Letters to the Editor
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Oh, brother, another one of these articles
And, golly, he sounds so proud of himself. Who'd've thought?
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I agree with Mr. Wilder
Extremists by any other name are just as F'd up.
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"New atheists" impede religious dialogue
It's difficult to talk about how to change one's political or eschatological beliefs if you start out by telling them their entire religion is wrong. I hope Chris Hedges will lead the way between religious extremism and atheist polemics to promote a reasonable dialogue between atheists and believers across the political spectrum.
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I saw Chris at UCLA
and had come to hear Mark Harris...
and came away feeling that Harris was using atheism as an excuse to bash Islam.
I found this aspect troublesome in his book, but it was obvious that he basically is framing his argument at that all Moslems are fundamentalists, and he had his own literalist mindset.
Chris is aces with me, and I guess I am not a new atheist after all.
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Thanks
It's easy to see where this will go and why Salon, driven by clicks and therefore reliant on controversy, posted it. Still, whatever the initial impulse, it is good to see something from this side of the argument.
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This is truly absurd,
Apparently a couple of atheists are neocons. Even more Christians are neocons. So I guess I don't believe in Christians.
This is truly insulting to atheists, who in my experience are greatly overrepresented in the reality-based community.
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@Sr
You're missing the point. The point is that fundamentalists can show up in any group, even atheists. Fundamentalism isn't restricted only to the religious, and is dangerous no matter what form it takes.
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John Lennon, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams
said it best.
John Lennon in the song "Imagine"
Woody Allen when he (or a character in one of his movies) said: "If Jesus were to come back and see some of the things done in His name, He'd never stop throwing up."
Kurt Vonnegut in the Books of Bokonon
Most of all, Douglas Adams in a speech back in 1998:
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
People can believe, or not believe, almost anything they want, no problem. The problem is when they insist that their beliefs be forced on other people without any proof of their validity, or even serious questioning, simply because they are "religious" beliefs.
The forcing can be direct (you must believe what I believe, without question, because I say so, or because my interpretation ) or indirect (my right to do something because of my religious beliefs trumps your rights to do something else). When people insist that their religious explanations be taught as science in public schools simply because they believe in them, that's direct forcing. When people insist on excluding others from a gym because of their religious beliefs, that's indirect forcing.
The person you most have to watch out for is the person who insists that their beliefs not be questioned.
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Dangerous
I don't think people like Dawkins and Hitchens are as dangerous as the religious fundamentalists, because part of the reason they have written their books is that they are scared that religious fundamentalists will destroy civilization as we know it and want to offer an alternative voice to empower those who instinctively feel fundamentalism is wrong, but need stiffer arguments to use to resist fundamentalist peer pressure.
Hitchens is a fan of Orwell, who is very much a voice against totalitarianism, and Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and believes that values for living can be found in the concepts of reciprocal altruism and kin selection leading to an empathy for others based on responsible behavior. He has said: My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.
Why is this so dangerous?
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Right about Hitchens and Harris, wrong about Dawkins
The author engages in the same gross stereotyping that he accuses others of.
Some of Sam Harris's work is a blatant sell of neocon agendas,with the US foriegn policy treated with kid gloves compared to how he dealt with other religion-driven agendas. His attacks on Chomsky were the first tip, along with Alan Dershowitz praising the attacks (not just the book, he singled out how great it was that Harris saw Chomsky as a lefty anti-Zionist extermist who must be silenced).
Hitchens's necon leanings are well known.
Dawkins, not so much, and I find his writing on the dangers of religion to be refreshing and important.
Sloppy thinking, to not see the difference. If his journalism has the same lazy work, that's not saying much for it.
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count me with Hedges
I read Hitchens a while back. He can't think straight. He can't even think crooked.
I read Dennett's Consciousness Explained. He can think pretty straight. I didn't find any reasons, though, to abandon my worship.
Dawkins I'd encountered a while back, with results not much better than Hitchens.
Hedges hits it right on the nose: guys like Hitchens and Dawkins (and, for all I know, Dennett too when he takes up his debating rhetoric) have the same oversimplified notions about religion that the fundamentalists do.
The only people I know who take the whole Bible literally are fundamentalists and atheists of the Hitchens sort. None of my fellow worshippers do, and historically, most of the great christian thinkers didn't either. Well, I'm simplifying things a bit... .
There may be, somewhere, some good arguments against religion. I'm still hunting.
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Belief is not reasonable
By definition, belief and faith are irrational. That's the point. Some people think that as an atheist I don't believe in god. That assumes there is a god, and I just don't believe in him/her/it. That's not accurate. I have come to the rational conclusion that god does not exist. There is no belief involved. Chris Hedges clearly doesn't understand this distinction, and is merely engaging in a fallacious "equivalency" argument: new atheists are "as dangerous and christian fundamentalists." There's no way to prove or disprove such a contention. It's all assertion and denigration.
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I'm I the only one left wondering
what a makes an atheist "new"?
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Hedges...
needs to remember people don't have "faith" in science. You can perform a test and check the outcome against the results of similar tests. Other people can read about these results and make up their minds. Secondly, I have never heard Hedges and Harris argue that humanity is steadily "progressing" towards a godless utopia, or a utopia of any sort. They seem to argue that as man gains more knowledge about how the world and the universe function, large scale fill-in-the-blanks style memes, like religion, become harder to sustain and attempts to sustain them lead to the conflicts we have today. To compare "the new atheists" (only two people as far as I can tell) to the entire fundamentalist network and its enormous coercive power is absurd.