more treachery

as a sort of follow up to the Bertrand Russell quote and video from the other day, I thought I’d add another from Sean Carroll.  this comes in the context of the incessant debates among scientists about whether or not scientists and, more importantly, science institutes (such as the National Center for Science Education) should engage in any amount of theology — that is, whether official representatives should weigh in on science vs. religion debates, and whether they should do any more than promote scientific education and, at most, acknowledge the fact that there are scientists who are religious.  do they have any business in theology, speaking of the compatibility of various beliefs with the cores of modern science?  Carroll thinks no.  He writes,

If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.

he is open to the possibility that the two are compatible — he’s just unpersuaded by any of the arguments made so far, and he believes that science and religion, generally defined, are not compatible approaches to understanding the world.

in any case, his point here about pretending that science and religion are completely compatible without first establishing the validity of the claim — and how this is a dishonesty — is akin to Russell’s point about “a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity, to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.”  it is (intellectually) dishonest to believe something that isn’t true (merely useful), and it’s dishonest for anyone — especially a national institute — to make claims about the ultimate compatibility of scientific and religious claims without first bothering to establish whether it’s true or not, regardless of how many people it would please.  in my mind, those who argue for incompatibility win the day (day after day) — and those who hold up “non-overlapping magisteria” shouldn’t at all be concerned with whether they are compatible (or overlap)!  so again, silence would be golden.

an intellectual grandpappy

a few vintage thoughts on religion from a very old Bertrand Russell:

well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true … at least I rule it out as impossible: either the thing is true or it isn’t. if it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. and if you can’t find out whether it is true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment … it seems to be a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.

the new atheism and the new humanism

in last week’s Newsweek, Lisa Miller, the religion editor, of whom I’m not a huge fan in general (though she’s intelligent and mostly reasonable), wrote yet another article on the new atheism and its main leaders, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris (why no Daniel Dennett, the final member of the “four horsemen”?).

I don’t want to discuss her entire article, or some of her specific points, at length, but two of her main points are that these three individuals have unfairly dominated the discussion/debate thus far and that it’s time to move on past the aggression and onto rethinking spirituality, humanism, etc.

regarding the first point, it’s not that these individuals have unduly grabbed a hold of the debate and won’t let anyone else have a turn.  there have been plenty of other books written about atheism — theirs just happen to have been the most successful.  granted, Dawkins and Hitchens were already well known (the former more so, generally) and so there was more attention given to their books, but Harris was virtually an unknown.  he just happened to write two very successful, very persuasive books that caught on.  sure he has done a lot of debating, but he’s also been working on his PhD in neuroscience of some sort and is no media whore.  (by the way, does she know that he doesn’t even like to use the term “atheist”?)

the real reason that they have “hogged” all the attention is simply because people like Lisa Miller won’t shut up about them.  honestly, she’s written at least three or four pieces for Newsweek on them this year already!  and in this vein, you can’t find any broadly appealing piece on the growth of non-religious portions of the country that doesn’t mention “the three” or “the four” (horsemen, that is).  they’ve only been dominating because people like you, Lisa Miller, keep complaining about them.  you are the silver-haired wind in their middle-aged-cracker sails.

and the truth is, she doesn’t appear to have any real clue as to what’s happening in the atheist blogosphere.  there are far louder and much more prolific voices on the internet (PZ Myers comes to mind), and there is a grand variety of atheists out there whose levels of “stridency” and whose views regarding religion vary enormously.  for those atheists concerned more about the undue influence of religion in the public sphere than about winning arguments, there’s Hemant Mehta, your Friendly Atheist.  and then there’s the somewhat overlapping, ongoing debate among professional scientists about how science should relate (or more accurately, how scientists should try to relate science) to religion, aka the “accommodationist” debate.  so here you have a lot of writers, some of whom may be non-religions but that’s irrelevant, who are opposed to the attempts of people like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller to placate moderately religious Americans by claiming that all’s well between science (read: evolution) and religion.  Jerry Coyne is probably the leading (unconquered) writer in this vein.  there are even non-religious writers/scientists like David Sloan Wilson who see atheism and science as types of religions, further muddying the waters.

