved in inner tribal politics and land disputes, inciting acts of brutality, war crimes, genocide, and rape along the way. Fast forward to the Middle East under Roman occupation and God decides it's time to put in an appearance. By mystical means he comes to earth in human form, being born of a virgin. He becomes incarnate as a Jewish male and wanders around what is today Israel-Palestine, imparting pithy social commentary (but never giving any systematic explanation of how such ideas might be made politically useful), engaging in faith healing (removing 'demons' from people), magic tricks (such as walking on water and raising a dead man), and ranting on and on about sin, eternal punishment for the majority of the world's population, and the impending end of the world. He gets himself crucified, in order that he can sacrifice himself to himself for our good. A few days later he walks out of his tomb and wanders round with some of his followers (noticeably not bothering to make himself known to anyone but those who already believed in him), before 'ascending' into 'Heaven', to wait for the time when he will return to raise every human who has ever lived in bodily form for judgement, then cast most of us into a pit of fire and take a select few into his 'kingdom' for eternity where they will live happily ever after.

These are the basic building blocks upon which all Christian theology is constructed. Williams and others can protest that of course they don't really see things in such a simplistic and manifestly implausible way, but this narrative underpins the Bible, the Church creeds, liturgies, and centuries of theological speculation.

Williams claims that '[w]hen believers pick up Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we may feel as we turn the pages: "This is not it. Whatever the religion being attacked here, it's not actually what I believe in"'. Perhaps we atheists have misread people like Williams, and maybe some deep profundity has been missed. So, let's look at what Williams claims to believe and see if that is the case.

Williams states that 'it would be utterly destructive and utterly wrong to declare from the pulpit what I did not in fact believe' and that 'offering for ordination entails taking the responsibility for the faith of the church, not just little bits of it'. What is 'the faith of the church'? Does it bear any relation to the crude narrative outlined above?

The Nicene Creed is for many of the largest Christian denominations a unifying statement of faith, and emerged from early church debates about the nature of Christian faith.

It is read by priests and congregations alike at every Sunday Eucharist. If Williams feels he can give assent to this document, which he clearly does as he is happy to join in its recitation and, as we have seen, he believes it would be 'utterly wrong' to proclaim something he does not believe to be true, then we can take it to be an accurate reflection of his view of reality.

Here is the Nicene Creed in full:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen

Here we have the basics that one must believe in order to be a Christian. This is the 'faith of the church', which Williams believes he is 'responsible' for proclaiming and defending.

We see the story of a creator God who 'speaks' through the Israelite 'prophets', who places important and accurate information about the future in the 'Scriptures' (i.e. the Old Testament), a God who 'comes down' from and 'ascends' to what can only be an actual place called 'Heaven', who is born of a virgin mother, who was crucified 'for our sake', who rose from the dead, who is to return one day from 'Heaven' in order that he can 'raise' dead bodies back to life for 'judgement', and who will take believers into an eternal 'kingdom'. It is manifestly clear that I have not chosen to misread or misrepresent the alleged facts of Christianity, and that Dawkins or anyone else can quite reasonably read this statement of faith and decide whether or not he finds it to be plausible or fanciful, plainly fictitious nonsense.

A key allegation is that because the 'new atheists' haven't studied theology in any depth they cannot really know what they are talking about. Perhaps something important has been missed. Perhaps the Creed needs some theological reflection in order that its 'true meaning' can be discerned.

Take Jesus' supposed resurrection, for example. Surely if Dawkins read theology he would understand that this should not be seen as a literal historical event entailing a dead body getting up and walking out of its tomb? Yet this is clearly not the case if one reads Williams' own words. Reacting to the suggestion of ultra-liberal American bishop John Shelby Spong that Williams surely doesn't really believe in walking corpses, Williams states that such a suggestion makes him 'quite cross', because:

I am genuinely a lot more conservative than he would like me to be. Take the Resurrection. I think he has said that of course I know what all the reputable scholars think on the subject and therefore when I talk about the risen body I must mean something other than the empty tomb. But I don't. I don't know how to persuade him but I really don't.

So, Williams does believe in walking corpses. But what about all this stuff about Jesus being God incarnate? Maybe if Dawkins and co read theology they would find that a more creative, poetic, and less literal interpretation is proposed by the likes of Williams. Again, it would seem not:

Some of the fundamental patterns of Christian teaching - the creation of the world from nothing, the utter involvement of God and Jesus Christ and the Spirit - they are to me the grammar of anything we might say. I'm not impressed when anyone says we ought to be creative about those; they are what create us, they are the realities that make it possible for us to be the human beings God wants us to be. I can't imagine wanting to be creative in respect to them any more than I could with the air I breathe.

One is led to ask again how exactly Dawkins and others have supposedly set up a straw man caricature of Christian faith, how Williams can feel that '[w]hatever the religion being attacked here, it's not actually what I believe in', given his clear assent to the notions outlined in the Creed.

At this point I should briefly concede that in order for certain aspects of the Creed to be fully understood, at least a cursory reading of Patristic theology is a necessary undertaking.

Some of the phrases do have a very technical meaning, and were arrived at through an often heated process of debate. Three examples that particularly stand out are the following concepts: 'eternally begotten of the Father', 'of one Being with the Father', and 'who proceeds from the Father and the Son'. However, the core message of Christianity is not dependant on such theological obscurantism and pedantry. These phrases are derived from later reflection on what I have termed the building blocks of Christian faith.

It is not necessary to understand the theological musings of early church thinkers in order to discount the underlying message of a virgin birth, demons and angels, miracles, a divine blood sacrifice, walking corpses, and heaven and hell as nonsense.

Here we see a clear example of the very nature of theology, and why its study is genuinely unnecessary for Christian faith to be rejected.

