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The New Atheists
What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy, hyperbolic and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student in neuroscience has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No fewer than five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past two years--Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and now Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great. The scandalized media have both attacked and inflated the phenomenon. After the New York Times Book Review, for example, ran a thoughtful review of Harris and then a negative front-page review of Dawkins, the daily paper published two weak op-ed attacks on the writers and a vapid article on how atheists celebrate Christmas, followed by tongue-in-cheek admiration in the Book Review for Hitchens's ability to promote his career by saying the unexpected.
Despite such dubious blessings, the four have become must-read writers. The most remarkable fact is not their books themselves--blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion in different registers--but that they have succeeded in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers. Is this because Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years? It would be comforting if we could explain this as a cultural signal of the end of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy. Such speculations are probably wishful thinking--book buyers are such a small slice of the population that few sociologists would stake their careers on claiming that book buyers' preferences reflect anything like a national mood.
The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority--almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned against and ignored. As Susan Jacoby pointed out in her book Freethinkers, it is symptomatic of the situation that the most dramatic presidential address in generations took place in the National Cathedral three days after September 11, 2001, so filled with religious language that it sounded like a sermon. It was delivered by a President flanked by Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives, a model of religious inclusiveness, without anyone standing alongside them representing the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. At this most important collective moment in our recent history, it was as if they did not exist. This is what the polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in America believes in God.
We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has harnessed this energy by embracing their demands--opposing stem-cell research, gay marriage and abortion rights, championing government aid to religious schools and faith-based social programs--and by appointing sympathetic judges. So effectively have they framed the issues that, according to the Pew Research Center's 2006 report on religion and public life, fully 69 percent of Americans believe that liberals have "gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government."
We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults--one in seven Americans--declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey ("American Piety in the 21st Century") of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as "the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons. It counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as believing in God--casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in "anything beyond the physical world," leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.
A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs, namely, the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say"--and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.
All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists--Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale--a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to "breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.
This does not make for restraint. Harris displays brash self-confidence, Hitchens and Dawkins angry intellectual bite and Dennett an inexhaustible theoretical energy and range of inquiry. Harris excoriates religious moderates, accusing them of providing cover for fundamentalists at home and abroad by refusing to contest the extremists' premises--because they share them. More upbeat, Dennett is devoted to creating the intellectual conditions for future discussions, in which religion will be treated as just another "natural" phenomenon and accordingly subjected to critical scrutiny. Dawkins bulldozes his way through every major argument for religious belief, and a great many minor ones. And Hitchens endlessly catalogues religion's crimes and absurdities. Each man is at war, writing as if no others had preceded him, and with a passion that can only be described as political.
Above all, each sees himself as breaking a taboo. This explains not only the vigor and urgency of these books, their mainstream character and their publishing success but also the common refrain in reviews that they have "gone too far." Of course they have, because their many faults are often inseparable from their strengths. Self-indulgence is their common flaw: Dennett and Dawkins might have considered their readers more and disciplined their own need to follow out every line of thought, while Harris is so full of his point of view that he, like Hitchens, is unable to consider faith as anything but stupid. They show little understanding of religion or interest in it [see Daniel Lazare, "Among the Disbelievers," May 28]. Still, I am surprised by the hostility and bemusement expressed toward them by their fellow travelers in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The London Review of Books. In attacking religion the four have been breaking the taboo against talking about it seriously, and they may be forgiven for not being calmer, more expert or more measured. Doing battle with what they see as the most pervasive and bothersome phenomenon in American life during the past generation, Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens deserve praise for their courage and tenacity in shattering its spell.
Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have roused a significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what end? Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions. Enlightenment optimism once supplied unbelievers with hope for a better world, whether this was based on Marxism, science, education or democracy. After Progress, after Marxism, is it any wonder atheism fell on hard times? Restoring secular confidence will take much positive work as well as the fierce attacks on religion by our atheist champions. On a societal level, as Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out in Sacred and Secular, living without God requires creating conditions in which people are free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all human societies until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare states. Markedly more religious than any of them, the United States provides a life that is far more unequal and far more insecure.
The surprising response to the New Atheist offensive should thus inspire us to think politically as well as philosophically. As a first step this demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God. And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired by Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms." Many of these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor survey, namely that more than one in four American "believers" does not mean by this a personal God at all but a distant God who has little or nothing to do with the world or themselves. This sounds very much like the deist God of "unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
These believers, along with those who think of themselves as "spiritual," as well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why according to the Pew study so many Americans--32 percent--want less religious influence on government. Twenty-four percent say that President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer, and 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation. Most dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country." This, then, is an unreported secret of American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our society.
Until now the most vocal left-of-center response to the Christian right, for example by Sojourners, has been to call for more religion in politics, not less. In early June the group organized a nationally televised forum at which John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton testified to their faith, talking about the "hand of God" (Edwards), forgiveness (Obama) and prayer (Clinton). Few loud-and-clear voices have been agitating in the mainstream on behalf of the separation of church and state, for secular and public education, or demanding less rather than more political discussion of religion. Yet tens of millions of Americans worry about such things.