anyway, the point is, among atheists and agnostics and secular humanists and the like, “the three” are hardly the most active or the loudest voices.  what about writers like Ian McEwan or Victor Stenger?  it’s one of those, “Well, everyone’s talking about them so they must be the most important” things that endlessly perpetuates itself.

the second point, which is a good one, is also problematic when it comes out of Miller’s mouth because, as I hinted at in the last point, there are tons of writers and groups out there for non-religious people who are doing just that — focusing on re-conceiving our notions of ethics and morality and what it means to be “good without god.”  there is the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbyist group, there’s the Center for Inquiry, and there are all sorts of secular student groups and local communities that have been raising their voices and getting media attention lately.  you know all those billboards going up around the country (and in other countries) and needlessly causing a stir?  well, those poster boys have nothing to do with it.

even the first bus campaign in England was started by a hitherto unknown, Ariane Sherine.  sure, Richard Dawkins donated some funds and took a publicity ride, but he joined after the fact.

and what about the Brights?  it’s a designation chosen by non-religious intellectuals who want a more positive take on their outlook, as opposed to “atheist.”  plus, it’s a more proactive way of understanding the world, not just by what you don’t believe, but by how you think the world can and should be understood.  here you find all sorts of very influential intellectuals, include Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, yes, but also Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker.  in fact, for many people, atheism implies a secular, naturalistic, humanistic outlook.  (fyi, Sam Harris also dislikes the term “bright”; he is very picky.)

speaking of Sam Harris — the entire latter part of his The End of Faith was about the future beyond faith, exploring new areas of human spirituality that go beyond our inherited traditions!  his book was essentially about the very thing Miller says we should be doing instead of what she accuses him of doing!  Jerry Coyne briefly touches on this here.

finally, moving on to a topic/group Miller does cover, there are various humanistic groups out there, represented in her article by Greg Epstein, Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain.  Epstein is the author of the soon-to-be-published Being Good without God, a topic he is very enthusiastic about.  his approach is an entirely positive one, focusing on what “a billion non-religious people do believe” and helping to create renewed sense of meaning and even (gasp) spirituality among non-religious persons.  he is by far not the only person with this outlook of course.  I think of the ethicist Peter Singer or the author Ronald Aronson, who wrote the influential (and on my wishlist) Living without God, or even the sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who write last year’s popular Society without God (also on my list).

in fact, Germany has had a figure like Epstein for a while now in the person of Michael Schmidt-Salomon, a well-known German humanist writer and apologist (who is associated with the atheist camp though he also avoids the term).  he has worked to try to encourage humanism and take the debate and media flurries surrounding the “new atheism” to a “new humanism” (whence the title of this post).

in any case, I do believe that in the case of the non-religions, any media attention is good attention, as more and more people realize they are not alone in their unbelief (as the billboards proclaim), and that they too have a say in what happens in this country and in this world.  and it has also been (or at least will be) helpful (even if still shocking) for people to realize that there are non-religious persons (even atheists!) all around them, and that’s a good thing.  Schmidt-Salomon talks about this, and uses the wonderful German word “stinknormal” to describe how average these atheists prove to be once people take a look at them (Der Sensationswert des Atheismus verglühte im Scheinwerferlicht und man stellte fest, dass „diese Atheisten“ letztlich auch nur stinknormale Leute sind, kaum geheimnisvoller als Mutti Krause von nebenan.)

and hopefully the public attention will continue to turn and focus on this other side of being non-religions.  it’s not all about put downs and arguments  — it’s also about excitement about what we do know about ourselves and this world, along with how we continue to go about understanding both, and creating room in public discussions about science, ethics, morality, policy, the environment, etc., for those of us who don’t feel the need to appeal to tradition or revelation or supposedly unchanging religious values in order to have a reasonable, fruitful conversation about our future.

homo religiosus

Karen Armstrong has a new article in Foreign Policy titled “Think Again: God”.  it is another argument for why religion is still a force in the world today, this time with more of a political twist.  oh, and of course she takes a moment to explain why the “new atheists” are wrong and bad.

at the beginning of the article, she briefly looks at the “God is dead” idea and explains how the opposite seems to be true: religion (but God?) is in full swing round the globe.  now while she may be right in a very limited sense that Nietzche and others would have been wrong in their prediction about whether people would continue to take religion, or God, seriously in the future, or that they would no longer believe in some cosmic order, she completely misses the point of the statement overall, which was that God (and religion) would cease to be a self-evident truth accepted by all and a viable means for approaching and explaining the world.  PZ Myers does a great job tearing her apart on this, as the following excerpt demonstrates:

