05.25.11

Dawkins’ The God delusion and…Blazing Saddles

Posted in atheism at 11:10 am by nemo

H. Allen Orr on the The God Delusion

MacDonald continues his discussion of all the bad reviews of The God Delusion. I am puzzled that he would bother since the issue amounts to nothing on either side: the god delusion is matched by the godless delusion, and the noise factor continues without end.
The real issue to me is the secondary level of issues, related to atheism, the Nietzsche syndrome. The overall belief system of the new atheists is puerile scientism, and a concotion of ignoramuses.
A good example of a secondary is Darwinism, and the whole concoction of false beliefs claiming to resolve the god question.
I think Dawkins got what he deserved, a host of critics, and the discussion won’t ever end. Like Blazing Saddles, one fart leads to another.

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05.17.11

Sam Harris on accomodationism

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 10:23 am by nemo

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/626387-sam-harris-on-accommodationism

This debate is almost completely useless. The real issue is that the ‘new atheism’ is the wrong vehicle to challenge religion. Many science types, like Mooney, sense this and bring in the issue of accomodationism.
But the fact remains that the new atheism will backfire and, if anything, restrengthen Xtian belief.

The first thing to observe is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.

Harris trumpets the ideology of reason but appears confused himself about the evolution question. Or, perhaps, he is being cagey and omits reference to natural selection on purpose.
The point here is that the evidence for evolution is very strong, but the questioin of natural selection hides behind this but is far less established. So is Harris trying to pull a fast one: does he mean purely the fact of evolution? Or is he sneaking in natural selection, and then accusing its critics of rejecting evolution?

The ideology of reason promoted by Harris et al is completely sterile. Few problems are solved by true believers in Reason. I think nonetheless the heritage of Enlightenment reason is one we should study intensively, keeping in mind that practical creative problems very often come from a more complex combination of factors, including the ‘rational’ faculty.
But the question of Reason could never be monopolized by the cult of scientism, or the new atheists, whose irrationalities are a novelty in the history of atheism.

The use of the term ‘reason’ by modernists (what to say of philosophers of antiquity, like Plato) needs caution its usage, that of the philosopher Hegel with his dialectic being one of its variants, apt here given the narrow usage of science types with the phrase.

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05.13.11

Greta Christina’s crypto-fanaticism

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 12:12 pm by nemo

Are All Religions Equally Crazy?

Are less established religions really crazier than older mainstream ones? Or are mainstream religions just more familiar

Greta Christina is derailing with this trend toward extreme statements, new atheists please note (although, no dobut, they would be in the cheering gallery, mostly). She started out with some popular posts at Alternet, but now she seems to be driven to dangerous statements about religion in general, statements that show the latent contradictions of the New Atheism, which tends to attach theism, but then, for some unknown reason and with totally misplaced ‘consistency’, proceeds to attack a ‘generalization’ called religion. Why not just tilt at windmills.

Here’s an example of the confusion possible here: ancient Athens spawned the first democracy in the context of a polytheistic art-culture of majestic sublety and breadth (even as the birth of science was taking place in the Greek Enlighentenment). This flowering of the Greek Enlightnement was a multidimensional phenomenon of almost unfathomable depth.
So should we oppose thie phenomenon on the grounds of its hybrid religious elements and strains? Can you, like Solomon, to divide the baby, where art and religion blend, politics and religion blend?
There are hundreds of examples like this.
The New Atheists need to define what they are doing more carefully, because what they have now is crazy, and will turn into fanaticism.
You may say this is a special case, but Christina’s generalization attempts to reject all religion. Her universal statement is deliberate, and most ill-considered.

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04.23.11

Critics without substance

Posted in atheism at 12:11 pm by nemo

The Emperor’s New Nakedness
By David Barash

Barash (one of the worst Darwin dummy fanatics and promoters of junk theory) is wrong to think the critics of New Atheism are without substance. It is the other way around: the ‘new atheism’ is criticized because it lacks any substance at all, and muddles the question of monotheism in particular, and religion in general. The book by Dennett was especially gruesome, breaking the spell would be better applied to the ‘new atheism’ itself.

Let’s be clear here: many atheists, ostracized by monotheists, are now ostraized by new atheists, who have a fetishistic list of companion beliefs, which should be irrelavant. In fact, the New Atheists strongly resemble the religious groups they attack, and have erected a brittle belief system that is taken on faith.

Let us hope we can be spared the establishment of this cult as a new form of public dogma.

One thing I do know, however, is that the alleged criticism of the New Atheists that I have seen has been remarkably devoid of substance, thereby comparing unfavorably to The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, God is Not Great, and The End of Faith, each of which spelled out numerous, specific, and detailed criticisms of the currently regnant theological poppycock. The New Atheists, it seems to me, have outraged the religious establishment by following the lead of the child who sees the Emperor parading along in his alleged new clothes. They have had the effrontery to announce that He is naked, whereupon the critics complain that the boy doesn’t appreciate His detailed theological embroidery, hasn’t adequately studied the intricacy of invisible clothmaking, or invested the requisite years of hard-headed analysis required to understand why apparent nakedness is actually a special kind of ultra-sophisticated vestment.