Whether most of them continue to believe in God matters much less than that they are comfortable with secular knowledge and America's secular Constitution. Barry Lynn, for example, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is a Protestant minister. Although Harris and Dawkins castigate all believers for sharing the premises of conservative Christians, the fact is that many believers could easily be working with out-and-out atheists and agnostics on key issues.
Such a coalition should take the offensive on behalf of American constitutional promises of a secular society, increasingly under threat from Bush's Supreme Court appointments. It will gain support in unexpected places: Judge John Jones III, a Bush appointee, delivered a devastating blow to the forces behind "intelligent design" in his December 2005 decision in the Dover School Board case. The first half of his impressive decision contains a crystal-clear reflection on what science is and why intelligent design, a refurbished form of creationism, is religion, not science. The second half reads like a whodunit, revealing how a minority on the school board conspired to impose intelligent design on the district. It should be a rallying point for the nearly half of all Americans who are disturbed by right-wing religious attempts to impose their faith on the rest of us. An immediate goal should be a call for the publication and widest possible distribution of the Dover decision. It could become another bestseller--by a conservative judge no less!--and a text for civics, current events, history, law and basic science classes.
A second goal of such a coalition might be a campaign to reorient American thinking about atheists and atheism. In recent polls, far more respondents have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman or African-American for President than for an atheist--atheists are more unpopular than gays. Television news viewers are encouraged to nod in agreement with such ageless gibes as "There are no atheists in foxholes" without seeing just how nasty they are. This obnoxious remark, by Katie Couric on NBC's Today show, drew a few complaints and letters, but no wider protests or apology. A coalition determined to widen the range of socially acceptable belief could make a significant difference on such issues.
A broad secular coalition could also demand more nuanced discussion of the range of belief and unbelief in America today. Rather than consciously or unconsciously promoting religious belief, public opinion research should try to register a full range of beliefs, including the interesting and perplexing ways in which people live secular as well as religious lives and their sometimes contradictory combinations. These are rejected by Harris, Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, and ignored by the media and mainstream politicians.
Finally, such an alliance could become one place where Dennett's goal of discussing religion openly and critically--as well as atheism and agnosticism--could begin to be realized. A number of questions might be explored: What, for example, is the common ground and what are the differences between believers and unbelievers? And--I save for last the touchiest question of all--shouldn't all Americans be instructed in the great religious and secular traditions, as well as their greatest books? After all, achieving literacy in both religion and secularism might allow us to discuss them more intelligently.
Ronald Aronson is the author of Living Without God, to be published next year by Counterpoint. He teaches at Wayne State University.
© 2007 The Nation
115 Comments so far
Show AllIt is bit late to write much, but being on the West Coast, I thought that both the article and many of the comments regarding the superiority of atheism above all forms of belief in the unknown is itself a form of fundamentalism and also a belief without proof. Therefore it needs to be challenged by pristine logical reasoning without any assumptions on my part as a worshipper of the "Light" which provides intuitive knowledge that you have not dreamed of, "Horatio". I am not a judeo-christian-isalmic-hindu or any other theist. I come from a very ancient order that has no truck with anthropomorphic "Gods" of various organized religions in the world today, nor any truck with rigidities of any kind, including Darwinism, and atheism of the the neo-darwinist kind that are praised in this article that treat the coming of life on Earth as an accident without an iota of raesoning to support that fundamenatlism.
Thus there are are very serious flaws in first order logic in many of the comments. I should note immediately that the blind belief in empiricism went out of the main stream of serious thought with the demise of the Vienna School logical positivists under the assault of Quantum Mechanics (see Heisenberg's humorous account of an encounter with a die-hard logical positivist in the 1930's) .
A large part of the problem I see with the Anglo - American public, even the liberals here on this site, is precisely this idea that you can simply put forward an opinion without any reasoning based in first order logic. That is why we are in the Iraq war mess in the firts place.
The first principle that should prevail here is a commitment to Aristotle's three "Principles of thought"( Russel's characterization):
1. any entity that is, is (Law of being)
2. an entity cannot both be and not be (Law of contradiction)
3. an entity either is or is not ( Law of the excluded middle, hence the binary true/false logic we use all the time)
It is true that there are various other "logics", but as Stephen Kleene and other leading logicians have shown, all these other logics require first order logic as "meta logic" to make any sense of what their truths are. Kleene was one of the contemporaries of Godel, and provider of an alternate proof of his magnum opus (You can buy his book - - inexpensive Dover Publications, 2002 - - and learn it well because if you want to seriously debate such weighty issues as this article, you better be prepared to debate with people who have at least this level of knowledge.
The authors (Daniell Dennett, and others that this article holds up as paragons of atheism are the most zealous neo-con believers in the "survival of the strongest" ultra-right wing Darwinism - - the brother of ultra right wing capitalism - - and certainly contary to the humanism of most of the writers on thsi site. But who is thinking things through, right?)
At any rate I will leave you a couple of things to ponder and perhaps from the responses to them, I will decide whether it is worth it to write a longer expository piece later). otherwise it seems that we are not having any deep discussions on this site on most topics, and many people are recycling certain mantras as universal answers to every issue, which is betting to be both boring and of no use to people who may want to seriously plan hor humanistic change in America.