Nietzsche, of course, wasn’t arguing for a literal death of a deity, nor was he claiming that religion had disappeared from the world. He was making a narrower argument, that in his culture (19th century Europe), the concept of god had lost its material and moral authority. There is no central defining source of absolute truth, and we human beings have to rebuild our values around something new, other than this notion of a celestial monarch (he personally thought the new value was a “will to power”, individual ambition and aspiration).

That’s still true. Fundamentalism is in many ways a desperate reaction to that loss, that deep down even they know God is a powerless answer. That was the striking thing about the “Creation” Museum: it’s a deeply fundamentalist institution, but even there in the heart of Christian literalism, they do nothing but ape the trappings of science and strive to present a “science” to support claims that were once sufficiently endorsed by simply pointing to the Bible. God is dead; he is no longer a vital element in how human beings interact in a meaningful, productive way with the universe. Modern fundamentalism is basically a series of aftershocks as cultures struggle to deal with the fall of gods.

… God is inadequate. To defend religion, people have to borrow the authority of science, and invent misbeggoten terms like Home religiosus and make grand claims about nature and natural law. This is exactly what Nietzsche meant when he said “God is dead”! Theology is flighty and transient, we have to find truth in reality, or in Armstrong’s case, a pretense of reality.

well put.

anyway, moving on.  her argument essentially hinges on the following claim:

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere.

overall, I think she is profoundly confused on the manner.  humans may be “meaning-seeking creatures,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean homo religiosus.  what about the various arguments for science or a philosophical outlook as systems of meaning?  our brains seek out patterns and we almost automatically create narratives to explain disparate pieces of information.  but each person born doesn’t enter the world as the first human ever (as if there were such a thing), so we’re not exactly building from scratch.  is every “meaning-seeking” explanation ever offered by humans equally viable in and valuable to the world today? surely we can judge between them and figure out what’s best for the world, right?

I think it’s a significant problem to confuse the human propensity for religion with the necessity to embrace and respect not humans themselves or the process itself but the end product, the religions, despite their created nature and various faults.  this is especially true considering that fact that, while religion in general, or aspects of certain religions (e.g., supernatural beliefs), may prove to be unique combination of mental faculties and behavior, there doesn’t seem to be any unique religious faculty or part of us that is reserved for religion alone.  this is why defining “religion” can be so hairy, given the innumerable overlaps between religious belief and, say, ideologies or the scientific process or sports fans and mass-media culture or trekkies.  religion may have a special impact on parts of our brains, but those parts function (or malfunction) otherwise on a daily basis.  in fact, there’s been lots of research on the increased religiosity or susceptibility to religious visions or trances in people in whom these areas aren’t functioning fully (or may be over-functioning, in some cases).

but anyway, why is it that we should embrace and respect these end products?  because, she says, “when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults.” so what, her argument is essentially, “you wouldn’t like them when they’re angry”?  yikes.

it’s also puzzling and troubling that her final point is that we have to learn to live with God — again, not religious people, but God, somehow (though she’s never quite clear about what “god” means or if “he” actually exists) — “in a balanced, compassionate manner,” when in fact the groups she cites as pivotal in the resurgence of religion as a force in modern world, especially in politics, are groups that are completely unwilling to bend or balance in any respect!  so what do we do?  create blasphemy laws that enable more religiously conservative countries to prosecute journalists, authors, poets, dissidents, and so on?  do we curb our own media and bridle free speech in an effort to show how compassionate we are?  I sure hope not.

anyway, “Jesus and Mo” cuts right to the heart of it in the newest comic:

before He knocked

I picked up a book of Dylan Thomas’ poetry a few weeks ago, and I’ve slowly been sounding it out and seeing how I like it.  so far, so OK.  often I don’t think I really grasp what he’s trying to convey.  but then again, I don’t think that’s entirely my fault; I just don’t think he’s always that clear.  lots of ornate imagery that, at least I think, deliberately create discords in meaning.  so I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to really understand, as opposed to what is supposed to just impress (on) me.