In principle, one should be able to judge the alleged truths of Christianity based on the biblical narratives alone, for all later theological reflection is grounded in the assumption that these narratives are an accurate reflection of world history and ultimate reality. Take out these narratives and the whole theological edifice comes tumbling down. In theology, one will find centuries of attempts by intelligent men and women to make their manifestly irrational beliefs appear logical and coherent, but it's all based on the same few key beliefs.

The essence of theology is neatly summed up in a well known definition given by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109): fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). In fact, as a theological student, this was the first definition of theology that I was taught. The notion of 'faith seeking understanding' demonstrates clearly how intellectually vacuous theology is, and how low its credibility should be as an academic pursuit (in the sense of actively engaging in its production, as opposed to its purely academic study as part of the history of ideas).

Theology turns the scientific method which we have followed since the Enlightenment upon its head. Where scientific research may start with a reasonable proposition based on prior evidence (a hypothesis) and then examine further data to see if this proposition is factually accurate, or may simply lead to the discovery of data which no-one had previously predicted, theology starts with the acceptance of ideas that have no factual basis or for which the evidence is appallingly weak and proudly proclaims acceptance of these ideas on the basis of 'faith' as a virtue, and then goes on to attempt to make these a priori beliefs appear intelligible and rational. In other words, the 'results' of theology have been arrived at before study to confirm them has taken place. The theologian does not approach the basic tenets of Christian faith as possible truths to be tested for logical consistency; he or she instead begins with the conclusion that a series of internally incoherent, pre-scientific, and fantastic 'beliefs' derived from 'faith' are true, and then attempts to dress these beliefs up in the clothes of intellectual credibility. Theology is not in this sense a proper academic pursuit, but is instead the attempt to mask superstition in a fog of pseudo-intellectual verbiage.

Williams is good at this. We already know what he believes about God, Jesus, and so on from his own words and from his assent to church doctrine, but then when speaking publicly he attempts to muddy the waters with vapid rhetoric such as the following from his recent lecture:

The religious believer says that moral integrity, self-introspection, honesty and trust are styles of living that connect with the character of an eternal and free agency, the agency most religions call God. Agree or disagree, but I would say to critics, at least grasp what is being talked about. Often the atheist seems to be talking about something else.

No, Dr Williams, the atheist is not 'talking about something else', but the very beliefs you proclaim to be true. Dressing up Christian ideas about God in language such as 'an eternal and free agency' is nothing but the creation of a smokescreen of meaningless jargon in an attempt to make superstition appear sophisticated.

It seems highly likely from the words of Williams that he himself has not bothered to read the writings he claims to be criticising. It seems amazing that he can blandly relate Christian belief to 'moral integrity, self-introspection, honesty and trust', without engaging with Dawkins' sharp critiques of the notion of religiously and biblically derived morality in The God Delusion. What we seem to be seeing is the replaying of a centuries old argument so weak that even a school child should be able to unpick it - the notion that belief in God is integrally linked to ethical standards, with its implication that atheists are somehow unable to be moral because they don't believe in a divine watchman who will one day bring judgement upon us.

Have Dawkins, Hitchens, and numerous other atheist thinkers grossly misrepresented Christianity? Can Christian believers justifiably claim that the religion they find written of by such thinkers is something other than the one they at least pay lip service to? No, and no, again. Must Dawkins and others undertake an arduous trawling through centuries of theological waffle in order to reject religious belief? Absolutely not.

The claims of Williams and others like him are nothing more than knee-jerk reactions against rationalism. They complain that their faith is being misunderstood when it seems that they themselves are the ones who are misrepresenting what they actually believe. How the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who by his own admission believes in all the core teachings of the Christian faith, can claim that atheist critiques avoid the so-called 'real arguments' is beyond me.

The fact is, there are no 'real arguments'. Theology is at bottom a matter of faith, not genuine intellectual argument. Theologians can continue to write endless books and articles using dense and 'learned' tones, but there really is no need for atheists to read them as they all boil down to the same ultimate beliefs, beliefs that atheists, quite rightly in my view, reject on the basis that they do not have intellectual or moral credibility.

Edmund Standing holds a BA in Theology & Religious Studies and an MA in Critical & Cultural Theory

See more articles at ButterfliesAndWheels.com


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The atheist delusion

'Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,' wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong


Saturday March 15, 2008
The Guardian

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils.

As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands.

For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future.

The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced by liberal societies in the 20th century.

For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day.

The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned.

These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase.

Most of the writers accept that religion is hear to stay for the forseeable future.

In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption.

Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

Where in these books do they say that science will drive religion to the margins of human life? Some quotes to this effect would be helpful.

It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian.

However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal.

Is Gray creating a strawman arguement when he suggests that the move away from religion is irreversible?

The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout.

Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.

As in the past, this is a type of atheism that mirrors the faith it rejects. Philip Pullman's Northern Lights - a subtly allusive, multilayered allegory, recently adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster, The Golden Compass - is a good example. Pullman's parable concerns far more than the dangers of authoritarianism. The issues it raises are essentially religious, and it is deeply indebted to the faith it attacks. Pullman has stated that his atheism was formed in the Anglican tradition, and there are many echoes of Milton and Blake in his work. His largest debt to this tradition is the notion of free will.

The central thread of the story is the assertion of free will against faith.

The young heroine Lyra Belacqua sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity.

Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion.

Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things,

and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. None of the authurs believe that atheism 'is right for everybody'

To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.

A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in Dennett's view of religion, which for him means the belief that some kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better - they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense. "The proposition that God exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory." But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.

The notion that religion is a primitive version of science was popularised in the late 19th century in JG Frazer's survey of the myths of primitive peoples, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. For Frazer, religion and magical thinking were closely linked. Rooted in fear and ignorance, they were vestiges of human infancy that would disappear with the advance of knowledge. Dennett's atheism is not much more than a revamped version of Frazer's positivism. The positivists believed that with the development of transport and communication - in their day, canals and the telegraph - irrational thinking would wither way, along with the religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century, Dennett believes much the same. In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (edge.org) under the title "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", he predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today". He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web.

