"There's no question in my mind that horror at militant Islam and fear of Muslim immigration lie behind at least some of the current vogue for atheism--you don't make the bestseller list by excoriating the evils of Lutheranism or Buddhism."Well at least she qualified the statement to limit it to events in her mind. Katha Pollitt, writing An Atheists Dilemma in The Nation is indulging in a bit of solipsism and she needs it to limit the scope of her sweeping generalities, because in the world outside her mind, it makes no sense.
Atheism or something arbitrarily close to it, seems to be the norm in Western Europe and was so before 9/11 changed nothing. Europe has been wracked by centuries of bloody war over the evils of Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism and other systems of religious certainty. Although American religious apologists, even the moderate ones, seem to look upon Christianity through pastel lenses as something that only a person with a malignant and ulterior motive would criticize, Europeans have too much horrible history to be covered with syrupy faith a la mode Americain. Buddhism of course, isn't about gods although Buddhists and Hindus have been going at it in bloody fashion as well.
"Even if you are a ferocious Sam Harris-style atheist who thinks religion is completely stupid--the province of shysters and fools--you have to admit it would be quite astonishing if that view persuaded the devout anytime soon"I would be astonished if the average IQ suddenly elevated itself by 50 points too, but it would be a hell of a good idea. But at any rate her assertion that fear of Islam is behind this hard to establish fad for Atheism is even harder to establish. I think there's enough information to show that religiosity declines with education and even more so with intelligence and while that sounds provocative and even smug, I can reply that your religion requires as much suspension (or lack) of cognitive function as any other - if not more.
I see no evil in Islam that I have not seen at one time or another in Christianity and God's Jewish warriors differ only by being a smaller group; and while we're on the subject of Brother Martin, he was a bloody handed son of a bitch and probably schizophrenic; a perfect argument for establishing that you don't have to go abroad to find the septic heart of all faiths and a good foundation for disbelief.
Of course the word "ferocious" wasn't chosen without some thought. It implies fanaticism of the religious sort and distracts from the validity of the distaste the non-believer, heretic or infidel has acquired from uncountable centuries of persecution. It's another version of the pathetic " you're wrong because you're angry" argument common to Bush supporters and other idiots.
If books such as Dawkins' The God Delusion or Hitchens' God is not Great make the top of the best seller list, it hardly indicates a mass exodus from America's fugue state. What it indicates is that amongst the minority of Americans that read, some are willing to part with $24.95 to hear someone brave enough to say what they wish they could say in the presence of mine enemies. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with Islam other than as another example of the madness of religion in general.
If you want to believe something, believe that admitting you don't share the visions or see the portents or believe the fiction is a ticket to ostracism. People won't let their children near you and your job performance rating will fail to glow the way it used to. If there is any dilemma this atheist sees, it isn't the one Pollitt has patched together. It's the same one my ancestors have had to face since Emperor Constantine. Lie and get by, tell the truth and die.
Cross posted from The Impolitic
15 comments:
So-called atheists really aren't anti-religion. They just want to replace their religion with everyone else's, whether it be global warming, feminism, "diversity" or whatever.
Mock religion or God, you get a free pass and probably a pat on the back. Question the holocaust or global warming and you're a heretic. Seems we've just replaced one religion with another. Instead of the Pope, we've got Abe Foxman and Al Gore.
That should have read, they just want to replace everyone else's religion with theirs...
Is the difference between an atheist and a "so-called" atheist that the latter is invented to fit an argument and the former simply doesn't believe in the supernatural?
Sounds like a convenient generalization to me. Trust me, you don't get anything free unless it's a brick through the window and I'm still waiting for the pat on the back and hoping it's not with a bat. You ask a lot in denying an atheist the right to any opinions in the absence of an approved belief system. Is humanism less credible without some terror-god breathing fire from the mountain? If I believe in compassion, can it be dismissed as an "alternate religion?" Does the same apply to geology or math or genetics - does advocacy of reason become something I'm selling without license because I think existence is devoid of some secret purpose?
Again, I think you're equivocating - using the definition of religion in two different ways in the same argument. Science is not religion. It's not about belief; it's about doubt, but in fact it's not religion that I deny, it's God and all the fiction and lunacy it takes to support belief in the impossible.
As to the holocaust, you know quite well that denying the death of millions and the existence of the culture that created the machinery isn't properly described as any sort of honest "questioning." It's more like a religion in itself: substituting revealed knowledge for observable fact for political purposes. The people who object to this sleazy subculture the most are the Germans and Austrians who perpetrated it and don't deny having done so.
Stand in a public square in Gaza and claim that the Arabs never conquered the area in 700 CE and there were no Muslims in Palestine before 1948 and then lecture me on holocaust denial and tolerance.
Religion is whatever we define as our ultimate truth.
Science and reason have their purposes but read any "study" done by the "experts" and you will see that science/reason are no less contaminated with and influenced by human passions and prejudices.