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04.17.11

Two posts on the New Atheism

Posted in atheism at 12:27 pm by nemo

Two part series on the New Atheism.

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-i-see-new-atheism-part-1-of-2.html

I have commented at length on the New Atheists, and was one of the first to critique it, if you care to explore the archives.
To me, the question is simple: we have enough religious idiots already, another cult, that of the New Atheists is simply more confusion. The New Atheism is too reminiscent of Bertrand Russell, who was fascinating as an individual. But a whole cult of such is deadly dull, and dangerous to sanity.
Never underestimate Xtianity, nor judge it by the beliefs of its average adherents. Note that Axial Age proto-Judaism was already in decline and points to a stance as to ur-divinity in the refusal to use ‘god names’, retreating into tokens of silence like IHVH. Willynilly the nameless became a name in that token. And so it goes. But instead of ‘atheism’ a secularist might simply point to the reality that ‘god talk’ was not licensed in proto-monotheism via Israel. So we should not be surprised if the New Atheists, in perfect sophmoric revulsion, simply puck in pubic on the gibberish of two millennia.

I was never an explicit atheist, but always revolved around the category. The New Atheism energized a kind of evacuation from that position. I was always wary of the defining dogmatisms of atheism, theism, and agnosticism, although the latter is the only real option here, a very loose agnoticism, that can explore neo-theism and atheism in parallel, as a kind of dialectic.
The issue is completely pointless if the defining category of ‘god’ is not specified. We can move too easily between the theism of Xtians and the theism of the atheist (?) Spinoza, what to say of the atheism of Buddhists and Jains. What does it mean to be an atheist? The stance is as incoherent as the theistic.

I think that the emergence of New Atheism is too fixated on scientism, darwinism, reductionist neuroscience, and flaccid ‘humanism’. And the behind the scenes game of Nietzsche who confused absolutely everyone.
I think that the New Atheism is a demonic fiasco in the making, and that’s no fantasy. The demonic outcome of Nietzscheanism in Nazism (not to blame fascism on Nietzche!) is a warning. The atheist world of secularists never knew what hit them, and still doesn’t. The situation is complex, and can result in the same confusions that arise from blaming Darwin for Hitler. But the connections are there for Nietzsche and Darwin both.
To say that ‘god does not exist’ does not imply that demonic spirits do not exist. Beware. And, pace, Gurdjieff and or Mephistopheles, they may not be spirits! The New Atheist is a beautiful sucker to play with for the democially inclined.
Nietzsche, to me, made atheism unsafe at any speed, and his attempt to foment the destruction of democratic modernism in the context of atheist nihilism and eugenic fantasies of the ubermensch are grotesque, and force the implicit atheist (who can’t deal with Xtian or other ‘god’ nonsense) to find a new position.
Defending the New Atheism ad infinitum is what we are stuck with here. But a new approach is needed, perhaps a neutral study of the history of religion in a secular context, along with a reading of the classic literatures on religion in the Jain/Buddhist tradition, with their take on atheism.
It is also worth noting that there are many concealed atheists who have ‘moved on’, e.g. Kant’s near atheism followed by his de facto neo-theistic ethicism, or Hegel’s hidden atheism, with his dialectic of theism and atheism, etc…
The New Atheism is a dangerous oversimplification that will slowly but surely turn into an intolerant cult (already there in fact) with a completely ostrich attitude towards the complexity of man, and the history of religion. And the Nietzsche demonic will resurface sooner or later. It is significant that the New Atheists are totally ignorant of occult issues. Complete sitting ducks. When the time comes, duck.

The failure of Xtianity was almost complete, until the New Atheists came along. Now the New Atheists leave so many so exasperated that Xtianity looks good all over again. That should make everyone suspicious. What is going on here? The best thing that happened to Xtianity in decline was the New Atheism, to say nothing of Darwinism and scientism.

How I see the “New Atheism” – Part 1 of 2
Perhaps the first thing I need to say on this topic is that there’s really no such thing as the New Atheism – at least in a sense. The authors who have come to be known as “New Atheists” are not necessarily saying anything terribly new. To the extent that there is something new in their books, articles, speeches, media appearances, and so on, it builds in an incremental way on what came before. What’s really new is that people who criticise religion in a forthright way now have a very large audience interested in their thoughts. Prior to the last few years that was far less the case.

In Western countries, there’s a long tradition of intellectual critique of religious teachings going far back into antiquity with the writings of Epicurus in ancient Greece and Lucretius in ancient Rome. The intellectual classes of Europe and the West increasingly turned away from Christianity in recent centuries, or at least from the orthodox traditions of the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestantism. Obviously, much happened in between.