some of the poems I do “get” are ones involving Christ imagery, esp. the Incarnation narrative, and the overall Christian “myth” (not used pejoratively).  my favorite so far may be the pattern poem “Vision and Prayer,” but that’s way too long to reproduce here.  but this one, “Before I Knocked,” was the first one that allowed me to understand Thomas better.  there’s a bit of pagan mythology thrown in here, which he apparently loved just as much, but it’s mostly Christian, though not necessarily orthodox…

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.

quite lovely.  even we AASHs (atheist/agnostic secular humanists — fyi, I just made that up) can appreciate myths now and then (again, as in “sacred narrative,” not necessarily “false story”), esp. ones we are familiar with, and ones that are so heavy with images and symbols ripe to be reworked and reinterpreted. I sort of wish I belonged to a culture with a more mixed mythic background, maybe indigenous American or Nordic, so that there would be more out there as cultural capital.  not to mention holiday carols!

the uncaring smear

PZ Myers is not one to pull punches when commenting on religion, so none of this should come as any real shock (if you know him, that is).  it’s not necessarily new, but it’s certainly interesting.  and funny (to me, at least).  today he has written about John Shelby Spong who, Myers writes, is “essentially an atheist who skims off a bit of the moldy skin of the rotten fruit of religion, and tells us how pretty the colors are … thereby making an implicit argument to keep the decaying garbage around.”

but his characterizations about someone like JSS and numerous other super-academic-liberal-not-really-religious-in-any-tangible-way-but-religious-apologists-of-whatever-sort-nonetheless are not only occasionally funny, but also sometimes insightful (and dead on, I would add).  continuing about JSS, he writes,

He’s like Karen Armstrong, so taken with the language of religion that they’re willing to ignore the substance. When you’ve reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he’s dead. Get over it and move on. And deceased figments don’t need a weepy wake or much sympathy for the family.

there are a few recently coined clever ideas that hopefully will start making their way into these seemingly endless debates (not that I really care to follow all of it or even participate, apart from on a personal, sincere, give-and-take level).  the first is Daniel Dennett’s phrase “deepity,” which refers to a statement with two meanings, one true but superficial, and the other sounding profound but ultimately meaning nothing.  this relates to his take on people like Karen Armstrong and others who utter all kinds of deliberately confounding and contradictory statements about religion and god, hoping that somehow, in our befuddlement, we’ll just nod and agree.  or at least be impressed.

the second comes from PZ and is called “theological whack-a-mole.”  it has to do with his response to some Christians that atheists should take the religious (biblical) claims of people (they specifically meant Christians like them) more seriously, paying more attention to historical context and broader narratives (e.g. Christological).  his response, while more scathing than anything I would ever dare to offer, is worth pasting in full:

What is “the” Christological narrative? There is none, or rather, there’s a thousand of them. We know the context, too — that the Bible is an evolving mess of over-interpreted poetry and tribal stories and crackpot history. Why you guys choose to selectively declare one interpretation of one subset of the conglomeration to be the absolute truth as dictated by anthropomorphic vapor, while another arbitrary subset is archaic and doesn’t apply anymore, is completely incomprehensible … not just to us, but to you, too.

We atheists actually do address the claims fervently held by millions of people. The sneaky trick the theological wankers pull, though, is that once we’ve smacked them down, they announce, “Oh, no — we didn’t mean those millions of believers. They’re stupid. We meant these other millions of believers.” It’s a big game of whack-a-mole. What you call “obscure Old Testament laws,” someone else will call the core of their faith. What you value as the “Christological narrative,” a member of yet another sect will call pretentious confabulations.

Atheists just cut through all the noise and call it all sewage.