A.) Godel proved that there are truths that exist (Aristotle's law of being is satisfied) that we can never PROVE in any finite system of deduction, and hence in finite space-time. (The non constructive proof of this result is easy - - it only requires some basic knowledge of the natural numbers : 1, 2, 3, 4 .... But the constructive proof Godel invented is a masterpiece of human thought and the greatest result in logic known to humans). Thus there are truths that we can know to be true without being able to prove that they are true. This may seem confusing to many people but the concept of "truth" here is from truth tables and "knowability" means we can state their content in clear, declarative, undersatndable sentences, but we cannot prove them by a step by step by any finite system of deductive reasoning. And finite systems are the only systems that humans or Turing (Universal) computers can do today and unto eternity
Most of the writers here seem to have been brought up in either anthropomorphic Judeo- Chritsian traditions or exposed to them all their lives, and the "God" they keep on debunking is that Judeo-Christian anthropomorphos.
Here is my candidate for A divinity:
There exists a truth about numbers that contains knowledge we do noy have and thus "speaks wonders", as it were, that we cannot prove but can intutively understand and articulate to other humans. That is, hre is at least one "divinity" of "Light" that may not be so easy, if ever, to debunk with critiques that are able to debunk Judeo-Christian anthropomorphisms.
Many Eastern sysytems of thought, including some that evolved in Hellenistic Alexandria influenced by these systems of divinity of "Light" such as that of Plotinus, a neo-Platonist that you may find more congenial to read than somebody like Carlos Castaneda' Don Juan have hinted at this. As far as I know, I am connecting this wisdom to the most powerful theorem in first order (Western?) logic here for the first time.
So go debunk that if you can.
B.) One of the simplest arguments against empiricism and the whole concept of induction from statistical truth to general truth (aside from Hume's dense critique) is this:
-triangles exist on a plane surface.
-the set of triangles is uncountably infinite (that is, it has as many distinct elements as all the numbers - - whole, fractional, and irrational such as square root of 2)
-the subset of right angle triangles inside the set of triangles is "negigible" in size so that if one were to pick any finite sample of triangles at random, one would NOT find a right angle triangle in that sample with statistical certainty ( i.e.probability 1)
-therefore, one would never be able to empirically
determiine Pythagoras' theorem empirically by searching over the universe of all triangles
-Yet we can determine Pythagoras deductively!
-therefore statistical investigation alone, which is the belief of all empiricists, and by implication, of all atheists as "objective truth", is not capable of providing us knowledge of many fundamental truths of major importance to human existence and survival. Only deduction can!
-but all systems of deduction come to grief on Godel's theorem, and so a belief in a truth of Light is a non-atheist belief that Judeo-Christian or even "Budhist" atheism (as someone mentioned, though to me Budhism is a system of Light going back to the Egyptian Nun -- the Budhist "Nirvana") cannot cannot debunk.
Kapish, my friends?
Goodnight
This nation will never see anything but a tiny fraction of atheists who can work with folks who are religious on any political agenda, because many of them are as bad as the Christian fundamentalists when it comes to surety in their world view and desire to convert everyone to it.
Anyone who lives on a tiny planet in an infinite universe and yet claims they understand the entire nature of existence is going to have a hard time getting me to accept their beliefs are scientific.
Agnostics are much more reasonable in their beliefs and I've found them to be reasonable in religious and philosophical discussion. They say we don't know, we can't know, and they don't care. That, I can see as a realistic outlook on the matter, though I take a spiritual view of life.
i saw christopher hitchens here in seattle yesterday talking about his new book "god is not great"..."god" is defintely not great, but his talk was!
I call myself an atheist, but I have to admit that I could be wrong, because there hasn't been any proof one way or another yet. So I could be wrong. But I don't think so.
Who cares what anyone is, so long as secular humanism is the bootstrapped process? All of these issues have been debated for centuries, and at least a decade on the usenet newsgroups.
Personally, I've concluded that there is no need for belief. There is "to know", "not know" and "non-computable." Sorting criteria is based on objective and verifiable evidence. Anything else lacks a yardstick or metric to separate it from hallucination, fantasy, drug-induced vision, psychosis, etc.
There are few people more fundamentalist than Richard Dawkins. In any case, the issue for me is not whether or not you have a religious faith or a non-religious faith but whether or not there is room in this world for both--and for all those between the two endpoints (if there are indeed only two). More importantly, can we learn to live and work together with respect? The operative phrase is 'with respect'. It IS possible to disagree with each other and respect each other simultaneously. Even if we disagree about faith systems, are there beliefs (about the common good, about education, about healthcare, pick one) that we share? Why do we all have to believe the same thing?
Why is the person with whom I disagree automatically and inherently stupid? Socially acceptable to hate? After all, it's the designation of the OTHER as different, disagreeable, not quite (or at all) human that makes it easy for us to go to war, to kill that Other. I'm not saying that this means we have to love all vegetarians, or even all people whether or not they are vegetarians. I am just saying that as soon as we start focusing on, see only the Otherness of s/he who is different in whatever small or large way, we make it increasingly acceptable to hate, and from there to kill. And THAT deserves to be described as stupid.
TonyDanza Said:
"A lot of typical Atheist bashing in the comments. I thought CommonDreams, of all places, would be free of it. How Disappointing.
You don't even fake tolerance towards us like you do with other races/religions/cultures.