Throughout our lifetimes, there has always been a strong body of thought according to which holy books such as the Bible are not divinely inspired but are merely human constructions, traditional religious concepts of God are highly implausible, and key Christian doctrines such as those of the Trinity, sin against God, eternal punishment, and Christ’s sacrificial atonement seem unlikely or even incoherent.

Consider the 1980s and 1990s, however – the rather recent past. During those decades, you could have found plenty of material that criticises traditional religion, denying its truth claims and seriously contesting its moral authority. The sorts of secular thinkers I have in mind were likely not only to think that the claims about the world made by Christianity and other religions are false, they were also likely to deny that the Christian churches and their leaders held the high moral ground in social debates or that there was any reason to consider Christian priests, presbyters, pastors, or even the pope – perhaps especially the pope – to be moral experts.

However, during the 1980s these criticisms were seldom expressed in highly visible, highly public ways. You were most likely to see them in academic books and journals, in material published by what we can think of broadly as the rationalist movement, or, related to this, in monographs from relatively small publishers such as Prometheus Books.

The material was there for those that wanted it, but it was tucked away in the corners of the culture. That is what changed, and you can pinpoint the exact year when it changed: 2004.

Let’s start by looking at what actually constitutes the phenomenon of “the New Atheism”. It’s mainly that the sort of material that had existed for a very long time is suddenly popular. Large publishers are now prepared to accept books that criticise religion; powerful literary agents are willing to represent such books; in some cases, very high-profile writers are writing them; and the public is buying them in rather large numbers. Some of the most prominent books have sold millions of copies.

Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry magazine, has suggested that the first cab off the rank – the first of these recent books by a forthright, unashamed atheist to issue from a major publisher – was actually Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004 by an imprint of the giant publisher Macmillan. But the really dramatic breakthrough was later that same year, 2004, with The End of Faith by Sam Harris, published by W.W. Norton. This was a far more fiercely anti-religious book, aimed especially at Islam, and emphasising that religious ideas actually matter because religious adherents are motivated one way or the other to act in accordance with the teachings that they accept. Harris followed up a couple of years later with another book, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is very short and provides an easy introduction to how he and many others like him think about religion (particularly Christianity), and its role in modern society (particularly the United States of America).

In early 2006, the large trade imprint Viking published Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, which calls for religion to be studied as a natural phenomenon. Dennett goes out of his way to be conciliatory to Christian believers, and his tone is far from vitriolic, but he has often been dismissed in vitriolic fashion, which tends to create the feeling on my side of the current debates that, no matter how considerately and courteously you may express yourself, you are likely, if you’re a critic of religion, to be demonised. That’s a bit of a problem, and I’ll return to it tomorrow.

Then, later in 2006, Richard Dawkins published the best known of the so-called New Atheist books, The God Delusion, which was supported by large publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2007, high-profile journalist Christopher Hitchens added a much more aggressive book than Dawkins’ (The God Delusion has a provocative title and forthright passages, but is generally more moderate in tone than you might think). Hitchens’ book is called, provocatively, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It was published by a new imprint, Twelve, which has considerable marketing power, and it became a best-seller.

In November 2006, prior to the publication of Hitchens’ book, a journalist called Gary Wolf published a piece in Wired magazine under the title “The Church of the Non-Believers”. In this piece he dubbed Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins “the New Atheists” and hyped up their hostility to religion, as opposed to mere disagreement with religious doctrines. Since Hitchens joined the group, the colourful epithet, “the Four Horsemen” has also been applied to Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens.

You can add in Michel Onfray, A.C. Grayling, Victor Stenger … and I should mention my own anthology, co-edited with Udo Schuklenk, 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, which offers quite a spectrum of thinking from outspoken non-believers. It should be pointed out, however, that whatever books you count as “New Atheist” books … there are already far more books written to try to answer them (often sporting titles like The Dawkins Delusion, The God Solution, Beyond the God Delusion, Letter from a Christian Citizen and so on). Apart from these opportunistic or reactive works, there are many other books published every year advocating one or another form of traditional religious belief. These far outnumber books by the New Atheist writers and some of them outsell even Richard Dawkins.

So the publishing phenomenon of the New Atheism needs to be kept in perspective.

Still, something has changed. Large publishers are interested in the New Atheist books and some of these books are, as I said, selling in very large numbers. There’s a hunger in the population for these kinds of books and there’s also a vibe of people organising under the banner of atheism. These people are not extremists – they are not going to blow things up, take hostages, or conduct violent revolutions – but there’s a sense of many people being, frankly, fed up with religion.

Tomorrow, I want to begin by asking why that might that be so.

========================

How I see the “New Atheism” – Part 2 of 2
I was saying yesterday that something has changed. There’s a sense of many people being fed up with religion, and large publishers are interested in books that relate to the public mood. But why the widespread hostility to religion at this particular point of history?