The growth of knowledge is a fact only postmodern relativists deny. Science is the best tool we have for forming reliable beliefs about the world, but it does not differ from religion by revealing a bare truth that religions veil in dreams. Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs - in the case of science, for prediction and control.

Religions have served many purposes, but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation.

why does myth trump explanation?

A great deal of modern thought consists of secular myths - hollowed-out religious narratives translated into pseudo-science.

Dennett's notion that new communications technologies will fundamentally alter the way human beings think is just such a myth.

Or is it a hypothesis?

In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to explain the appeal of religion in terms of the theory of memes, vaguely defined conceptual units that compete with one another in a parody of natural selection. He recognises that, because humans have a universal tendency to religious belief, it must have had some evolutionary advantage, but today, he argues, it is perpetuated mainly through bad education. From a Darwinian standpoint, the crucial role Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history, and if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this.

Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out.

Dawkins does not say religion will 'die out' if it were not inculcated in schools and families. But it would probably be reduced significantly.

This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory, and I cannot help being reminded of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.

Dawkins's "memetic theory of religion" is a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere. Along with Dennett, who also holds to a version of the theory, Dawkins maintains that religious ideas survive because they would be able to survive in any "meme pool", or else because they are part of a "memeplex" that includes similar memes, such as the idea that, if you die as a martyr, you will enjoy 72 virgins.

Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science.

I'm glad he agrees that ID is not science.

Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory.

A Theory (capital 'T') in science is differant from a theory (everyday use) or an hypothesis.

Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors.

Dawkins compares religion to a virus: religious ideas are memes that infect vulnerable minds, especially those of children.

Agreed.

Biological metaphors may have their uses - the minds of evangelical atheists seem particularly prone to infection by religious memes, for example. At the same time, analogies of this kind are fraught with peril. Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion, which is real enough.

He gives less attention to the fact that some of

the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula. In each case, the science was bogus, but it was accepted as genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question.

Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater.

We must be aware of science being manipulated for political ends.

Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom?

It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies.

It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.

Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. "What matters," he declares in The God Delusion, "is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." This is simple-minded reasoning. Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism. He used Christian antisemitic demonology in his persecution of Jews, and the churches collaborated with him to a horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history. Hitler's world-view was that of many semi-literate people in interwar Europe, a hotchpotch of counterfeit science and animus towards religion. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was a type of atheism, or that it helped make Nazi crimes possible.

Nowadays most atheists are avowed liberals. What they want - so they will tell you - is not an atheist regime, but a secular state in which religion has no role.

They clearly believe that, in a state of this kind, religion will tend to decline.

Religion will not necessarily decline but religion's undue privileges will probably decline.

But America's secular constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian fundamentalism is more powerful in the US than in any other country, while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an established church.

Contemporary critics of religion go much further than demanding disestablishment. It is clear that he wants to eliminate all traces of religion from public institutions.

Awkwardly, many of the concepts he deploys - including the idea of religion itself - have been shaped by monotheism. Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.

AC Grayling provides an example of the persistence of religious categories in secular thinking in his Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West. As the title indicates, Grayling's book is a type of sermon. Its aim is to reaffirm what he calls "a Whig view of the history of the modern west", the core of which is that "the west displays progress". The Whigs were pious Christians, who believed divine providence arranged history to culminate in English institutions, and Grayling too believes history is "moving in the right direction". No doubt there have been setbacks - he mentions nazism and communism in passing, devoting a few sentences to them. But these disasters were peripheral. They do not reflect on the central tradition of the modern west, which has always been devoted to liberty, and which - Grayling asserts - is inherently antagonistic to religion. "The history of liberty," he writes, "is another chapter - and perhaps the most important of all - in the great quarrel between religion and secularism." The possibility that radical versions of secular thinking may have contributed to the development of nazism and communism is not mentioned. More even than the 18th-century Whigs, who were shaken by French Terror, Grayling has no doubt as to the direction of history.

But the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think

humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species.

In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.

The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics.

In fact,

while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society. Slavery was abolished in much of the world during the 19th century, but it returned on a vast scale in nazism and communism, and still exists today.

Slavery was always promoted in the Bible never condoned.

Torture was prohibited in international conventions after the second world war, only to be adopted as an instrument of policy by the world's pre-eminent liberal regime at the beginning of the 21st century. Wealth has increased, but it has been repeatedly destroyed in wars and revolutions. People live longer and kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today's secular missionaries have followed his example. One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.

Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer

Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray's In Defence of Atheism is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject.

Refreshingly,

Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism is an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: "Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy."

More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking. Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism. The key liberal theorists of toleration are John Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms, and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic. Yet Onfray has nothing but contempt for the traditions from which these thinkers emerged - particularly Jewish monotheism: "We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God," he writes. "But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people." Here Onfray passes over an important distinction.

It may be true that Jews first developed monotheism, but Judaism has never been a missionary faith. In seeking universal conversion, evangelical atheism belongs with Christianity and Islam.

In today's anxiety about religion, it has been forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century was secular in nature. To some extent, this is also true of the current wave of terrorism. Islamism is a patchwork of movements, not all violently jihadist and some strongly opposed to al-Qaida, most of them partly fundamentalist and aiming to recover the lost purity of Islamic traditions, while at the same time taking some of their guiding ideas from radical secular ideology. There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including antisemitism. But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

The influence of secular revolutionary movements on terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens notes that, long before Hizbullah and al-Qaida, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the island's Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties. Tiger suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they will be rewarded in any postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 80s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the Lebanese communist party. These secular terrorists believed they were expediting a historical process from which will come a world better than any that has ever existed. It is a view of things more remote from human realities, and more reliably lethal in its consequences, than most religious myths.

