01.04.09
Atheists and morality
Atheists have moral reflections too
by Sue Blackmore
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/04/religion-atheism-radio4-bbc
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12.29.08
Atheist proposes theism?
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset
12.28.08
Heaven for the Godless?
Heaven for the Godless?
by Charles M. Blow, NY Times
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/opinion/27blow.html?_r=1
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Loves me loves me not
My Christmas message? There’s probably no God
by Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/23/atheism-disestablishentment-rowan-williams-humanism
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12.22.08
Atheist fundamentalists
How to Get on an Atheist’s Good Side
By Greta Christina, Greta Christina’s Blog. Posted December 22, 2008.
Here’s nine tips for believers who want to reach out. After all, atheists are a growing movement and may soon be a force to be reckoned with.
and this:
8: Do not — repeat, DO NOT — talk about “fundamentalist atheists.”
This silly article in the Dawkins New Atheist vein is a cleverly tricky form of emotional manipulation that deserves, contrary to prohibition, to be castigated as atheist fundamentalism.
A force to be reckoned with? This is social ambition, and a new method of declaring heretics in embryo.
I used to be an atheist (and/or theist/agnostic) until Dawkins stole the category for his fundamentalist groupies.
I recommend breaking all these rules. We don’t need a new ‘politically correct/incorrect’ protocol to silence critics of the silly movement that Darwkins et al. have created.
We already have a ’successful’ case of the triumph of a lie in Darwinism, that’s enough. Let’s leave atheism to its old-fashioned vigor as a dialectical component of philosophical enquiry. No more.
No scientific or Darwinian bullshit to back it up and make it ‘official’, please.
I have no real problem with atheism, save that the form its expression takes is as problematical as that of theism.
Theism seems exhausted, played out, and atheism springs to life in a strange void. But its character is as fraught with stupidity as bad theism.
Becoming an atheist is too simple. It is of the type of one-line ‘declaration of faith’ that comes with no secondary intelligence about the implications of that declaration. So to be an atheist provokes just as much metaphysical equivocation as theism. Of course our atheist fundamentalists have a canned belief system based on Darwinian selectionist metaphysics, which makes it seem like a plausible system of belief.
What’s the point.
Atheist assholes.
12.20.08
A second mess added to the first
Secularists’ vital war on religion by A.C.Grayling…
As long as religion is a danger to the lives and liberties of others, secular liberals will never relent in their protests
It seems as if the New Atheism movement is pettering out, or else reaching its limit in terms of social effect. This could be wrong: its impetus will surely recur after subsiding slightly.
But, whatever the case, it was always a bungled movement, opposed by many atheists. Basing it on the watered down worldview of Darwinian scientism, and a refusal to even study the history of religion, has resulted in a second cultural mess added to the basic Christian cultural mess.
‘you can never win’, is the phrase, best muttered under the breath.
12.19.08
Hitchens/xmas
‘Tis the Season To Be Incredulous
by Christohper Hitchens, Slate
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.slate.com/id/2206713/
The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas.
12.15.08
A secular age
Believe it or not
by Robert Westbrook
A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
Secularization is generally taken to mean the decline of religious belief among modern peoples or its detachment from political authority in modern states. For proponents of both these definitions, the U.S. poses difficulties. Among the most modern of societies by all the sociological measures that have been proposed as explanations for secularization, its population has remained stubbornly wedded to religious belief and only grudgingly and fitfully renounced the claim to Christian nationhood. At the same time, the resurgence of political Islam and the militant Christian response it has engendered in some quarters have raised doubts about the confident assertion of secularization theorists that the process is irreversible, even in the West. Not least of the symptoms of this crisis of secularization theory is the recent aggressive campaign to resist “desecularization” by best-selling atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
The misuse of the term ’secularization’ is rampant. But since the ‘misusers’ have taken hold of the term, it is almost a lost cause to try and set the record straight.
The term ’secular’ (and we shouldn’t be dogmatic, but simply explore a range of possibilities), which comes from ’saeculum’, arose during the sixteenth century, and the rise of the early modern when a sense of a changing age gave birth to the first sense of the secular. So note that the term ’secular’ was originally used in what was still a religious society. The rise of modernity is itself what we should mean by ’secularization’, and that is a process, not an ‘ism’. Protestantism is thus a prime example of the ’secular’, that is, a modern transformation of Christianity.
The current usage seems to imply that secularization is a variant of atheism, but that is a disservice to the idea of the modern, whose ‘idea’ is in fact a whole spectrum of ideas. Atheism can’t be anything but a dialectical pole to theism, and, by and large, modernism, secular modernism, includes both.