Part of it, of course, is a reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, and it’s notable that The End of Faith, the first of the very popular New Atheist books was largely focused on Islam. But surely that’s not the whole story. Every day there are terrible actions carried out in the name of one religion or another, and many people now see religion as having a dark side.

Unfortunately, there’s plenty of evidence that even traditional forms of Christianity, which pride themselves on their love and compassion, have this kind of dark side. Much of the behaviour of religious leaders and organisations in Western countries fuels the perception that they’d rather use force than try to persuade people. In many cases, we see Christians, doubtless well-intentioned, wanting to get governments to impose their ideas on others who may not be Christians. You may say that it’s your democratic right to do this, and I’d agree with you up to a point. Only “up to a point”, because I think that might show a simplistic view of how democracy is supposed to work. In my forthcoming book on freedom of religion I’ll have a lot to say about this.

Meanwhile, even if it’s somebody’s democratic right to ask governments to endorse, promote, or impose, Christian viewpoints, there will inevitably, and quite rightly, be a response from people like me who strongly disagree with those viewpoints. We’re going to ask whether those viewpoints are soundly based, whether they really have the divine authority that is claimed for them, and so on.

If any of us involved in public debates claim to have some kind of special moral authority that comes from God or a holy text or a body of theological teaching … then there will, quite rightly, be others asking whether we really possess that sort of authority, whether God really says what we claim (or even exists), whether our holy texts are really divinely inspired, whether our theological doctrines are credible, and so on.

On the face of it, after all, the sorts of claims that are made by Christian and other religious leaders sound extraordinary and even arrogant. No one should assume, anymore, that people will simply accept that these religious leaders have a special insight into reality or that they hold the high moral ground in public debate. Many of us disagree, and of course we also have rights, notably the right to express our disagreement strongly and publicly.

That is what the New Atheists are doing, and even if you disagree with their views (in part or in total), what they are doing is legitimate.

We’ve seen many attempts to demonise forthright atheists as unreasonable or extreme or dogmatic, or as “fundamentalist” in their own way. If you look at it like that, you’re engaging in wishful thinking. The reality is that many people who are thoughtful, moderate, rather tolerant, not at all extreme in their thinking, are now suspicious of religion – not only of its claims to offer transcendent truths, but also about whether it’s even socially beneficial. That’s the message we should all take from the New Atheist phenomenon. The New Atheist books are successful for the simple reason that people want to buy them. And that’s because there’s a perfectly reasonable suspicion of religion’s dark side out there in the community.

I made some of these points when I spoke last September at the Crossway Conference – a conference of evangelical Baptists here in Australia – and they seemed to gain a lot of acceptance. The irony is that some religious people seem more willing to accept the legitimacy of strong criticism of religion than some atheists. I am amazed by the continuing attempts by many atheists and secularists to demonise the New Atheist writers and their intellectual allies.

There’s been a great deal of discussion of this phenomenon on other blogs just lately. In a sense, my thunder has been stolen. But I do find it extraordinary that we have so many atheist thinkers expressing what seems to go beyond disagreement with certain New Atheists on certain points (the kind of disagreement that you get from me all the time if I disagree with some specific thing that Sam Harris said or that Richard Dawkins said), and conduct themselves in a way that seems resentful and spiteful.

Surely those of us who wish to engage critically with religion are all better off as a result of the New Atheist publishing phenomenon. It has opened up opportunities for us, and all of the publishers that we might approach are now working in an environment where criticism of religion sells. That benefits academic presses and smaller trade presses that are publishing critiques of religion. The rising tide really is floating a lot of boats here.

I’d don’t know, but I suspect that Prometheus Books now sells more copies of its publications than ever as a result of the synergies that Dawkins and company have created. If they don’t, they must be doing something wrong, because this is now a very favourable market for them. And Christopher Hitchens even helped out with an intro to one of Victor Stenger’s books published by Prometheus. This is not a zero-sum game (and I certainly don’t see Stenger complaining).

Again, I can understand people wanting to disagree with specific New Atheist thinkers about specific points – such as my disagreement with Sam Harris about certain issues in moral theory. What I don’t understand is all the resentment. Apart from the unattractive emotions of envy, jealousy, and spite, the only explanation is that some of these folk who had established philosophical and historical theories are disappointed that what they see as incorrect theories are gaining greater popularity with the public.

Well, fine. But there is now a greater opportunity than ever to disseminate the “correct” historical and philosophical analyses, whatever they are. That can be done in a positive way – through actual books and articles – rather than through the unedifying spectacle of a long-running campaign of sledging on the Internet.

I haven’t descended to naming names here – the specific names are pretty obvious, but not all that relevant to the point I want to make. He (and it usually is a “he”) that hath an ear, let him hear.