It is not necessary to believe in any narrative of progress to think liberal societies are worth resolutely defending. No one can doubt that they are superior to the tyranny imposed by the Taliban on Afghanistan, for example. The issue is one of proportion. Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those that were faced down in the 20th century. A greater menace is posed by North Korea, which far surpasses any Islamist regime in its record of repression and clearly does possess some kind of nuclear capability. Evangelical atheists rarely mention it. Hitchens is an exception, but when he describes his visit to the country, it is only to conclude that the regime embodies "a debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship". As in Russia and China, the noble humanist philosophy of Marxist-Leninism is innocent of any responsibility.

Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb." He need not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to believe. The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an Islamist elective theocracy, in which women, gays and religious minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq's history. The idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy - which Hitchens ardently promoted - was possible only as an act of faith.

In The Second Plane,

Martin Amis writes: "Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally."

Amis is sure religion is a bad thing, and that it has no future in the west. In the author of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million - a forensic examination of self-delusion in the pro-Soviet western intelligentsia - such confidence is surprising. The intellectuals whose folly Amis dissects turned to communism in some sense as a surrogate for religion, and ended up making excuses for Stalin. Are there really no comparable follies today? Some neocons - such as Tony Blair, who will soon be teaching religion and politics at Yale - combine their belligerent progressivism with religious belief, though of a kind Augustine and Pascal might find hard to recognise. Most are secular utopians, who justify pre-emptive war and excuse torture as leading to a radiant future in which democracy will be adopted universally. Even on the high ground of the west, messianic politics has not lost its dangerous appeal.

Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. In the 20th century, when it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender totalitarianism. Today, the result is a climate of hysteria. Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come.

Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

· John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be out in paperback in April (Penguin)

Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

by Wold Net Daily

Thanks to Carl H. Silverman for the link.

Reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,2192,Irrational-Atheist-trounces-God-deniers,Wold-Net-Daily,page42#124248 via
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59905

Editor's note: WorldNetDaily exclusive columnist Vox Day's new book, "The Irrational Atheist," scores a direct hit on atheism's most well-known practitioners. Using reason, science and historical documentation – not theology – Day argues the atheists into an inescapable corner.

WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah recently interviewed Day about the new book, which is available at WND's online store.

Joseph Farah: The title of "The Irrational Atheist" refers to the Unholy Trinity of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, while Dawkins.Net is advertising the Four Horsemen of Atheism, which includes Daniel Dennett. Given that you wrote a chapter about Dennett, why didn't you include him in with the other three?

Vox Day: Originally, I intended to do just that. But after reading four of his books, it became quite clear that for all his atheism, Dennett really doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the other three. Despite his occasional problems with logic, Dennett is a respectable intellectual. He is seriously interested in the scientific questions, and he is very willing to ask hard questions about his own assumptions and core beliefs too. This is totally different than Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, who are entirely occupied with making groundless assertions when they aren't busy drawing errant conclusions from incorrect data.

Farah: Why have we seen this explosion of atheist titles?

Day: It's a bit strange because the so-called New Atheists are really not new at all. There is very little that Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens say that was not already said by Jean Meslier prior to his death in 1729. If Sam Harris didn't talk so much about Islam and make so many egregious errors, you'd think that he was Bertrand Russell's parrot. I suspect the reason is related to the current state of physics and the increasing uncertainty scientists feel about the universe based on the very, very low probability that the universe randomly happened to turn out the way it is now observed to be. Atheists have felt that science was on their side ever since the Enlightenment, and now they see it slipping away from them. So, this recent explosion of atheist books is not a sign of strength; it's a sign of desperation.

Farah: Are atheists becoming more militant? Extreme? Why?

Day: The outspoken ones are certainly becoming more desperate and shrill. Part of this is because they've got such terrible front-men. They've got these spokesmen who are demonstrably incapable of making a sober and rational case for atheism, so they have to make up for it by setting off rhetorical fireworks and making outlandish statements – for example,

Dawkins's stupid assertion that a religious upbringing is worse than sexual child abuse.

If I were an atheist, I'd be deeply embarrassed to have these clowns as the public face of my religious identification. I think the end result will be more atheists identifying themselves as agnostics, which is a much more reasonable perspective.

Farah: What are the consequences of widespread atheism?

Day: There are none, because atheism will never be a widespread phenomenon. Like socialism, it's a parasitic phenomenon that can't survive on its own.

As Chesterton pointed out long ago, atheism rapidly mutates into paganism and diverse forms of spiritual absurdity. And we're already seeing signs that the post-Christian West is returning to paganism; it's not transforming into some sort of shiny, super-rational, post-superstitious science fiction society.

Farah: Why do you refer to Richard Dawkins as Darwin's Judas?

Day: He only finds Darwin useful insofar as his theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to eliminate the basis for a belief in a Creator God. As Dawkins states in his own words, he's "a passionate anti-Darwinian" with regards to the proper conduct of human affairs. Dawkins thinks humanity should follow Darwin just long enough to cast off Jesus Christ, then ditch Darwin in favor of following Richard Dawkins' opinion on life, the universe and everything.

Just like philosophers, you can always count on a scientist to come around eventually to the concept of rule by scientist-king.

Farah: You compare Sam Harris to Michael Bellesiles, who was convicted of academic fraud and lost the Bancroft Prize awarded to him. Is that a fair comparison?

Day: It's probably not fair to Bellesiles. He may have made stuff up, but at least he can handle elementary school division. I also suspect he knows the difference between difficult concepts like "counties" and "states." Harris demonstrably does not.

Farah: What are the most common mistakes made by Christian apologists when dealing with atheism? How is "The Irrational Atheist" different?

Day: Too many Christians forget that their basic assumptions are not shared by the atheist with whom they're talking. Christians always want to quote the Bible to try to prove a point, but to the atheist, that's no more meaningful than reading Shakespeare at them. And Christians often want to talk about the way God makes them feel, forgetting that the atheist's feelings are equally relevant.

My book doesn't rely on the Bible or theological gymnastics or emotional appeals; it simply makes use of detailed historical and scientific evidence in order to expose the logical and factual flaws in every atheist argument you're likely to encounter.

