HOT TOPIC REPOSTED BY POPULAR DEMAND
Not sure, but I don’t think the Brit author of this piece likes these guys.
The New Atheists loathe religion far too much to plausibly challenge it
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.
[…]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”.
The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking […] 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?
Well, now that this has devolved into a debate over the definition of a word (one that could be avoided if the God Squard would increase their library from one to two books by adding a dictionary) it is no longer worth having.
So now we must leave this abstract virtual place and return to where this debate really matters… School board meetings, city councils, state capitols, and the hallowed halls of of the Supreme Court.
Christians are attacking America and stripping her of her core values, imposing their rigid, indefensible, and puritanical values on peaceful and innocent citizens everywhere. The real fight is between the Fundamentalist Xian Jihad and the Enlightened Citizens of The United States.
The real God eats meat and drinks beer while driving His Hummer to a place where he can shoot His guns for fun. The rest is irrelevant.
#125 – If I had a big brother, I’d want you to be him 🙂
OFTLO – we’d have a lot of arguments, but it would be interesting. 😉
More seriously, I was raised Christian but grew out of it after I started analyzing the contradictions. Fundamentalists of all types need to STFU and mind their own business. The one thing all Fundies have in common is that they all presume to tell everyone else how to live. I don’t just mean the Jihadists and Fundie Christians either – I include the crowd, the Collectivists of all flavors and the Blame America First crowd among others.
If everyone just kept busy taking care of themselves, they wouldn’t have the time to mess with others lives and we’d all be better off.
OK – I meant to also include the Global Warming (TM) crowd as a fundie life-controlling group but my post was controlled by the bad HTML group I guess…. 😉
#127 – OFTLO – we’d have a lot of arguments, but it would be interesting.
That’s because you are always wrong…
But you’d have beat up bullies for me in grade school. 🙂
Global…
I’m somewhat of a collectivist to a certain degree.
You are a capitalist.
You tell me why I like collectivism…
Is it to leverage the power of economies of ______? (hint: Fish are covered in them)
#109 – noname,
You said:
Do you see that difference? Simply, No.
They where atheist and they were mass murders. What ever their motives for mass murder doesn’t change, they were atheist nor excuse they murdered on a historically massive scale.
Your attempt to separate they where atheist and that they were mass murders is truly making a difference with out meaning.
My point is that many people have actually committed mass murder because of religion. This makes religion a real part of the crime. No one has committed mass murder BECAUSE of atheism. So, atheism is not part of their crime.
This does NOT excuse atheist murderers. I make no attempt to do so. I am merely pointing out that religion is the cause of many mass murders, where atheism is not.
#111 – Billy Bob,
Excellent job of quoting me out of context. See how easy it is to change the meaning of someone else’s quote when you just cut at the right point. As for not proselytizing, check what happens when religious people have atheists knocking on their doors preaching evolution.
http://tinyurl.com/344dw4
#112 – Lauren the Ghoti,
Welcome to the party. In general, I tend to give people a bit more leeway in making typos. I’ve made a few myself. Of course, that is the only thing ghoti-y in your logic. All else makes perfect sense.
#117 – Bruce IV,
Oh good, my turn to quote a bit out of context. I’ll try to do it without changing your meaning, which is not my intent:
Science is a tool to understand and manipulate the physical universe. … Framing the debate in terms of scientific evidence limits its scope to the physical universe.
So, can I take it then that you admit that there is no god in the physical universe? How does this not make you an atheist? Is god in some other universe? On another D-brane? Off the bulk of our currently observable 4 dimensions?
Wouldn’t a yes to any of these make god an irrelevant topic for discussion with no effect in our universe and certainly no ability to explain its creation and no effect on the universe at all?
#119 – JimR,
Thanks. I didn’t think I imagined that.
#122 – Billy Bob,
The point that is missed by the quote out of context is that what I’m really intolerant of is having religion shoved down my throat. I don’t get to choose to use only 1950 series and earlier money so that I can avoid seeing the godvertisement that was added in 1960. I don’t get to choose to avoid seeing the 10 commandments if they are placed in public buildings like courthouses, etc. And, I can’t stop all of our political candidates from godding at me in every one of their speeches.
130 – wrong thread for that debate.
My religion is:
“Stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours – I’ll let you do what you want as long as you let me do what I want.” That’s pretty much it.
(Fish is more Lauren’s area of expertise. 😉 )
Jim – 123 – thanks for the compliment (if I may take it as such)
Scott – 131 – If you want my personal view on God’s interaction with the physical universe (this is one area where there are many possible Biblical interpretations, so its not necessarily a consensus view among Christians) it goes like this. God created and maintains the entire physical universe. He Himself is not contained within said universe, but possesses omnipotent power to order it as He will. The laws of science are His usual mode of governance of His creation, so that humans may better understand the world. He may suspend them at any time (the example I use of this is an account in Joshua of a time when Joshua requested more daylight to complete a battle and the sun and moon stood in their places – this obviously is not the usual effect of gravity and the earth’s spin). The base of this view is Biblical passages speaking of God upholding nature (I can’t remember a reference – never been good with little details like that, prefer the big picture). Thus, God maintains His relevance to the physical realm without being constrained by time or space. If any of you have read Tolkien’s Silmarillion (which contains numerous allegories of Christian theology), its somewhat the same as how Middle Earth was “bent” so that the realm of the Valar was outside of Middle Earth, but still accessible (to the elves) (though that is an extremely rough analogy – the concepts are only vaguely similar).