Commentary

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/blackford-what-is-new-atheism/

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12.24.10

Agnostic and doing just fine

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 1:36 pm by nemo

When the 2001 census-takers descended upon London, Ont., they found 83,680 people who described their religious beliefs as agnostic, atheist, humanist, non-existent or some “other response” such as “Darwinism.” (The census didn’t specify the number of smart-asses.) Assuming the numbers hold nearly a decade later, that makes roughly one in five Londoners pretty much godless. They outnumber Muslims by a factor of seven, Jews by a factor of 45. They’re everywhere, these people.

And they’re miserable. Or so Ian Hunter, professor emeritus at London’s University of Western Ontario, seems to think. “By and large,” he wrote in Tuesday’s National Post, “the appeal of agnosticism … is that it gives the illusion of a safe harbour in a roiling sea when, in fact, it … leaves the voyager without a compass (for Christians, the Bible); without a guide (for Christians, Jesus Christ); without a destination (for Christians, heaven); and without a hope (for Christians, resurrection).”

Blimey. If that’s the agnostics, imagine the despair of the atheists!

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Agnostic+doing+just+fine/4022161/story.html#ixzz193VimDvF

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12.20.10

Atheism in the workplace

Posted in atheism at 12:20 pm by nemo

Atheism in the workplace By GRAXAN
Added: Monday, 20 December 2010 at 8:22 AM

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/565978-atheism-in-the-workplace

I bought Richard’s book The God Delusion over a year ago. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and perhaps arm myself with some excellent arguments for secularism. The problem is, I find I have little reading time due to having young children to care for and entertain. So I figured that I would take my shiny new book into work and perhaps read it in my lunch breaks.

I work for the National Health Service in IT (I am seriously thinking of a long term career change into the sciences via a part time degree, but this is a digression) and the office I work in is home to three other colleagues – an Iraqi Muslim, a Welsh Catholic and my boss who, so far as I can discern, is an agnostic – the politically correct ‘faith’.

As I walked into the office that day with book in hand, my boss noticed the title and immediately told me to hide it from sight. The fear of upsetting the religous members of staff present became his first concern with no regard given to the right I may have to read what I choose. I must say I found this quite upsetting and debated a little with him on the merits of this decision. Needless to say, the possibility of a work grievance aimed at myself or more likely the department as a result of the implied insult of the book’s title to those of religious persuasion, made the decision very easy for him. I do not read serious books at work any more.

My question is, have other people encountered this kind of censorship in the workplace generally, or is this reaction more to do with the political nature of the UK public sector in which I find myself?

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12.10.10

Atheism in the Muslim world

Posted in atheism at 2:29 pm by nemo

Atheism in the Muslim world By ATEIZMORG
Added: Thursday, 09 December 2010 at 3:28 PM

This is usually hard to find. In most of the Muslim countries, people that are openly atheists are unheard of.

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/560993-atheism-in-the-muslim-world

In fact, in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, although I do not know their laws, it is quite possible that atheists are being punished by death sentences, since these countries follow the Sharia law, and there are verses in Koran that are clear in their meaning to call for killing of infidels.

One Muslim country that you can find openly atheist people in, although rare, is Turkey.

Turkey has a long and proud secular tradition, and being an atheist is not a crime there. Although, from the viewpoint of a lot of Turks, it is almost as bad as a crime.

I am the administrator of one of the two major atheist web sites for Turkish speaking internet community. We recently created a forum category on our discussion board for discussions in English.

Ateistforum (forum.ateizm2.org) is the discussion platform associated with our site (ateizm.org). If you go to this page (forum.ateizm2.org), you will see the category named ATEISTFORUM – ENGLISH on the page for discussions in English.

Turkish atheism has been growing on the internet. When we first started this web site and the discussion forums attached to it, we didn’t think there would be this much interest. Now we have been in operation for almost 10 years and we are still one of the most popular destinations for Turkish people who want to discuss and debate Islam, existence of God (Allah in this case) or other philosophical or political issues related to religion.

Our forum is almost as busy and as active as richarddawkins.net.

We had our share of legal and other problems because of running this web site. Digital attacks from hackers, legal censorships from Turkish courts to ban access to our site from within Turkey (due to made up reasons such as personal insult to the leader of the largest creationist organization in Turkey). Some of our moderators who reside in Turkey are facing some other lawsuits as well.

If there are people who are interested in hearing all this, I can answer questions regarding atheism in Turkey in this discussion topic, or at our message board.

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12.05.10

Schopenhauer and the decadence of Nietzsche

Posted in atheism at 12:12 pm by nemo

http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap6_6_4.htm

The New Atheists have misunderstood their own ‘ism’, and might study one of the classic and first atheists of modernity, Schopenhauer, who did not allow his views to be distorted by scientism. And the ‘decadence’ of Nietzche in his wake is a warning that atheism is already in decline.

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11.27.10

Life after atheism

Posted in atheism at 2:07 pm by nemo

After five thousand years of religions on earth, we have the following tidbit from a New Atheist.