"The Irrational Atheist" isn't a defense of God or Christianity; I assume the Creator Lord of the Universe can defend Himself. He doesn't need my help.

Farah: Are you considering an apologetic sequel making a case for Christianity?

Day: Not at the moment. Right now, I'm more interested in the philosophical implications of biotechnology. Cross some of biotech's more questionable developments with globalism and post-Christian paganism, and it's not hard to see that we're looking at some crazy days ahead.

Farah: I've heard the book has gotten off to a great start. So why are you making the entire book available as a free download from your blog?

Day: Yeah, it's already on its second print-run ahead of the official release date. As for the download, my theory is that the main problem from which most books suffer is that too few potential readers have heard about them, so I figure that word of mouth from someone who's read the ebook is just as important as that from someone who's read the hardcover. Also, if people like a book that they've read, whether it's a download, a library book or just one they borrowed from a friend, they want to have it. I must have four or five copies of Eco's "The Name of the Rose" myself, not counting translations. But "The Irrational Atheist" ebook isn't a free download per se. It's a Radiohead-style pay-what-you want setup, which includes the option to pay nothing. Various formats including PDF, PDB and LIT will be available starting on the official publication date of Feb. 1.

Farah: Or they could buy it right here at WorldNetDaily today.

Day: That would be even better.

Farah: One last question, and it's an important one. When are you going to lose that ridiculous mohawk and grow a righteous mustache like mine?

Day: The hawk is gone, I'm sad to say. But I'm not sure I've got what it takes pull off the Magnum P.I. look.

Colin McGinn recalls The Atheism Tapes

British Philosopher Colin McGinn recalls today (4th February) in his blog The Atheism Tapes recording with Jonathan Miller. Some interesting comments critisising his views are being discussed here too.

"I well remember that sunny morning a few years ago when Jonathan Miller came to my apartment in New York to discuss the non-existence of God. ... we were attacking the foundations of what billions of people find essential to living happily (or that’s what they think).

In earlier centuries, or in other places, we would have been gruesomely executed for having such a congenial chat.

It is often forgotten that atheism of the kind shared by Jonathan and me (and Dawkins and Hitchens et al) has an ethical motive. Or rather two ethical motives: one is ethical repugnance at the cruelty, tyranny and oppression of organized religion over the course of human history;

HASSERS 'Antireligious'

the other concerns the ethics of rational belief—how we are obliged to form our beliefs about the world.

HASSERS 'Ethical'

The first motive is familiar and needs no commentary from me. The second is less widely appreciated, but for some of us it is crucial to the whole discussion. We believe,

as an ethical principle, that beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument—so that “faith” is inherently an unethical way to form your beliefs.

To believe “on faith” is to believe that the world is a certain way (contains a god etc) without the support of either empirical or logical justification. This violates the ethics of belief—how you ought to arrive at your convictions. That, for us, is the original sin of theism; and from this sin the other sorts of sin arise—religious intolerance, persecution, violence.

In the Atheism Tapes you will see this ethical perspective amply displayed.

Atheists through the ages have been moved by a moral imperative: to uphold the rationality of belief.

Wishes can never replace justification as a ground of conviction.

Contrary to the popular myth, atheists are not people who have abandoned the idea of the moral good; they are people with a particularly clear sense of what moral goodness requires.

From our point of view, the typical theist has already done something morally wrong simply in being a theist."

Angry atheists are hot authors

by Rachel Zoll, AP, Yahoo

Thanks to Sam Khouri for the link.

Reposted from:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070524/ap_on_re_us/atheist_authors

reposted from: richarddawkins.net
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments

The time for polite debate is over. Militant, atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.

Christopher Hitchens' book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.

Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the phenomenally successful "The End of Faith" and its follow-up, "Letter to a Christian Nation." Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" struck similar themes — and sold.

"There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist," Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. "There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying."

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books' success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.

"I don't believe in conspiracy theories," Mouw said, "but it's almost like they all had a meeting and said, 'Let's counterattack.'"



The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists, Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power. Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the U.S., London and Madrid, the atheists say.

As Hitchens puts it: "Religion kills."

The Rev. Douglas Wilson, senior fellow in theology at New Saint Andrews College, a Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, sees the books as a sign of secular panic. He says nonbelievers are finally realizing that, contrary to what they were taught in college, faith is not dead.

Signs of believers' political and cultural might abound.

Religious challenges to teaching evolution are still having an impact, 80 years after the infamous Scopes "Monkey" trial. The dramatic growth in homeschooling and private Christian schools is raising questions about the future of public education. Religious leaders have succeeded in putting some limits on stem-cell research.

And the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a national ban on a procedure critics call "partial-birth abortion" — the first federal curbs on an abortion procedure in a generation — came after decades of religious lobbying for conservative justices.

"It sort of dawned on the secular establishment that they might lose here," said Wilson, who is debating Hitchens on christianitytoday.com and has written the book "Letter from a Christian Citizen" in response to Harris. "All of this is happening precisely because there's a significant force that they have to deal with."

Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America. In an 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said they did not believe in God. Other surveys concluded that 14 percent of Americans consider themselves secular, a term that can include believers who say they have no religion.

Some say liberal outrage over the policies of President Bush is partly fueling sales, even though Hitchens famously supported the invasion of Iraq.

To those Americans, the nation's born-again president is the No. 1 representative of the religious right activists who helped put him in office. Critics see Bush's Christian faith behind some of his worst decisions and his stubborn defense of the war in Iraq.

"There is this general sense that evangelicals have really gained a lot of power in the United States and the Bush administration seems to represent that in some significant ways," said Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion at the University of Notre Dame. "A certain group of people sees it that way and that's really disturbing."

Mouw said conservative Christians are partly to blame for the backlash. The rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been so strident, they have invited the rebuke, the seminary president said.

"We have done a terrible job of presenting our perspective as a plausible world view that has implications for public life and for education, presenting that in a way that is sensitive to the concerns of people who may disagree," he said. "Whatever may be wrong with Christopher Hitchens attacks on religious leaders, we have certainly already matched it in our attacks."