What gives?
I guess we are the last group that it is socially acceptable to hate."
It's also socially acceptable to hate vegetarians.....lol
I am atheist AND vegetarian so I get it from both directions.
A lot of typical Atheist bashing in the comments. I thought CommonDreams, of all places, would be free of it. How Disappointing.
You don't even fake tolerance towards us like you do with other races/religions/cultures.
What gives?
I guess we are the last group that it is socially acceptable to hate.
One can only feel "persecuted" if they are identified with a label. Why call yourself anything? I suppose it comes out of the need to feel a sense of belonging. Perhaps everyone feels under attack when their belief or philosophy is challenged, as it inevitably will be when it collides with a different belief or philosophy. Assumptions and beliefs tend to be unstable by nature. Personally, I find labels limiting.
Authentic religion has nothing to do with belief; it never did. Authentic religion has everything to do with consciousness, which makes belief and superstition unnecessary. It's more akin to intuition and insight. Intellect, with respect to thought, is just one tiny part of being and cannot, of itself, give full expression to this insight, which is beyond its ability to comprehend. Buddha was not an atheist but, like Christ, possessed an internal knowing that eludes ordinary perception and logic, and the vast majority of us today. Ironically, though, as human beings, higher consciousness (if you give credibility to the mystics) is possible for us to attain. Atheists close the door to this possibility by insisting that reason and logic, along with ordinary sensation, are the only instruments that exist for apprehending reality, while believers insist that they must wait until after they die to meet God. For an atheist "proof" must come in the form of empirical data or logical argument, which largely excludes psychological validation. Religious believers, on the other hand, insist that "God" or a higher reality cannot be directly known, but must be accepted on faith. Throughout the centuries, both Buddhism and Christianity (as well as other major religions) were distorted to serve whatever interests commandeered them; present day Christianity is a mockery of its original intent. Atheists as thought and logic worshipers are just as adamant in their own way and they have fundamental assumptions or beliefs, which are merely better hidden. Both atheists and religious believers have their own form of "worship" which equates to self worship (egotism) because it's the worship of preferred ideas. If this is true, then the power struggle between atheists and so-called Christians simply amounts to another silly rabbit chase.
Author makes 50+ mentions of the word "believe, believer, unbeliever."
And no mention of the word "seeker." Thus have nothing, really, to say.
Fundies and atheists of course are believers.
If a god consciousness has always existed. Then why was it that consciousness evolved. Why were we not just provided with "the consciousness?"
Anyway enough of that.
If religion is born out of a way to explain the material world and the need for a better life. Will it not evaporate slowly away as science answers major life questions and as a society we evolve to take care of people basic needs?
One other thing, and maybe it's just me, but every atheist I have ever met was the way they were for several reasons...
1)Cynicism.
2)Bitterness stemming from bad experiences with religion or life in general. Bill Maher is a perfect example even though he has stated that he isn't an atheist. He's never spoke well of growing up Catholic. Interestingly enough though, as much as he throws jabs at Christianity and Islam, he puts Jews on a pedestal, staunchly defending Israel and her policies. Or they've just had a rough go of it in general and are angry because they think God would have bailed them out if He/She was real.
3)Non-conformity. The compulsive need to flip the world a middle finger. The kind of people that lead "alternative" lifestyles, and I'm not talking "gay". Just people that like to "swing". People that like to shake the snowglobe of morality.
Working-class theology for yas. :) You don't think there's a God. Ok. Worship Odin? Cool with me. Just don't step on my toes and keep it to yourself. I'll try and do the same.
And Chris Hitchens is a colossal jerk. He seems as if he came out of central casting to play a stereotypical English snob ala Simon Cowell. And I love Brits which is why I don't care for either of them.
Kelmer:
I agree that "There are atheistic religions. Classic Buddhism for instance." Alas, then you make strange turn: "Imagine a circle and label it universe". The key word in what follows is 'imagine'.
Well, you have skipped 'reality check'. How does it work? It is difficult to explain to one who capitalize the Uncertainty Principle and call it Mystical concept. Then you prescribe to concept 'evolution' anthropomorphic value of 'betterment' or progress. Nothing could be further from real theory of evolution, that blind watchmaker, than literary reading of any scientific text. Even Richard Dawkins, this paragon of atheism, cannot avoid slipping from time to time to anthropomorphism.
Any reader should understand it, for our tool of communication is anthropomorphic and metaphoric by its very nature.
Religion is but re-connection (re-legare) of people and hence undeniable part of being human. God - Creator, Law Giver, Moral Watcher and Authoritarian Father - is a figment of imagination on par with your circles. Simple Ockham's razor is sufficient to shave it off.
Alas, we, as species, are not equally provided with reasoning facilities. Thinking is very hard job that requires life long training. So, do not rush for simple answers.
The reason atheists are unpopular is pretty simple. They think everyone else is stupid and spend most of their time telling people so, all the while shining the light on the underbelly of every religion. Many of them are about as intolerant as any radical Muslim or Christian Rightie. Those people want to abolish and faith different than theirs. Atheists often seem to want to abolish religion period and are on a crusade like anyone else.
I believe in God. I grew up Catholic but am not currently church-going. It's not something I can prove. Which is why imo, debating God's existence is pointless. It can't be proven either way.