Life after atheism By DIPEN SHAH
Added: Saturday, 27 November 2010 at 11:12 AM

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/554271-life-after-atheism

Dear all
Prior to my conversion to the cause I was a man with a belief in the afterlife. I was covered in a soft and cosy blanket that basically said “If you screw up in this life … don’t worry, there are plenty more to come … just make the amendments then and everything will be ok!”

Recently I have discovered the fallacy of my old beliefs … complete and total rubbish. An afterlife? Yeah right!

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11.26.10

New atheism and the god obsession

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 5:36 pm by nemo

http://darwiniana.com/2010/11/26/kurtz-vs-the-new-atheists-2/,

and http://www.superscholar.org/the-future-of-secular-humanism/

I find the opposition to Kurtz to be a telling indicator of the New Atheist confusion. Paul Kurtz?! Are you guys kididng. If the New Atheists have a problem with Kurtz they are incompetent to a degree even I hadn’t suspected. It shows the way cults differentiate into doctrinal quibbling and sect subdivison.
Secular humanism is not an atheist religion (nor a theistic).
People need help with their religious confusions, and the New Athesits are totally unhelpful.
Secularism was always about a complex view of religion, witness thinkers like Hegel and Kant. This watered down canon of atheist allegiance is the best thing that happened to religion in decline. Religionists can actually point to people dumber than they are.

Arguing about the existence of god is a waste of time, that secularists could devote to more constructive pursuits.
I have often criticized the New Atheist movement, not least because many outstanding atheists (like Kurtz) are the object of doctrinal fanaticism and, amazing, are forced to find a new label for themselves, and in general because a resolution of the metaphysics of religion has backfired and produced a metaphysics of atheism.
Face it, Richard Dawkins is a box set mind and a menace to groupies hungry for simplifying consolations, and the epitome of bad leadership, leading his converted fans into a cultic true believer mode when the whole point of atheism was a fear of doctrinaire positions and beliefs, and a wariness about ‘god fixations’, theist, but also atheist. Let’s face it, atheism leads to delusive beliefs about the universe designed to make it true, e.g. natural selection pressed into service to ‘guarantee’ some kind of atheist perspective. It need not be so. The classic traditions of implicit atheism in Indian religion (which never flaunted their atheism) never let atheist beliefs dictate the laws of the universe, a syndrome sadly evident in Nietzsche who is too often the invisible influence behind the New Atheists.
Current culture in America needs to devote itself to something more productive than cramming atheism down everyone’s throats. The political situation is being perverted by the dumbing down of secularism around a kind of Mencken snottiness and Bryan-bashing.
A much more robust stance would be to realize that you can’t ever resolve the god question, and to stay within a toleran agnoticism that can also study the details of world religion, which is something far vaster than the theism question.

The problem is really the obsession with ‘god’ created by monotheists after the Axial Age. Then the issue is not ‘god’, but obsession. Look at Buddhists, they waster zero time on the god issue, for or against.

Look at current politics. It is being distracted by the New Atheists. We need to focus on cultural, economic and political issues in a generalized liberalism, and socialism, without this wild goose chase (visible to be sure in the first Marxists) of atheism. The secular is not a theistic or atheistic perspective. To bend liberal secularism out of shape on the atheism question (or theism question) is a disaster for practical efforts.

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11.25.10

Two-front attack on ‘new atheists’

Posted in atheism at 12:22 pm by nemo

Two-front attack on ‘new atheists’25 November 2010
By Matthew Reisz

Archbishop and Marxist challenge Dawkins et al’s ‘off-the-peg enlightenment’. Matthew Reisz writes

The “new atheism” promoted by academics and writers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens came under fire at a debate in Cambridge.

Terry Eagleton, distinguished professor of English literature at Lancaster University, opened the discussion, titled Responses to the New Atheism. He said that the last time he had spoken at the University of Cambridge’s Great St Mary’s Church was in 1968, during a debate on student radicalism – something, he noted, that we are likely to see a good deal more of.

“Why is God back centre stage again?” he asked. “Just when grand narratives seemed to be over, He’s back in the spotlight.”

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11.21.10

Archbishop of Canterbury and Terry Eagleton

Posted in atheism at 1:59 pm by nemo

Rowan and Eagleton on atheism
The Archbishop of Canterbury and Terry Eagleton mount a joint attack on the New Atheists

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New Atheists perpetually on the defensive

Posted in atheism at 1:49 pm by nemo

Atheistic affirmation of life, art, music, and beauty By SCHRODINGER’S CAT
Added: Saturday, 20 November 2010 at 1:41 PM

I thought I’d try a little experiment, as it doesn’t seem to matter how many times non-believers say they appreciate art, beauty, and the world as much as anyone else…..still we get lumbered with this dour and ‘nihilistic’ image, as if we spend every day huddled in a corner fearing death, rather than appreciating life.