@123 – Perhaps you are right and I have not studied the natural sciences deeply enough, but I am still satisfied with my model of the “why’s” for the “what’s” of science. It may not be the majority view, but that does not necessarily make it untrue. (The atheists here will surely agree that the majority view on a given topic is not always true, seeing as there are many more non-atheists than atheists (the term theist implies a unified ideology simply by the fact that it is a single word – there isn’t one, as there are multiple incompatible religions))
#59 and #131 Misanthropic Scott
In #59 you state “The big difference is that atheists have done so in the name of some other ideology”
Then in #131 you state “I am merely pointing out that religion is the cause of many mass murders, where atheism is not”
You have not demonstrated any proof to support your comment in #59. When later I nicely pointed this out, you then have the gull to ask me to provide for you, your proof, which of course I just ignored.
Your comment in #131 builds on #59 which you have left unsubstantiated, thereby both #59 and #131 are bogus.
Though, you could argue, absence of evidence is not absence of something existence or a truth. Since after all, Science has only ever discovered or uncovered already existent truths, it never generates something from nothing.
But, I am sure being the true atheist, you believe you are, you do not want to go down that road. I am sure you would rather leave truly pioneering work to those advancing knowledge in their field.
As Albert Einstein put it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
#133 – Bruce IV,
God created and maintains the entire physical universe. He Himself is not contained within said universe, but possesses omnipotent power to order it as He will.
Wouldn’t that make for a demonstrably and testably different universe than the one in which we live?
As for Tolkien, good example, very similar. Both are equally fantasy.
#135 – noname,
Fine. We can agree to disagree on this. I think I have given a sufficiently large number of examples where religion actively caused people to kill specifically in the name of religion. Stalin, yes an atheist, as noted above, killed to promote communism and probably even more because he was genuinely paranoid. No, I do not have “proof” of this. I had thought it was pretty well known. If not, then OK, we can agree to disagree on the point.
As for the many cases of killing for religion, they are genuinely well-known and well documented. Perhaps the killers were not truly “Christ-like” whatever that means and if he ever even existed as a human being rather than as a fictional character. Yes, I agree. The ridiculously huge number of people killed by people in the name of Christianity were definitely killed by people that were not “Christ-like”.
However, they were indeed following scripture. Violence is rampant in the Bible. Both the old and new testaments are equally part of Christianity as far as I know. Else, why would Christians want the 10 commandments displayed anywhere? Why would Christians be against gay marriage?
I love how suppression of religious free speech is recast as “as an atheist, I have the right to not have religious ideas touch my eyeballs or ears” (or “shoved down my throat”). When did anybody get the right to stop another’s free expression because they don’t want to hear it?
Maybe I don’t want to see Paris Hilton anymore. Do I have the right to prevent her from appearing everywhere she might be “shoved down my throat”?
#137 – Billy Bob,
Yes. You have the right not to see images of Paris Hilton on your money, in your public schools, in public courthouses, in public post offices, not to have your pledge of allegiance to your nation say ‘under Paris Hilton’, and, IMHO, even not to have people pushing images of Paris Hilton knocking on your door to tell you how beautiful she is.
Billy Bob,
You should also not get harassed, beaten up, or killed because you prefer Britney Spears, or Marylin Monroe, or Rock Hudson, or none of the above.
I think a real problem in this discussion is the use of the label atheist and what a theist or non theist thinks it means…
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Dan Barker:
A former fundamentalist preacher who has become an activist for atheism, freethought, and the separation of church and state. He wrote in his 1992 book Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist that,
“It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism […] Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god — both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter […].”
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Valerii A. Kuvakin:
Professor and chair of the Department of Russian Philosophy at Moscow State University, Kuvakin writes in his book In Search of our Humanity:
“Atheism … goes back to the Ancient Greek (a — a negative prefix, theos — god), evidencing the antiquity of the outlook of those who saw no presence of God (or gods) in their everyday lives, or who even denied the very existence of God (or gods). There are different types of atheism, but atheism in one form or another has existed in every civilization.
[T]he concept “atheist” partially coincides with such notions as “skeptic,” “agnostic,” and “rationalist” and it borders with such notions as “anticlerical,” “God fighter” (theomachist), and “God abuser” (blasphemer).
It is wrong to identify an atheist as one who denies God, though this is what opponents of atheism usually claim. If such people exist, it would probably be more correct to call them the “verbal” murderers of God, for the prefix a- means denying as elimination. … I would like to stress that the prefix a- does not necessarily mean rejection. It can mean “absence of.” For example, “apathy” means “absence of passion.” Thus, the concept “atheist” does not necessarily mean nihilism.”
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Michael Martin:
The author of one of the most extensive and detailed books on the philosophy of atheism. He states in Atheism: A Philosophical Introduction that,
“If you look up ‘atheism’ in the dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek ‘a’ means ‘without’ or ‘not’ and ‘theos’ means ‘god.’ From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative veiew, characterized by the absence of belief in God.”
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Gordon Stein:
A prolific writer on atheism, humanism, freethought, and philosophy, who described atheism in his An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism:
“The average theologian (there are exceptions, of course) uses ‘atheist’ to mean a person who denies the existence of a God. Even an atheist would agree that some atheists (a small minority) would fit this definition. However, most atheists would stongly dispute the adequacy of this definition. Rather, they would hold that an atheist is a person without a belief in God. The distinction is small but important. Denying something means that you have knowledge of what it is that you are being asked to affirm, but that you have rejected that particular concept. To be without a belief in God merely means that the term ‘god’ has no importance or possibly no meaning to you. Belief in God is not a factor in your life. Surely this is quite different from denying the existence of God. Atheism is not a belief as such. It is the lack of belief.”