I don't really have a problem with people not believing in God. It's fine with me. I just don't like being made out to be a sheeplike mental midget because I do.
Has religion impeded scientific progress? I dunno. All I do know is that I can't recall any positive social change that ever came out of atheism. Did any of them march with MLK? That's not to say that I think all atheists are bad. I just don't think they should throw stones either. And as far as waging war on organized religion, they're as organized as anyone. It's as if they're ready for war.
I agree that religion should stay out of politics and schools. The Christian Right is dangerous just like Radical Islam is. Religion should be a private matter. I understand that atheists are an embattled minority, but man, do you guys always have to be on the rampage? I have a friend who is an atheist. She's ok by me. I don't beat her over the head for her beliefs, and she doesn't do it to me for mine.
Is there a God? To be honest, I really don't know. I'd just like to think there is. That doesn't make me a neanderthal.
Maybe the backlash against the militant idiocy of fundimentalism will catapault humanity out of our childhood phase of mysticism and into an adulthood of rationality. Probably not, but old athiests like me can hope.
Insidious ignorance once more rules the day.It's depressing to observe how our so called "rulers" use religion as a shield against reason. So it has always been, and so it shall ever be.
Jaded Prole,
I hope you are correct; but don't hold your breath...
Probably we will have to wait few more centuries for social improvements to find societies where religion would be studied as we study slavery today. What was normal then would be a footnote in history.
Or perhaps we might have to wait another million years of evolution so that very few brains would need such fantasies to cope with reality.
This was a thoughtful article, especially the section at the end in which Aronson recommends a coalition of liberal-minded or tolerant believers and non-believers against the forces of fundamentalism. This, to me, has always been the ideal. I'm a lifelong atheist myself, also a liberal. I've usually been tolerant of mainstream religion, so far as its practitioners do not push things into fanaticism and extremism (as the fundamentalists do). It is only when fundamentalism goes from abstract discussion to policy-making (sex is bad, evolution never happened, the world is flat, etc.) that I object. But many practitioners of religion want only to live their lives in peace, just like the atheists and agnostics; and of course there are numerous liberals involved in political activism for the betterment of society who base their values on theistic principles.
Our liberal political concerns have always struck me as more important than debating whether or not a supreme being exists. Given the choice between associating with a group of theist liberals on the one hand, and associating with a group of fellow atheists who are reluctant to engage the world and "make it a better place" for the oppressed and downtrodden on the other hand ... well, which would you choose?
At least Christopher Hitchens hasn't lost his reason completely. Now, if we could just get him to admit that his support of the Bush Administration and the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, then I would be satisfied. Christopher never told us what he thinks of the rest of the neoconservative agenda, i.e., rolling back the 20th Century social, political and economic reforms.
Post modernist in a general way tend to believe that all is relative, denying that real evil exists. We have to change this laisse faire attitude. It is the fundis who are the real evil in this world. Instead of just letting the fundi creed creep into our national ideation, we should be pointing out how evil and wrong headed these fundis are. For example every infantcide by a mother in this country has been committed by a rapid fundi. If it was lesbian mothers killing their children there would be no end to the fundi outcry.
There are atheistic religions. Classic Buddhism for instance.
And Secularism IS a religion. It drives me crazy how people miss this.
A good philosophy of religion course will show this. Its very easy to explain:
(Imagine a circle and label it universe) That's secularism: the belief that there is a material universe and there is nothing beyond it. Absolutes are defined as the notion that everything within this universe can be known.
Imagine a circle and label it universe. Then put another circle around that one and label it god. That's theism: the belief that there is a material universe and a creator behind it. There is nothing absolute other than this creator.
(imagine a circle--label it universe, then have another circle and label it God(optional), then put another circle around that and label it "mystery" That's Mysticism: the belief that there is a (material) universe. There may also be a creator of that universe--BUT beyond that there would have to be some other undefined force--it remains a mystery and undefined because if you attempt to define an absolute, you face the problem of being able to question it(for theists, its the idea of who created God, which can never be settled, and for secularists it is the idea that you can find the "god particle" or that you can prove that everything within the universe can be defined). If something is absolute, wouldnt it be the final answer to any question? If you can question it, it cannot be absolute.
In the 1930s Werner Heisenberg came up with a secular version of this Mystical concept, called the Uncertainty Principle. But someone beat him to it by maybe 3000 years.
One also can separate Theism from Specific Revelatory Theism--the notion that the supreme creator is giving you special instructions and that you and your arbitrarily defined group is superior to others.
Theists came up with the concept of the Great Chain of Being--with humans as the highest creature on the ladder.
The Secular version of this is Evolution--since the term itself suggests that life "evolves" to something better-a higher plane of existence. "Survival of the fittest." Though others have pointed out that it could be "survival of the luckiest" or simply adaptation,but there is still a strong impulse among secularists to want to believe that humans have special importance--even in a universe that they claim is mindless(how can something without a mind have favorites? :)
Even the term "progress" has this aspect. It is assumed that salvation will come through scientific materialism--and any criticism of this makes you a Luddite.