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/550559-atheistic-affirmation-of-life-art-music-and-beauty

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11.15.10

Madison Avenue atheism

Posted in atheism at 4:11 pm by nemo

Atheist Group Prepares for Holidays With Ad Campaign Tackling “Biblical Morality”
High powered advertising to spread the New Atheism seems, to me, another manifestation of religion and capitalist manipulation of opinion. It is no science, that is clear. Nor philosophy.
Not to overdramatize this: but the opportunity for a robust cultural secularism can’t be achieved by the standard ‘humanist’ cult game.
The atheism proposed is so brittle that it can only alienate real atheists who have a far broader view of things, stretching acrosss history. Just as Christianity is a watered down form of religion, the New Atheism is a watered down version of atheism, which goes back millennia, like the Jain religion itself, one of the first religious atheisms in existence.

In previous years, their campaigns have been upbeat and simple, reminding viewers that being a good person doesn’t require belief in God.

This year, responding to a wave of religious fundamentalism, the American Humanist Association is getting a little more feisty with their major holiday ad campaign. According to the Atlantic, “The AHA campaign, in particular, highlights some of the more violent and sexist passages of the Bible and Quran and contrasts them with quotes from Albert Einstein, Katherine Hepburn and others.”

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Booknotes: America’s Four Gods

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 2:03 pm by nemo

America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God—and What That Says about Us
by Paul Froese
Oxford University Press, October 2010
280 pp., $22.99
More than a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche, the depressive and depressing German philosopher, pronounced the death of God, but most Americans have yet to hear the message. The four horsemen of the New Atheist apocalypse—Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel C. Dennett—have done their best to carry on the movement that Nietzsche heralded, but their achievement has been largely monetary. Some 90 percent of Americans are still content to believe in God.
Read the rest of this entry »

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11.13.10

New atheists, and the metaphysics of scientism

Posted in atheism, Evolution, Science & Religion at 12:10 pm by nemo

The Metaphysics Of Evolution
One of the reasons the New Atheist movement starts to backfire is its reverse metaphysics, and the way its scientism becomes an almost religious mystification.

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11.12.10

Nietzche’s brittle extreme

Posted in atheism at 2:29 pm by nemo

Theism/Atheism: The God Debates

Scroll down for some Nietzche notes.
I am often puzzled by Nietzsche: was he serious? His atheism is so extreme that it becomes brittle and breaks, leaving the Christian with a good laugh.
Many critics of Christianity have been disarmed by Nietzsche’s extreme brand. That leaves on almost suspicious of his tactics.

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11.11.10

Evangelical Atheists

Posted in atheism at 2:45 pm by nemo

‘Evangelical Atheists:’ Pushing For What?

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New Atheist nonsense

Posted in atheism, Evolution at 2:43 pm by nemo

Stenger interview: Questions for a New Atheist, Part 1

Stenger’s reply below is complete nonsense. Hitching atheism to Darwinism is the reason, and the source of the failure of this new brand of atheism.

Real atheists need to be wary of this new cult: it will discredit atheism altogether.

2. People the world over continue to believe that the universe was brought into being by an agent and that this agent often communicates with us. Is this human stupidity or plain human fear and insecurity?

This is probably the result of evolution. Animals will react to unusual movements by assuming it is a threat from a predator and take evasive action even when one is not there. Those without that capability would not survive because occasionally the threat is real. Similarly, early humans would have needed that oversensitivity in order to survive. For example, a caveman walking along a path in the woods might hear a rustling of leaves. If his genes predisposed him to ignore such signs, and a tiger was behind the bush, those genes would quickly die out. But if his genes developed the mechanisms needed to react defensively, even when it is only the wind rustling the leaves, those genes would survive. This healthy overreaction would have lead humans to assume animal-like or human-like agency for many phenomena that were purely benign and natural. Since any distinction between supernatural and natural was beyond early human intellectual capabilities, assigning agency to gods would have also occurred, leading to religion.

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10.29.10

Straw Men of New Atheism

Posted in atheism at 12:47 pm by nemo

Exposing the Straw Men of New Atheism: Part Five

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10.28.10

Rajneesh and New Atheism

Posted in atheism at 12:53 pm by nemo

http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2010/10/27/rajneesh-book-on-christianity/

The strange resemblance of the New Atheism, in a distorted brand, to the critique of religion by the religionist Rajneesh in the eighties is striking.
I think the New Atheist cult ought to understand this broader perspective compared to their own version that won’t work in the end.

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10.21.10

Atheism on faith?

Posted in atheism at 1:01 pm by nemo

Is Atheism a Belief?

One of the most common accusations aimed at atheists is that atheism is an article of faith, a belief just like religion.

This is a futile line of argument, from Greta Christina. This attempt to make atheism into some kind of adjunct to scientism is a waste of everyone’s time.

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10.17.10

Time to get pushy with New Atheists?