That religion should persist in a secular age, then, is not a contradiction. And it is more a sign that those who criticize religion have failed to do so successfully.
Stand back and look at the drama of modernization since the sixteenth century, and consider the inadequacy of Darwinian atheists to really do justice to the hopes for potential change that struck the men of the sixteenth century who saw a new age dawning, and hoped for deliverance from Catholic imperialism.
The confusion arises because we equate ‘religious change’, the prime characteristic of the process of ’secularization’, i.e. the arising of a new era, with the end of all religion. But as the New Age movement shows the ‘end of religion’ instantly produces a cornucopia of ‘religious change’ as an immense number of new possibilities compete for the future.
The most we might expect is the transformation of traditionalist religion into something else, including quite possiblity a less obsessively theistic form of religion. There was every possibility that the passing of Christianity could have produced a society without religion, but instead it produced a strange new form of Christianity. Modern science culture, stuck on Darwinism, wasn’t up to the task of replacing religion, and we are treated to the idiocies of the science cadre trying to use natural selection to explain religion.
Passing beyond religion would require something a lot more than simple cultic scientism as a replacement.
It is not the end of the world, or of modernity. It is possible to try again, after we shift beyond the era of Positivism, to a postdarwinian modernity.
In general the idea of age periods and religious transformations deserves study in light of the eonic effect, where the relationship of the modern transition to its content is seen in a larger sense than the restricted usage of the current Dawkins/new atheist movement.
12.14.08
Humanism and Australian schools
Religion in [Australian] schools to go God-free
by The Age
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.theage.com.au/national/religion-in-schools-to-go-godfree-20081213-6xxs.html
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12.07.08
Dropping the theism/atheism obsession
Reply to After Darwin, and after Nietzsche.
People get almost in a frenzy over the issues that might trigger the ‘god’ question. I merely spoke of suspicions about ‘teleological issues’ and the theism/atheism obsessions arise. It’s obstructing progress.
I am neither an atheist, theist, or agnostic. If you use the term ‘god’ I don’t react, since it is like hearing gibberish.
That’s close to being a de facto atheist, but it’s not the same, because atheists speak the same gibberish. The term ‘god’ is forbidden in World History And The Eonic Effect, because it will totally confuse the perception of the eonic effect.
We need people who are neutral, as I am on the questions of theism/atheism.
Between Kant (a theist of sorts, after reducing ‘god’ to rubble, and reconstructing him via ethics) and Schopenhauer we have a theist and an atheist, yet they see the same transcendental idealism.
Nietzsche is so obsessed with the ‘god’ question that even secondary characteristics of the universe have to be denied to guarantee no god. It gets to be silly, if not morbid.
In part this is the universe of Christians, Judaists, and Moslems, not theists as such. Then there is the Spinoza line. We naively use the word ‘god’ for both extremes.
It gets pointless. Leave me out of it.
In fact the question of god is so abysmally ill-defined that noone can think straight, not even atheists.
Meanwhile this situation has made everyone incompetent on evolution. It may be necessary to export evolutionary research to a non-Christian culture.
I see no inherent connection between divinity, and teleology. I have no easy assurances of anything to do with teleology, a word that should be defined. That’s why it is on quarantine in World History And The Eonic Effect.
In any case, the question of Nietzsche, to me, is sad. His style and brilliance hide the shallowness of his religious assertions, and while debate over Darwin’s influence should continue it is hard to avoid what one of his principal biographers enthusiastically concedes, the direct influence of Darwin.
Kant, I would guess, achieved the balance required, and can speak of ‘natural teleology’, and ‘Nature’s secret plan’. I accept the former term, but remain wary of the second. But the eonic effect shows a glimpse of what can only be called ‘nature’s secret plan’.
I see why students simply deflect their attention from the eonic effect. The facts are too much to face.
In any case, using natural selection to guarantee the non-existence of ‘god’ is a naive and silly strategy, quite childish indeed.
I have mentioned J. G. Bennett here several times. I was reading his account of evolution, an outlandish but interesting mental fugue. It is neither theistic nor atheistic. He points out the obvious, ‘god’ would have to be beyond the scale of the known universe, now seen to be very large. We are right to demand an examination of our naive, almost absurd ‘god’ beliefs.
Bennett in his discussion of the relativity of the present moment (volume 4, The Dramatic Universe, our ‘present’ moment is sometimes ‘this instant’ or the more general contemporary ‘present age’, the ‘present’ moment of homo sapiens, etc…) lets out the idea that the present moment of the larger scale of intelligent life (thence his demiurgic sources) is many many millions/billions of years, the scale of life itself (billions of years), which means that the relationship of these higher sources is analogous to the similar relationship we have to the cells in our bodies!