There was a book that came out about 10 years ago that argued that Religion is never more dangerous than when it is coupled with science--how the head of the US Genome Project was a born again Christian. The people who come up with GMOs and want to release it into the wild do so with either a belief that its what "God wants," or a notion that humans are God and are supposed to do it. Vivisection grew as an industry because of a quasi darwinian myth that you could break down "lower" lifeforms in order to understand "higher" ones.
The idea that we will end up with a Star Trek future where people live in harmony and peace because of scientific materialism overlooks the history of human nature.
You can have good theists and bad atheists and vice versa---and you never see Buddhists joining the debate on creationism vs evolution because it means nothing to their religion and way of life. Scientific knowledge is not the same as wisdom.
Wisdom without scientific knowledge is just intellectual posing at best. If there is a God, it's name is REASON.
Agnostics, who basically do not care, are the real atheists. Fundi ahteists are just as intolerant and ignorant as fundi muslims or christians.
Kelmer: Good points. I honor science and believe in a Supreme Being, but also realize that my intellect (any human intellect) is incapable of embracing the very concept of the infinite. I am fairly convinced that what renders many agnostic or atheist is their rebellion to the hypocrisy of the church/religious institution of their upbringing. To me this is a failure of imagination, for it presupposes God is what some limited human (and there's always been church-state politics and abuses of power going on, these have influenced the codification of Bible text and its many translations, changes and interpretations) says IT is. The popularity of these books is a good sign as the very narrow and retrograde beliefs of fundamentalist Christians are NOT those that a democratic society can tolerate, particularly when the church-state divide (that gave rise to this nation in the first place) is crossed.
It is a form of hubris when individuals discount "God" because they have sharpened their intellects. Here is the prime example of left brain, and the limited range that logic alone constitutes. It is an empty place without love, the realization of something greater than flesh and its inherent mortality; in short, it lacks poetry. Just for the record, I always excelled in science and math, studied the humanities (psychology, sociology, etc) and have concluded on the basis of YEARS of independent research into uncharted mystical studies, that often intuition and the right brain have more to teach us than what cold academics can deliver. Ultimately, just as we were designed with two brain hemispheres (and that parallel extends to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems), perception is most enlightened when it takes both into account. Those who practice Yoga, form a bridge between these dimensions, i.e. the best of Yin and Yang and tend to become cutting edge thinkers. Religion depends upon its flock of followers, whereas the mystics (and I include Einstein in that group) see beyond what most can see and often pay a high price for flying higher than the earth bound flock is able (or willing) to go. As Richard Bach stated (in Illusions), "If you argue FOR your limitations, you get to keep them." Generally, society has asked people to lock step with limited thought, and many who rebel just fashion new boxes for their thought process to rest within.
Secularism and atheism are not "also religions." But I really do dislike this article - it shows the authors own prejudice, and reveals that he is not actually a humanist at all. I won't be reading his book, and I don't believe in coalitions with hypocrites.
secularists will never make any headway in the US saying people are religious b/c they are stupid. 99% of humanity is/has been "religious"(if by religious we mean not a secular materialist). saying this is so b/c people are stupid is the analysis of a 3rd grader who's slightly brighter than his classmates (a la hitchens).
so why are people religious? simply b/c life is disappointing. people do not find this rock to be enough to meet their hopes and needs. not at present anyway. too much suffering. universal suffering.
the alleviation of suffering will lead to the retreat of religion and save us from jesus' silly disciples. rational arguments from atheists alone will not. sympathy for the oppressed is as important (maybe more important) than being able to argue the oppressed out of their delusions.
still, God save us from his children! now the democrats are talking this crap. jeeeeeezus.
Since I'm not superstitious and don't believe in an afterlife, I'm thinking of switching to the Republican party. I'll be able to lie, cheat, steal, take drugs, invade other countries, shoot old guys in the face, kill mud people and get rich at other's expense without having to worry about going to hell.
I'll be able to engage in all kinds of illicit sex, my sins will be forgiven, I'll get my own tv program, my own university, poor people will send me money, I'll be able to hang out with the plutocracy and be a part of it.
I'd get the medal of freedom for playing golf, I could become president of the country and Master of the Universe even as a moron, or maybe a Supreme Court Justice or Senator.
Banks and corporations would give me lots of money and a lot of other stuff. I could send other people's kids to loot other countries for me while I strut around like John Wayne. I mean, what's there to think about? I'll drink to that!
ezeflyer: Imagine if your prom date on the other side becomes Jerry Fallwell! (I know you are joking, me, too!)
Every right thinking individual KNOWS in their heart that the world is merely a dandilion seed caried on the back of a giant tortoise who is swimming through an infinate ocean, and that the giant tortoise requires all of us to refrain from eating M&M's, and we must ritually cleanse our genitalia in Boones Farm apple wine....
Oh, and Paris Hilton is the new Messiah
why not??? makes as much sense as any other religion
Why is eating a shrimp cocktail a sin in some religions?...Will I still burn in hell if I eat "Shrimpmates"? Red Lobster is stealing my soul!!!
Religious belief and ignorance go hand-in-hand.
Americans are (by design) spectacularly ignorant, as is illustrated by the NCLB regime, where children are told WHAT to think at the expense of HOW to think; rote learning, and the slothful mental habits that go with it, are instilled instead of the skills necessary to actually make sense of the world based upon facts and reason.