Posted in atheism at 12:05 pm by nemo

Atheists Debate How Pushy to Be
The confusion started by the Pew research poll is now in evidence in the muddled New Atheist camp.

I think it is time get pushy back, and demand from New Atheists some ground for simple agnosticism. The question of ‘god’ is beyond resolution: the attempt to pretend otherwise is a puzzling development. Why this strangely warped cult of disbelief?

The attempt to create a new cultic dogma out of atheism can only succeed in counterproductive outcomes.

The Pew poll was totally misleading, if not rigged from the start: the New Atheists are especially obtuse on the question of religion, even if they can spout better factual answers to a meaningless poll quiz. Their ignorance of the breadth and depth of religion is almost beyond belief. The all time prize goes to Hitchens for denying the existence of Buddhist enlightenment.

I think that agnosticism can’t be demanded from New Atheists, as the only way to in public, whatever they wish to state as their personal beliefs, taken on faith.
Kant exposed the bogus proofs of the existence of god. Time to see the same in the New Atheist cult of true believers who think, like Dawkins, that atheism can be foundationalized by scientism/darwinism.

Don’t let these closet Nietzscheans oozing the nice guy routine wreck the balance of real secularism.

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09.29.10

Atheists on religion test

Posted in atheism at 12:14 pm by nemo

Atheists outperform “protheists” on religion test

This test is misleading and merely shows that atheists tend to be better informed and smarter at facts. But they are not smarter on religion as such, as the New Atheist movement shows.

Keep in mind that religion includes immense numbers of people who are handicapped compared to well off and well educated atheists.

The sad reality is that scientism/Darwinism has made scientists and atheists totally brain dead on issues of religion.

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09.28.10

Atheism modern? The proto-Jains were atheists five thousand years ago

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 11:46 am by nemo

Why Atheism Will Replace Religion

Atheism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism? Does this mean that religion is on the way out?

This thinking is shallow and fallacious. The Protestant Reformation was the first quintessentially modern movement. That it stopped developing in the era of the Enlightenment notwithstanding.
Atheism was a sideshow in the Enlightenment beginning to modernity. Atheism is forever turning into a cult for cranks, as with the New Atheists.
Further it has been mixed with a metaphysics of scientism and Darwinism that has corrupted it, and will discredit it.
Atheism is far more ancient than Axial monotheism and was the original matrix of much primordial religion. But it was not atheism as now peddled by the likes of Dawkins, who has made it hard for many atheists to use that term.
The point here is that Axial monotheism may well come to an end, but the possible substitution of ‘atheism’ in its current cult brand would be a cultural calamity of Social Darwinist Nietzscheans and nihilist culture criminals. The ‘atheism’ of Buddhism, which it inherited from greater antiquity was not the silly form we now see, and was barely either theistic or atheistic.

We can go on and on here, but the strange reality is that New Atheism is ironically discrediting atheism.

One very ancient related view here was agnostic polytheism, with an agnosticism about ‘god’, a belief in polytheism, but a mistrust of such divinities, with an insistance on freeing religion from exploitation by same divinities. Remains of these views (in some ways upgraded) are visible in the recycled brand known as Buddhism which is almost closer to us than primordial Shaivism/Jainism.

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Ignorance of religion

Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 11:37 am by nemo

Why Do Atheists Know More About Religion?

Whatever the relative comparison, the reality is that the New Atheists are very ignorant about religion, especially the complex realities of world religion. So this poll is a deceptive piece.

The most dreadful cases are the Big Four, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett.

Hitchens’ take on Buddhism in his book is truly dreadful, and dangerous, as ignorance
This poll seems paper airplane status.

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09.27.10

New atheists, and the 9/11 patsies

Posted in 9/11, atheism at 1:30 pm by nemo

Beyond the “New Atheism”?
Whatever the case with the ‘new atheism’ in general, one of the traps, or else, deceptions, of the onset, viz. via Harris’ spiel, was the concealed hatred of Moslems, and the use of 9/11 to subtly feed that.
Have none of these smartie nerds ever heard of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Where’s their indignation at the way the CIA et al. set up Moslems for patsies in this intelligence crime of the US government?

Whereas religion had seemed benign, if not actually true, to many thinking people, the September 11 attacks, the widespread religion-based opposition to stem cell and therapeutic cloning research
, the never-ending resistance to gay rights and abortion rights, the callous actions of the religious in the Schiavo affair, the Catholic Church’s appalling insensitivity towards abused children, and the many atrocities perpetrated daily in the name of religion of one kind or another, all converged to create a sense that human religiosity has a dark side of cruelty, dogmatism, moral blindness, authoritarianism, and intolerance.

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Beyond the “New Atheism”?

Posted in atheism at 12:08 pm by nemo

Beyond the “New Atheism”?

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09.25.10

CfI and atheists

Posted in atheism at 10:49 am by nemo

CfI declares war on atheists re:

For Atheists and Believers, Ignorance Is No Excuse

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