The same people who can't predict weather more than a week away run their ridiculous "models" about water levels in NYC 100 years from now and insist that we take that as gospel. How is that not religion?
You know, I agree with your distaste for "religion", but what I've come to realize is that religious stories are no more or less pathological or beautiful than stories that our culture lines up to pay $12 per person to see, whether it's Harry Potter or Star Wars. The only difference is that some people believe religion is literal while accepting Harry Potter and Star Wars as fictional.
What if they were both fictional? What if religion was never meant to be taken literally but, rather, as a collection of stories designed to teach some lessons. Kinda like the little boy who cried wolf. Do we need to believe that boy literally existed to understand the point of the story?
With regard to the Holocaust, questioning the details of an event and denying it are two different things. So let's get the facts straight on the actual event. Because the notion that 6 million people died in ovens doesn't make sense when Germans didn't have enough fuel for their tanks. 6 million doesn't make sense unless Jews have a remarkable proclivity for passively walking to their deaths, which I highly doubt.
Intellectual Insurgent wrote:
"The same people who can't predict weather more than a week away run their ridiculous "models" about water levels in NYC 100 years from now and insist that we take that as gospel. How is that not religion?"
I'm a climate scientist, so I'll pipe up here. There's a big difference between weather forecasting and climate prediction. The analogy I like to use is of a pot of water on a hot burner. If I put a pinch of pepper in the water, I won't be able to predict the trajectories of the pepper flakes more than a second or two in advance, because the flow is turbulent. That's weather prediction. On the other hand, I can predict with great confidence that the temperature of the water in the pot will rise to boiling, and will stay at boiling until the water all evaporates away. That's climate prediction. Obviously it's a harder problem for the atmosphere. But weather prediction beyond 14 days has been shown to be physically impossible, while climate prediction is merely hard. For climate prediction, you only need to know what the turbulent motions are doing on average, not in detail.
Daniel,
Thank you for chiming in. What do you think of global warming? From what I've read, scientists are not in agreement on the details, so how can someone like Al Gore be so certain about what the earth's temperature was like 600,000 years ago?
Thanks Daniel, I've argued that while you can't predict the motions of a particular sub atomic particle, you can't use that argument to ridicule the predictions of Newtonian physics makes about the motion of something the size of a billiard ball. Yet, that's what people do to deny the climatological data. I'm under the impression that there is an overwhelming consensus, but perhaps you can say differently.
The German crematories - and yes I've been there - weren't run on motor fuel. Your doubt may be based on a lack of knowledge as the Germans kept careful records, using machines made by IBM, which are available. The Germans do not deny the number, only people who have no connection to the events and have an ulterior motive or prejudice. The strategy here is like the phony challenge to evolution. It is to make the verifiable seem somehow confusing and then to conclude that some other facts must be true because we don't know the first set even though we actually do. Few people familiar with the fossil record buy into Biblical fairy tales and few people involved in the liberation of Europe buy the "it was only a few hundred thousand" lie. It's a version of the age old "I don't understand A, therefore B" fallacy. The arguments that the numbers were overstated or that there were no gas chambers are simply unsupportable and the only people questioning them are idiots, like Arthur Butz, a former electrical engineering professor of mine who flew over Auschwitz in a 707 and called it research. It's a fact that a good deal is known about ancient climates and we have air samples frozen in the ice sheets going back about 600,000 years.
Of course science makes mistakes, yet it incorporates new data and tests old data against reality - it's the opposite of religion and the comparison is false. No religion does that. All religions oppose that. All religions attempt to cloud fact under mystery and confusion in order to deny facts. All of them and I include the anti global warming arguments, the holocaust is overstated arguments and the anti evolution, new Earth arguments as religion.
Germans do not deny the number because they'll go to jail if they do. How's that for free speech?
With regard to global warming, evolution or any other "facts", I don't see how discussion on countervailing arguments can be shut down in the name of reason. Reason requires each fact to be examined and re-examined but, in the current climate (pun intended), group-think says that global warming is happening, evolution is fact not a theory, 6 million died in ovens and it is blasphemy to even ask if that's possible.
The mere act of questioning -- which is the essence of the exercise of the rational mind -- of the details is blasphemy, which is what renders all of these things indistinguishable from religious dogma.
It's wrong to claim that atheists just want to replace more traditional religions with "their own". It's certainly possible for atheists to have unprovable or dubious beliefs, but believing in Jawheh or Allah doesn't purge those others from your mind.
To cite the examples given, I've heard Christians state their belief in global warming, or that there's a conspiracy to promote the idea of global warming, or in the existence of the Holocaust as generally described, or that it didn't happen or not much that way*.
Atheists at least have one wrong thing in which they don't believe. They also may have a better chance at the habits of mind that will in fact make them question their beliefs where they are most credulous. Some religious people also develop those habits for every type of belief save their religious beliefs (I'd like to have Aquinas debunking on my side, if I couldn't get Spinoza), but more often the habit of accepting authority sticks.