This is deliberate, because the ignorant and unskilled at raciocination are much easier to manipulate--just have a Pat Robertson get up there, spout some Jay-zus talk, and tell the fools listening that they'll have 40 virgins in heaven if they'll vote RepubliKKKan--and there goes the treasury.
Our nation was a product of the Enlightenment, where precisely the skills of fact-based analysis were exalted at the expense of superstition and ignorance. What we are seeing now is a degradation of that heritage, with the inevitable deterioration of the American polity and society that goes with it. And this profits the thieves who have bought and stolen their way into power.
God help us. --Wait: She doesn't exist...
Thanks, ezeflyer'; I needed the laugh.
Who says the "believers" are telling the truth? The easiest way to ingratiate yourself with others around these parts is to declare your faith, whether you really have any or not. Most church-goers seem to be drumming up business of one sort or another among the faithful. Religion's just part of their pitch.
Real atheists don't believe in God, and they don't believe the believers do either.
Why stop at religon? Why not obliterate all culture. Sterilize us into an homogenous mass.
And then dismiss any values not based on self-interest, because they have no basis in reality. Logically if someone values something for a reason other than self-interest, then they are irrational.
Or maybe there is a deeper psychosis than religon. Perhaps there is a psychosis of blaming all of the world's ills on one group of people. Perhaps this vilifying of religon is part of a need to have a devil.
Peace
Macchendra
This discussion brings to mind one of Mark Twain's great shots at religion (in the paraphrased words of Puddn'Head Wilson):
"Faith is when you believe what you know ain't so."
I think the problem is it's alost impossible to talk about "religion" without everyone assuming you are talking about that cranky, irascible, unbelievable Bible god. Because this is the one worshipped by the world's 3 "great" religions. And no wonder the way these 3 dominate and terrorize the world. But their deity is just about as plausible as Santa Claus.
Once outside that deadly box there are any number of spiritual possibilities that can be quite liberating and easy to live with. Like what the Native Americans used to believe, or the Aborigines of Australia, the "Bushmen" of southern Africa, the Inuit. If for no other reason than the tangible reality of Mother Earth.
Richard Dawkins' said in a radio interview that a number of Bishops and other clerics throughout Britain did not believe in god.There were also a number of Popes thru the centuries said to be non-believers.With these people at the coal front with opinions like this,what does it say about the rest of us?
A christian nation? I don't see any traffic jams on sunday morning.
Find the original reason for needing SOME sort of faith in a higher intelligence at work all around us. The great spiritual TEACHERS, have all said the same thing; the only way you'll ever find God is be "out of your mind".
Stop judging, start living in joy. The spiritual path is three feet long, from the base of the spine to the crown of our heads.
www.ananda.org
Christopher Hitchens is a neocon. I wouldn't waste a single penny on anything that he writes.
I am an atheist BTW.
Abuelito: Well said, and I totally agree! JJpeter: the only problem with utter and entire focus on enlightenmen from the inside (out), is that right now Eden is burning... do we have the luxury of that narcissistic focus on self and peace alone? (I ask myself this same question as it is a crux of much of the New Age movement, which in the time millions went into private spiritual rituals to better themselves, happens to be exactly when the right wing took over, moved into the gap created and formed--like a vicious cancer--public policy that led to corrupt leaders, that's led to EVERY wrong domestic & international decision possible or plausible.
it takes as much "faith" to believe in evolution as it does to believe in Jesus..the next columbine or va tech should please the godless...with out a guide to live by..people make up their own rules..get real athiest..do yall believe that we are spinning around at over 1000 mph..and circling the sun at the same time at close to 18,000 mph..i say this to make a point that just because something is hard to believe doesnt make it untrue..and you people who would deny people who had a bad childhood with no security and living in fear most of the time..would you deny them they chance to feel secure..just like you were when you were a child..(you wouldnt call your own childhood when your parents were your god irrational would you)stop being so selfish..Jesus said"woe,unto anyone who harms one of these little ones"..
If we are honest all we can say is that we do not know. Scientifically, the "why" of our being becomes an insoluble mystery. But then we make the mistake of saying (if we do) that we've reached the limits of our ability to consciously understand. Buddha and Christ were "pointing" to something beyond ordinary understanding, a kind of perception that resides within the realm of human perception, but requires development. Atheists require proof according to scientific/empirical standards, which this broader perception will never yield to, though psychologically its effects are often clear. The closest physical analogy we have here is wind; we can readily see its effects, but not the wind itself. Religious believers and atheists are very similar in this regard. Both establish in their own way what can be known and what cannot. Might it not be more prudent to say we do not know, without placing limits upon what is capable of being known, or establishing standards for what we will accept as proof (brings to mind how Newtonian physics was usurped by quantum physics). Knowledge, in the form of thought and logic, must always be incomplete, regardless of its breadth or depth. So why not at least leave the door open to the possibility that there exists another kind of "knowing" that transcends it? This knowing, then, (again if it exists at all) must be established through watchful awareness in the present.
Arguably, philosophical problems are particularized versions of more general logic problems (self-created -- they don't have any corporal existence). Basically they are the platonic/karnaugh realm of relationships of ideas to one another, how they flow and what follows what.