You must define what you mean by an entity on that scale. Clearly we don’t know anything there, and speculation is pointless.
Bennett does that with ease using his distinction of ‘Being, function, will’, the result being a hybrid abstraction of ‘will’ questions’ and ’scientific law’ questions.
In any case, Bennett is not a creationist about evolution, and sees it as a function of ‘life on the scale of solar systems’, i.e. an as yet invisible dynamics of the stellar level of cosmology. Not very helpful, pehaps, but food for thought.
I mention this because this writer shows how freedom from stale theism, and the Nietzsche/Dawkins style of compulsive/paranoid atheism, enables one to grasp just how difficult the question of evolution is. We have no way to solve the origin of life question, and are stuck debating natural selection. It’s not science, and obsessed theists are no help either.
12.02.08
Hitchens/Wilson debate
Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson Debate
Westminster Theological Seminary
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.wts.edu/flash/media_popup/media_player.php?id=462¶mType=video (audio and transcript available at this link)
Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists
Atheists and fundamentalists are strikingly similar
JOHN ARKELIAN
reviewer
I Don’t Believe in Atheists
Chris Hedges
Free Press
ISBN 1-4165-6795X
Dec 1, 2008
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
(An old proverb)
RELIGION POISONS everything, or, at least that’s the contention of a new crop of proselytizing atheists (writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris), who have condemned not just organized religion but also the very idea of belief in God.
But what if those atheists are really just the mirror image of the religious fundamentalists they despise? That’s precisely the thesis of an intriguing and ingenious new book by long-time foreign correspondent Chris Hedges. His wittily titled I Don’t Believe in Atheists (Free Press, 2008) makes a persuasive case that atheists and fundamentalists are more similar -— and more dangerous — than either camp would care to admit. Both tend to be intolerant and chauvinistic. Both dream of a perfect society and of a perfectible human being. Both claim a monopoly on the truth and both are impatient with opposing views. Both tend to disregard human fallibility; and both neglect nuance and understanding in favour of a blind certainty born of ignorance and dogma.
For Hedges, a central fallacy at the heart of atheists and fundamentalists alike is the myth of inexorable human progress, the notion that mankind is steadily advancing — morally and ethically.
12.01.08
God No!
God No!
NPR, On the Media, Sam Harris
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Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/11/28/04
No longer content to silently disavow religion, the so-called New Atheists are on the offensive. Borrowing tactics from the faithful, nonbelievers have taken to proselytizing in books and in the media. And yes, they’re even in foxholes.
11.29.08
Nietzsche and the New Atheists
A diatribe against the New Atheists, In the Name of Knowledge and Wisdom
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Jonas E. Alexis, a math teacher in Florida and the author In the Name of Education. His new book is In the Name of Knowledge and Wisdom: Why Atheists, Sceptics, Agnostics, and Intellectuals Deny Christianity.
This article attempts to defend the Old Testament divinity from Dawkins’ plain expose of his/its savage character. Beyond that the stalemate of these two sets of idiots, New Atheists and their rightwing and other critics becomes a bit tiresome, a football of words, especially that strange word ‘god’.
However, it is reasonable to summon the case of Nietzsche against the New Atheists, if only as a caution in a movement that clearly shows his influence behind a total silence about his life and work. And Nietzsche is especially insidious because he took ‘atheism’ to a completely unnecessary extreme.
It isn’t true, that if ‘god is dead’ (a statement that is very provocative, but without meaning), everything is permitted. That shows Nietzsche, apparently, to be a cowering choir boy who is suddenly set free from his own belief in Christianized ethics to become a nihilist. There is something sinister, unfortunately, in Nietzsche. People have been ‘a-theos’ for millennia, not believers in the Christian god, yet affiirming the real significance of ‘divinity’ without the obsessive Judaeo-Christian hangup over ‘god’, forgetting the very use of the term was severely cautioned by the Israelites with their token of indication, IHVH.
Secularists, who are atheists, would do well to study the lineage of their beliefs and make sure that a sharp literary style in the deceptive Nietzsche might not sell them a bill of cheap goods.
Dawkins is right, Jahweh as a lawgiver is hardly credible to modern man. No use protesting the case. Modern minds have moved on.