Given the popularity of the anti-religion books so far, publishers are expected to roll out even more in the future. Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, says religion has been one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing in the last 15 years, and the rise of books by atheists is "the flip-side of that."

"It was just the time," she said, "for the atheists to take the gloves off."

******** Comments at RichardDawkins.net **********

7. Comment #44445 by freeurmind on May 24, 2007 at 6:55 pm

As much as I want to see all these J freaks go back in the cave where they belong I wish these books ,and hopefully the ones to come,will spark in many a little sense of reality and get people thinking that maybe what they have been believing all this time,for whatever reason,is not the ultimate truth,ignite the skepticism that lays dormant in all of us and with that bring the debate on a larger stage where ideas can be heard and challenged .I think if we can do that we would have a big impact on the minds of so many people who have been believers until this time because of sheer ignorance,passive ignorance.I believe that many people will have a hard time shaking the rust off their brains but the stronger the shaking the better the chances they will start thinking .For the same reason I think the approach of these latest books is the right one ,playing nice will not get us far.Let's punch the religious bag hard.

11. Comment #44454 by Jayday on May 24, 2007 at 8:43 pm

I am gratified to know that there are people buying Hitchens', Dawkins' and Harris' books. Before the catastrophy of the George Bush presidency and then 9/11 and the Iraq quagmire, I suspect most Americans wouldn't have paid much attention to these authors. Not because they didn't have anything worthwhile to say about religion, but because our world in American was predominantly a live and let live existence. Dawkins rightly characterized it by saying that most religious practice was pretty benign. I may not have been a theist, but if my neighbor was, it wasn't a big deal. However, when our government positioned itself to legislate "morality" and set a foreign policy based on their right wing Christian fundamentalist beliefs, then more people have taken notice! Of course these authors are "hot," and it is a great thing. They are saying what we've always wanted to say but were never motivated. As Dawkins says, we were "taught" not to discuss religion in company. He is absolutely right, there are high stakes, and we shouldn't be bullied into painting a face of false respect by people who are taking away our personal freedom and try to replace it with some supernatural garbage or who paint their idea of a moral world as some simplistic fairytale without nuance and depth. Take away the fear mongers who try to manipulate us and we see the emperor really is naked.

13. Comment #44457 by MelM on May 24, 2007 at 9:12 pm

Harsh rhetoric from religion is at fault? Nope. Blame these instead:

• Dominionism (see Kingdom Coming)


• Creationism in the schools


• Wingnut "science" museums


• Screwing up American history. (I'm reading Liars for Jesus now.)
  
• Court stripping attempts


• Breaking down the wall of separation


• Trying to end abortion


• Attacking Oregon's "Death With Dignity Act"


• The "Bible Literacy" Trojan horses


• Anti stem cell research


• Giving away government money for Christian charity


• Rediculous promotion of sexual abstinence


• The promotion of senseless prattle
  

You bet we're angry! I have some respect for those believers of past centuries who were finding their way out of a religious nightmare but I'll have no tolerance for those believers of today who are trying to work their way back into one.

15. Comment #44463 by debaser71 on May 24, 2007 at 9:46 pm

The way I see it is that these articles talk about what's IMO an important topic, ATHEISM! Even though it's full of insults the very fact that atheism is being talked about at all is a good thing. That more people are open to talk about such things favors us. We have reality on our side.

Anyway most of these articles are just scrubs jumping on a badwagon and recycling the same set of negative adjectives (angry, militant, vehement, assault, etc) over and over. IMO they pretty much play into our hands by keeping the debate going.

16. Comment #44465 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on May 24, 2007 at 9:56 pm

Truth be told, lots of folks just haven't thought about it that hard, and are more comfortable in saying "yeah, there is some sort of god" to explain what they don't know rather than saying "I don't know the answer to that".

Other than a fairly hard core minority this is absolutely the case. Atheism, simply hasn't been given enough profile as a genuine "option".

Myself and my wife just spent an interesting week helping a fellow previous missionary complete her deconversion.

She still has tremendous fear of hell, inculcated at a very young age, but she is working through that.

Conversations online and off, are what are going to change the world. Getting religion on the agenda and subject to vigorous debate is all that is needed for the change to begin to take.

On youtube we are having a "Bash Islam" week at the moment, generating lots of controversy. Come and have a look!!

New Atheism encourages what it disavow

Yelling insults won't reduce the appeal of extremist religious belief. We need to be more shrewd about this peculiarly modern phenomenon.

Madeleine Bunting

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May 10, 2007 11:30 AM | Printable version

Well, I suppose you could say I asked for it (email me if you have been converted by Richard Dawkins from a believer to an atheist) - and I've had plenty of emails. They make interesting reading but the pattern is not one that surprises me hugely. With one exception, my correspondents all said they were agnostic and Dawkins' The God Delusion has made them into atheists. There was one Muslim from Singapore who said the book had actually converted him from belief to atheism - Richard Dawkins will be glad to hear.

But for the most part, agnostic to atheist is a significantly different proposition to Dawkins' declared aim of converting religious believers into atheists. So I stand by my conclusion that this genre of New Atheism will not achieve its declared purpose - it will not roll back the rise of a particular form of extremist religious belief which - and here Dawkins and I can agree - is a threat to peace and tolerance.

What Dawkins and his fellow atheists do achieve is morale raising among American atheists. Emails and posts portrayed a picture of beleaguered victimhood - of atheists "branded as moral degenerates" for their views, as one email put it. This is how American this debate sounds; I really don't believe in the UK that atheists are a persecuted minority; the British are pretty phlegmatic about faith, they prefer religion private so no one bothers an atheist or a religious believer unless they insist on banging on about their beliefs.