*Timeout for an observation: given that the Nazis were willing to mount serious expeditions to determine if we lived on the interior of a universe made of ice, and didn't bother equipping their troops invading Russia with winter clothing at first, believing that they wasted money on murdering my relatives even as they were running out of resources doesn't seem that out-of-character. Beside, Jews and the like were the Real Enenmy to them: Russians were sub-men not even worth feeding or exterminating, Americans were mostly wayward Germans, and the English were actually to be admired, and fighting them was a shame.
Thank you Dabney.
Instead of making second order peripheral inferences, why don't you argue from facts? Besides, the Germans and Austrians passed these laws and they enforce them, not the Jews. The German and Austrian records and other sources directly corroborate the numbers and arguing about fuel costs and other nonsense is the kind of legerdemain one uses to defend the guilty, not to establish the truth.
Every philosophy conceals a philosophy as the man said, and people who espouse this idea have something further they're trying to argue for. It's not a matter of legitimate historical research to establish that only so many Gypsies, so many handicapped, so many homosexuals and so many Jews were gassed - it's to prove that age old calumny of my age old enemy: that there is a Jewish conspiracy against everything good and Christian - and for the last 50 years, Muslim.
Oh yes, and we don't eat babies either - at least not usually.
Religion is all based on faith and faith can only be asserted not challenged. Thus any scientific argument against a religious belief is useless since nothing will shake the faith of the religious believer in his or her belief. 'Nuff said.
When I argue with believers, it's more to give a bit of solace to those of us who have to hide from the inquisition. That's why people read Dawkins, not because they didn't know everything he says already.
As to Pollitt's assertion that atheists are too angry at extremism to notice moderate religion, This one sees moderate religion as the petrie dish in which extremism lurks, waiting for conditions to be right.
People believe what they feel good believing and it's oh so easy to say "I don't know how 6 million Jews just walked into ovens" without having read any of the inexhaustibly voluminous accounts of how it happened. Unfortunately these same people will be very surprised when it happens to them.
I have to chime in here because so much of what insurgent says is just ignorant crap.
Insurgent,
1. I am an atheist and I am very anti-religion. I don't want to "replace" anyones religion with mine. I don't have one. If people want to continue to live in a world of fantasy and myth and give their money away to already rich churches, so be it. As long as they don't try to force their ignorance on me. When was the last time an atheist knocked on your door, handed you a pamphlet and tried to convert you?
Global warming, feminism, diversity, I like the way you lump these three distinctly different concepts together as "whatever". Reveals your ignorance.
2. Arguements about the seriousness of global warming or the extent of the holocaust are not heretical. Denying them is absurd. You get Your facts straight. No one ever said that 6 million Jews died in ovens. Untold numbers were starved and worked to death, died of disease and injury due to lack of medication, were gassed, died from "medical" experimentation and a variety of other methods of murder. Read your history. As far as climate, Daniel said it all.
3. Whatever we personally define as truth is our belief, not our religion. Your dependence on that word weaken your arguements.
4. Certainly science has a subjective element. It is conducted by people. But to compare it to religious "faith" is silly. One is an attempt, sometimes flawed, to discover what is real about the world even if this discovery does not jive with preconceived notions. The other is dependence on ancient myths originated by men who thought the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it. Science gave us penicillin and x-rays. Religion gave us witch hunts and exorcisms.
5. Your comparison with a Harry Potter movie is ridiculous. I don't see movie goers slaughtering others because they had a different opinion about the movie. Religion is responsible for millions of deaths and unbelievable suffering throughout history. Harry is not.
6. Religion never meant to be taken literally? Jesus, are you for real? Tell me one church, one pope, one priest, one minister whoever said that religion was just "stories" but not to be taken literally.
7. No one says questioning is blasphemy but you. But questioning should include some degree of actual research which you have obviously not done. I suspect that your educational background in history and the sciences is sadly lacking.
8. What the hell does German free speech have to do with your discussion on religion? You are fishing to save an arguement that you have already lost to others with vastly more knowledge of the issues.
I suggest you shut up and try to learn something here instead of blabberingn on like a teenager.
Shieh, shieh ni
The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam ("appeal to ignorance") or argument by lack of imagination, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false or that a premise is false only because it has not been proven true.
The argument from personal incredulity, also known as argument from personal belief or argument from personal conviction, refers to an assertion that because one personally finds a premise unlikely or unbelievable, the premise can be assumed not to be true, or alternately that another preferred but unproven premise is true instead.
Both arguments commonly share this structure: a person regards the lack of evidence for one view as constituting evidence or proof that another view is true. The types of fallacies discussed in this article should not be confused with the reductio ad absurdum method of argument, in which a valid logical contradiction of the form "A and not A" is used to disprove a premise.
above from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
say, intellectual insurgent, why are u so named? is it that u carry on an insurgency against intellect?
xpbrian, i dispute only some of #4: scientists can get subjective, but science does not. also, science gave us some pretty awful weapons. that's no argument against science, tho. the trouble lies in individuals' denial o conscience, which is the real definition o cowardice.
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