Teleological and other logic arguments all fail to prove the existence of god because they fail to prove the existence of anything as such. Is there any mathematical or logical presentation I supply to prove that a cup of coffee is sitting next to me?
But there does exist a powerful (Popper) asymmetry. If I claimed that the cup of coffee next to me was a spherical cube, made out of Helium Carbonate, simultaneously empty and full, having a conversation with me, you could probably lean on first order to logic to disprove my claim because it either is self-contradictory, violates a law of physics/chemistry, etc.
So these logic games are fun, but for the most part useless in ontological claims positive. We can spin any yarn of logic we want. However long, it will not cause things to pop into -- or out of -- existence.
The problem with logic is that it is just a fragment of the whole of being (see the very good discussions between Krishnamurti and David Bohm). Agreed, logic games are fun (and even useful within limits), but can never go beyond a certain boundary; namely, the boundary of thought. The religious question is a unique one because, though it may be one of "objective consciousness," it must be validated individually, so it becomes a paradox of sorts. If I climb a mountain before you and describe the beautiful scenery, you might ask me to "prove it," but I tell you that you must climb and see for yourself. However, you decline to do so and proclaim that neither the mountain nor scenery exist and that I am mad or deluded. See the dilemma?
In the long run perhaps the way to overcome the extremes of religion is to actually create a society which is'nt based in violence and exploitation as ours is.Given a sensible caring society few people would likely opt for zealous belief in other worldly salvational fairy tales.
TonyDanza June 9th, 2007 1:06 am
"A lot of typical Atheist bashing....You don't even fake tolerance towards us like you do with other races/religions/cultures....I guess we are the last group that it is socially acceptable to hate."
Seems we bring it on ourselves by our "Cynicism," "Bitterness," and deliberate "Nonconformity" - since the only reason for being atheist is a "compulsive need to flip the world a middle finger." [iwarrior June 8th, 2007 11:05 pm]
Human beings will never create a peaceful society, unless they learn to live holistically. Any attempt to do so will prove futile, as it has up to this point. If you live from only a fragment of your whole, how can you expect to create a world without division? Impossible. Seems to me to be the elephant in the room that no one wants to see, and for good reason; it would mean the end of exploitation of the "have-nots" by the "haves." Without inner transformation outward harmony is impossible because collectively we will always reflect what we are individually. As for the poster above, what does it matter what others think of you as long as you are secure within yourself? Most of what people call "tolerance" is disguised hatred anyway, which sooner or later erupts into violence and war.
1.The Eye of Body= sensory perception, feeling, emotion
2.The Eye of Mind= logical, rational dualistic thinking
3.The Eye of Spirit= non-dual unity consciousness, the absence of a self that exists apart from other.
These Eyes are opened sequentially in the human phenomenon.
Each level transcends and includes its junior dimension.
The subject becomes the object of the subject at the higher level of consciousness.
For example, as an infant, your consciousness is completely identified with the body. However, as consciousness expands through childhood, the body becomes the new object of the mind, itself the new subject. Meaning, the body is seen as "mine" or as a possession, while the mind is "me". Ask yourself, "Do I have a body, or am I a body?"
The same thing happens with the evolution of consciousness to the Eye of Spirit. Thought, sensation and perception become observed objects. They cease to be solely identified as "me" and are objects in consciousness, they are now "mine". Who is this new "me" that knows thoughts and sensations as objects in awareness? You are that awareness. You always were and always will be. This is mysticism. This is what lies behind and beyond all seeing and knowing. "God" is what see's observed events in a radically evolved sense of knowing which is now expanded beyond that of the limited and finite self and itself can not be seen. The Eye of Mind cannot "prove" God's existence because God is ungraspable, unknowable. What is "known" requires a Knower and something to be known. A subject and an object. God consciousness erases this gap between subject and object. This is the Holy Spirit. This is Buddha Nature.
Until an athiest takes up the very scientific endeavor of running an experiment with the mind (mystical meditation, zen, christ consciousness, sufi dancing, yoga, etc...) that atheist is mired in the same pit of dogmatism that he/she claims to deride.
The so-called smart atheist who dismisses God out of hand is usually rejecting their magic/mythic fundamentalist upbringing that was long on belief and short on evidence. That's quite understandable. Jesus did not walk on water, that's silly. The baby Buddha did not take four steps in the four directions when he was born. Again, nonsense. However, to dismiss the claims of consciousness made by mystics for thousands of years as some way of making an uncertain doomed existence more palatable is inherently dogmatic in that the very experiment of the mystic is not being attempted before it is cast aside.
I often think of Galileo's experience at the hands of the church when I hear modern Scientists denying God's existence, usually the Mythic Paternal God, mind you. Galileo, of course, was a key figure in the impending Enlightenment, that beautiful modernistic rational worldview that progressed humanity in so many ways. The church as the old guard would prevent Galileo from making such blasphemous claims as the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa, as that threatened their worldview and the basis of their power. When Scientist's refuse to shut up and sit on a meditation cushion and study the mind, while expousing their unassailable belief system, they become what they dispise. True believers. Speed bumps in the way of consciousness evolution. Of course, there is a place for rationality and reason, logic and science. But, alas, it is only one part of the story, one face of reality. I'll shut up now. Check out Ken Wilber's work for more in this line.