On the other side of the Atlantic, it may well be a different picture and if so, I'd be the first to argue for tolerance and respect for atheism. I don't much like the kind of political culture such as in America where it is close to impossible to admit you're an atheist. If Dawkins has helped America to more acceptance of such a position, all to the good. But I also raise the concern that his form of atheism is mimicking the kind of intolerant bigotry we've seen in the past from the religious. As one person put it, it's payback time - atheists are simply giving back what religions have handed out for centuries. Well, exactly. And what's the point of that?

Once you get past a lot of the abuse on Comment is free, there's an important debate that fascinates people about the nature of religious belief. Faith has clearly failed to explain how the universe works and science has succeeded, but faith hasn't withered away. As one person put it, "is there only one kind of truth - one that is provable and scientific and that is the one by which religion must be judged" and they concluded by asking "what about other kinds of truth - such as artistic, emotional - which we find valuable and enriching?" What science can't satisfactorily answer - or express - for many believers and non-believers alike is that search for meaning, human connectedness and elusive human experiences such as peace. Nor does it provide any map for the development of greater insight or compassion. Dawkins may say he finds all that in science - good for him. For many of the rest of us, science doesn't - and perhaps traditional religion doesn't either - so we're still looking.

What surprises me - and perhaps by now, it shouldn't - is how any criticism of Dawkins prompts such a vociferous response. Yet I acknowledged plenty of common ground; much of the political charge sheet of the New Atheists against a Christian fundamentalism in the US is deeply disturbing. I share the New Atheists' horror at the mad beliefs about the second coming and the end of the world; I totally agree that the religious right should not be able to impose their beliefs on science education - intelligent design, creationism and all that hocus pocus.

But I differ on tactics, and I do so because it seems to me that extremist religious belief is a peculiarly modern phenomenon driven by the trauma of globalisation and modernity. We need to be much more shrewd about how we handle religious extremism. In many contexts - particularly Islam - it has become a political identity. Religion has re-emerged in the wake of the failure of secular political movements such as communism and socialism. The disorientating pace of social and economic change exacerbates people's need for security and certainty. Yelling scornful insults at this swelling band of benighted believers will only encourage them to draw the wagons up tighter around the laager.

Monday, May 7, 2007 | Reason : Commentary | Print

The New Atheists loathe religion far too much to plausibly challenge it

by Madeleine Bunting

Reposted from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2074075,00.html

Anti-faith proselytising is a growth industry. But its increasingly hysterical flag-bearers are heading for a spectacular failure


It's an extraordinary publishing phenomenon - atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett's success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Last week, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was published in the US. The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books.

This rising stack of books has prompted screeds of debate, flushing out all manner of belief and unbelief in blogs, reviews, essays and internet exchanges in the US. The Catholic columnist Andrew Sullivan has just concluded his exchange with Sam Harris on the net, while the philosopher Michael Novak recently took on the whole genre of New Atheism, or neo-atheism. Surely not since Victorian times has there been such a passionate, sustained debate about religious belief.

And it's a very ill-tempered debate. The books live up to their provocative titles: their purpose is to pour scorn on religious belief - they want it eradicated (although they differ as to the chances of achieving that). The newcomer on the block, Hitchens , sums up monotheism as "a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events". He takes the verbal equivalent of an AK47 to shoot down hallowed religious figures, questioning whether Muhammad was an epileptic, declaring Mahatma Gandhi an "obscurantist" who distorted and retarded Indian independence, and Martin Luther King a "plagiarist and an orgiast" and in no real sense a Christian, while the Dalai Lama is a "medieval princeling" who is the continuation of a "parasitic monastic elite".

This kind of vituperative polemic sounds a tad odd this side of the Atlantic.
where have we heard 'tad' before?

Apart from an ongoing anxiety about Islam, the British are pretty phlegmatic about religion. Church attendance continues its steady decline and the Christian evangelical boom has never taken off. The whole New Atheist publishing phenomenon is like eavesdropping on a blistering row in the flat next door: one's response alternates between fascination and irritation, but is it really anything to do with us?

What's clear is that this wave of New Atheism is deeply political - and against some of its targets even a devout churchgoer might cheer them on. What they all have in common is a loathing of an increasing religiosity in US politics, which has contributed to a disastrous presidency and undermined scientific understanding. Dennett excoriates the madness of a faith that looks forward to the end of the world and the return of the messiah. What Dawkins hates is that most Americans still haven't accepted evolution and support the teaching of intelligent design; according to one poll, 50% of the US electorate believe the story of Noah. He argues that "there is nothing to choose between the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent ... The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America."

Harris similarly draws an analogy between Muslims and the American Christian right: "Non-believers like myself stand beside you dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well - by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service of your religious myths and by your attachment to an imaginary God."

This is popular stuff - a plague on both your houses - on both sides of the Atlantic after a war on terror in which both sides have used their gods as justification for appalling brutality. But it tips over into something much more sinister in Harris's latest book. He suggests that Islamic states may be politically unreformable because so many Muslims are "utterly deranged by their religious faith". In a another passage Harris goes even further, and reaches a disturbing conclusion that "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them". This sounds like exactly the kind of argument put forward by those who ran the Inquisition. As one New York commentator put it, we're familiar with religious intolerance, now we have to recognise irreligious intolerance.

The danger is that the aggression and hostility to religion in all its forms (moderates are castigated as giving the fundamentalists cover for their extremism) deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged recently in the science/faith debate. The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking, one of Britain's most eminent evolutionary psychologists acknowledged to me recently. Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed - the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human wellbeing? In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?

This isn't the kind of debate that the New Atheists are interested in (with the possible exception of Dennett, who in an interview last year was far more open to discussion than his book would indicate); theirs is a political battle, not an attempt to advance human understanding. But even on the political front, one has to question whether all the aggression isn't counterproductive. Robert Winston voiced increasing concern among scientists when he argued in a recent lecture in Dundee that Dawkins's insulting and patronising approach did science a disservice. Meanwhile, critics in America argue that the polarisation of the debate in the US is setting the cause of non-deism back rather than advancing it.