But the circularity of the question, a symptom of the metaphysical mind’s invariant plight, leaves atheists with all the confusions that Nietzsche invents to, strangely, plant a time-bomb beneath the stance of atheism. Among them the deliberate adoption, seen in direct hints in his work, of ultimate evil, in the sophmoric but dangerous pranks made real time of this strangely Christian invert, like a boy playing with matches. Nietzsche’s superpranks, to him, in the embrace of evil had real time consequences. Much ink has been spilt both defending and attacking him. The real evidence is complex, but, to start, on can note that his Zarathustra was reprinted for the rucksacks of soldiers entering WWI. With much more mischief to come with the Nazis.
It is not that atheism is intrinsic one thing or another, but that one of its principal proponents himself did everything he could to pervert the subject, a puzzle, no? And the New Atheists are just the kind of liberal suckers Nietzsche wanted to trick into being his followers so he cold subvert them, along with liberal culture and its Enlightenment legacy of democracy that he detested.
It is always necessary to escape from words and their consequences. It as hard to render atheism coherent as theism.
Nihilism is so rampant for various reasons. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made the point that if God dead, then anything is permitted. Nietzsche, unlike our modern atheists, was willing to follow atheism to its “logical” conclusion. Nietzsche then replaced the Judeo-Christian God with the Greek god Dionysus. This topic is too vast and cannot be discussed in a thirty-second sound bite. It will be fully discussed in our next book. But what is courageous about Nietzsche is that he was not dancing around and playing semantic games like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. According to Nietzsche’s philosophy, moral values do not exist without God—and he was right. T hat does not mean that an atheist cannot be moral. But an atheist cannot defend his moral principle against another! He cannot logically say Hitler was wrong or George Mueller was right. In a nutshell, nihilism is so rampant because the nihilistic culture has no moral framework or principle upon which a person should base his or her life.
11.22.08
‘Imagine no religion’
‘Imagine No Religon’ Billboard Only Lasts a Few Days in Rancho Cucamonga
by LAist.com
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://laist.com/2008/11/21/atheism_only_lasts_few_days_in_ranc.php
11.18.08
Dawkins takes on fairies
A ‘God Delusion’ for young people? Dawkins to take on fairies
“If you want your children to be intelligent,
read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent,
read them more fairy tales.”
I immediately thought of this Albert Einstein quote when I heard that Richard Dawkins is worrying about children reading about wizards and spells and magic wands.
Dawkins is the Oxford-based evolutionary biologist who gave religion a smackin’ right cross with his bestseller The God Delusion.
A few days ago he told Britain’s Channel 4 that he is planning on writing a children’s book “to explore children’s relationship with fairy tales and encourage them to think about the world scientifically not mythologically.”
11.17.08
Atheism article
Atheism, a positive pillar
by USA Today
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/11/atheism-a-posit.html
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11.14.08
Schopenhauer an atheist to New Atheists?
Comment on Spinoza, deus sive natura
James said,
November 14, 2008 at 11:56 am
A more interesting question is whether Schopenhauer would be considered an “atheist” by the standards of these Darwiniana/scientistic atheists.
Good question. Of course, Schopenhauer, who doesn’t trumpet his atheism, resembles the Buddhists, who also did not trumpet their atheism. The problem with Dawkins-style atheism, of course, is that it is falsely matched with Darwinism/scientism to make the definition highly restricted.
11.13.08
Spinoza, deus sive natura
Comment on Atheists and morality
James said,
November 13, 2008 at 9:02 pm
You can also bring in Spinoza’s ethical system just for the purpose of illustrating that the current theism/atheism debate causes us to limit ourselves perceptually (ignore whether his system has any merit or not). It’s quite clear that he isn’t using “God” in the same sense as the theist and yet he constructs an ethical system based on “God.” Here is a brief summary:
http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/spinoza.html
Excellent point.
‘Are you an atheist?’
Question in a comment, …Are you an atheist….?
I am neither a theist, atheist or agnostic. How is that possible? Simple. If you use the term ‘god’ I don’t react, in any way. I just hear four syllables stuck together.
It gets worse (better?): this corresponds to the unjunction of the ancient Israelites against uttering the ‘divine name’, to which IHVH pointed to. From that perspectives all references to ‘god’ (what language are we using???) in ordinary language are misguised.
Observe the discussions on both sides, atheist, or theist: to what are they referring?
Atheists have pointed to many contradictions and confusions of theists, but then suddenly produce their own: negation of ‘god’ as atheism can also be confused, it is another metaphysical quest. The New Atheists all of a sudden, against the whole tradition of atheism, declare the Darwinian theory some kind of foundation or proof of atheism, pure bunk.
So I cannot use the term ‘god’ in current English language discussions, because the word has no meaning that is clear or fixed. Hence I can’t even be an atheist, since I am fearful of what price tag is put on that also.
Etc…