Dawkins is an unashamed proselytiser. He says in his preface that he intends his book for religious readers and his aim is that they will be atheists by the time they finish reading it. Yet The God Delusion is not a book of persuasion, but of provocation - it may have sold in the thousands but has it won any souls? Anyone who has experienced such a conversion, please email me (with proof). I suspect the New Atheists are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and even less sympathy of why people increasingly use religious identity in political contexts, they've missed the proverbial elephant in the room. These increasingly hysterical books may boost the pension, they may be morale boosters for a particular kind of American atheism that feels victimised - the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition - but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand.

m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

^^^^ Comments ^^^^^^

4. Comment #38160 by Caesar Best on May 7, 2007 at 6:27 am

"In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?"

Screw that! Firstly I seriously question these findings, but if that was true, I'd still rather live a short life in freedom than a long one in the prison of religion.

"but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand."

Oowh, I understand. Atheism comes from understanding, not ignorance.

7. Comment #38167 by Paul Nettleship on May 7, 2007 at 6:56 am

"The books live up to their provocative titles: their purpose is to pour scorn on religious belief"

And why not? That is all infantile beliefs are worthy of. Anyway, the purpose of the books is to educate primarily. Clearly too late for this catholic journalist though.

9. Comment #38170 by mikehicks55 on May 7, 2007 at 7:02 am

Ms Bunting seems to believe that Atheists shouldn't be as passionate about their "disbelief" as the religious are about their faiths.

As a former Catholic, I have lost count of the number of times I have been seen ripe for conversion to another denomination, or now, back to Catholicism. I have friends at the moment, members of an evangelical group, who have taken me to their functions and attempted to brainwash me into the "happy clappy Jesus" mentality.

Atheists, by comparison, tend to have a live and let live attitude. I occassionally point out to religious friends apparent follies in their beliefs, but usually only as a rebuttal if I'm asked why I don't believe in God.

I can't believe that free thinkers will ever be as confrontational as many fundamental Christian groups; when was the last time atheists went door to door, or stopped anyone in a busy shopping centre in an attempt to convert any one to their way of thinking?

And as has been said many times, when did anyone carry out an act of terrorism in the name of atheism?

Whilst the "herding cats" metaphor is still as applicable as ever, if nothing else, the recent "publishing pheneomenon" has allowed more people to feel they can stand up and say "I am a cat!"

12. Comment #38174 by Robert Maynard on May 7, 2007 at 7:09 am

By proof, I wonder what she means? A scanned copy of a receipt for TGD? Three photos of yourself, first with a Bible, then The God Delusion, then nothing, and ..a smile? Do some religions have membership cards/certificates they could tear up for demonstrative purposes? :P

I see "New Atheism" as taking the same course as feminism and the gay pride social movements. Dawkins has said as much himself, that this activist attitude must be taken, if not to
"turn everyone" atheist, at least to just get it out there, and plough the issue into the social consciousness, to "raise consciousness".
Like feminism and homosexuality, the best way to counter a prevailing attitude of 'don't ask; don't tell' is basically to go "hysterical" for a few years. It's never necessarily an organised push, I don't think, so much as a critical mass of blossoming solidarity and community.
In the aftermath, once your foot is in the door of social awareness, and your stance is acknowledged as common and respectable, it's ripe to become sheltered by the progressive consensus, stereotypes are slowly eroded, and you are then in a position to pursue changes to any social policies that made your life a secret hell before you found you weren't alone (such as workplace discrimination, twisted educational reform, or undermining the first amendment)

Total (or even mass) deconversion will probably not be a reality anytime soon (especially in America), but that doesn't make the activism of "New Atheism" any less desperately important or worthwhile, for the general welfare and legitimacy of atheists as equal citizens of the world.

15. Comment #38179 by youmemeyou on May 7, 2007 at 7:20 am

I'd say that positive scientific works have done more to supplant my theological superstition than philosophy. If the non-existent 'religion of atheism' has nothing to offer (being absent), atheists do not lack.

23. Comment #38194 by Keinen_Gott on May 7, 2007 at 7:46 am

Let the 21st be the century of a new enlightenment; the century we all, as a race, realised that we must get rid of all forms of religious dogma if we are to survive each other. If this is not so we all will surely die in some form of a religious war or genocide. I can see in the not so distant future a war called WW3(christianity vs Islam). Let us all hope that this is not so.

29. Comment #38206 by Grandt on May 7, 2007 at 8:09 am

I've always found it hilarious when 'believers' claim that atheists don't know about religion, and as such shouldn't comment on it.

Fine.

If we are not to comment on religion, 'believers' should refrain from commenting on scientific topics.

Somehow I don't think that that is going to happen though.

38. Comment #38216 by troodon on May 7, 2007 at 8:42 am

"Yet The God Delusion is not a book of persuasion, but of provocation - it may have sold in the thousands but has it won any souls? "

Souls....none
Minds....well, that's different

40. Comment #38218 by scooternyc on May 7, 2007 at 8:52 am

I find the implication of there being a "debate" so absurd it's laughable. There is no debate when you challenge the religious of our world with providing scientific evidence to their claims.

In all other areas of our world and our lives we expect the scientific method to provide us with the strongest foundation for proving of hypothesis which have created more comfort throughout the years based on these proved theories, which create products, cure illness, conserve resources, etc.

To make the claim that god exists or that the bible is the word of god is nothing more than fiction as we all know, until the accusers bring forth their evidence of fact to such a claim.

My answer to any person these days who brings up this so-called "new religion of atheism" is simply: " you have no proof of your claim, otherwise you would have presented it; the time of conscious raising is at hand and religion's time has come for extinction".

People want to continue to argue for which I simply reiterate, "Where's your proof?" A book that authenticates itself is not proof. Ignorance of science on your part in understanding the world, in which we live, is not proof. Your "personal experience is not proof.

God is a placebo – filled with nothing with nothing to offer.