And some of us see no reason to be nice to sewage, and get really cranky at demands to respect your steaming pile of ordure.

ouch.  not the best representative of a fruitful conversation with someone, especially not someone you care about, but I think it’s a decent response to the Spongs and Armstrongs and Eagletons out there.

anyway, here’s PZ with Mr. Deity.

the Bible: honorably primitive?

a newly resurfaced (or at least newly repurchased) letter of Albert Einstein is making a bit of a buzz in some atheist and religious circles, notably for a few choice lines:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this….

the relevance of this is due to the use by some religious pundits of a few quotes from Einstein that supposedly enlist him in some shapeless god-fearing camp, temporarily and conveniently unclear on doctrinal matters, as opposed to some non- or anti-religious camps that point out Einstein’s letters, in which he is sometimes pretty clear on what he thinks about religion or god.

if you search for “Einstein and god,” you will get any number of collections of quotes or articles trying to prove something one way or the other (even a few laying out what he thought and then telling you why he was wrong).  he clearly used god language now and then, and referred to himself as a “deeply religious person,” but this was usually within the context of speaking about a sense of awe before the physical universe.  some have characterized his “religion” as a pantheism of sorts, a god of the philosophers, but not a personal, interfering god.

does it really matter all that much?  not really.  but it’s nice whenever personal letters find their way to the light (I say this, of course, heading toward a library program in archives, perhaps).  and I think a quote like this would be a nice balance to some of the quotes you sometimes see from Einstein about god outside of churches (New England ones, at least).

the entire transcript can be found here.

being good without god: Daniel Dennett

Slate has a series called meaningoflife.tv, which features interviews by Robert Wright of scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers on issues of morality, religion, life and death, and so on.  I’ll occasionally be commenting on some of them.  the first is a series of brief interviews (or brief topics of longer interviews) on the question of being good without god.  that is, the idea of morality without appeal to an absolute, revealed standard of right and wrong.

the first up is Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and head of cognitive studies at Tufts.  (he’s also known as being one of the “four horsemen.”)  when asked about whether he thinks it’s necessary to believe in God or any sort of transcendence for us to be good or moral, Dennett brings up arithmetic, which, he says, we didn’t invent but discovered.  it would be true whether we knew of it or not, and it is true anywhere you go in the universe.  it is transcendent and true in a Platonic sense (though maybe not base-10 arithmetic, he qualifies).  but what about a universal, Platonic-ish principle for morality for intelligent beings?  on this subject, he claims to be agnostic.

he imagines that if the search of extraterrestrial intelligent life pays off and we are able to have a conversation with aliens, we could possibly share, along with arithmetic, some understanding of morality or ethics that is not “might makes right,” “this is what our grandparents did so it’s what we’re gonna do,” or “historical accident.”  overall, he believes there could be a basis for a universal ethics that is transcendent.  or at least he doesn’t really see why there couldn’t be one.

to explain this, he moves to an idea he presented in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that of “forced moves” or a “Good Trick” — those things or aspects of culture that would (or will) repeatedly be discovered or that will be “happened upon” by evolution when it’s in the vicinity because of their “truth.”  this is related to the idea of convergent evolution — traits that appear in disparate species due to their functional benefits, such as wings or certain body shapes.

Wright then queries about whether this could be added as proof to the idea that evolution has a direction, that “there’s some point to the whole exercise.”  Dennett thinks no.  he thinks it just happens.

my thoughts: the idea of a “Good Trick” is a very intersting one, in evolutionary biology as well in issues of human morality.  but any discussion of this idea would have to be based on a complex understanding of our biology and human nature in the true natural sense.  evolutionary convergence happens because of the genuine physical restrictions on biological beings and within this world — on a different planet, under different conditions, and working with different elements or DNA, I imagine there would be an entirely different bag of “tricks.”  so to use this idea, we have to continue to understand our biology and our ever-complex brains in order to understand how our minds work and how/why we behave as we do.  then we’ll be closer to understanding any potential universal code of human morality, or at least the range of behaviors and beliefs we tend to share.

as for the extraterrestrial part, I’m not sure how to even begin thinking about that…

religion & intellectual dishonesty

someone I sort of knew from HDS posted this quote from Terry Eagleton (via Stanley Fish) today and it has been driving me somewhat crazy, esp. since another friend, someone I respect, seems to like it and agree with it:

…we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

I find this to be untrue and intellectual dishonest on a number of fronts.  a rather obvious one is atheism or “scientism” as reflecting and extending capitalism.  schwat?!?  maybe insofar as each thrives on a marketplace of competing ideas, but otherwise I think it can easily be rejected out of hand, or especially on historical grounds.  most progressive socialist (and even anarchist) thinkers in the Western world were quite the atheists.  but even if you select a few individual examples, the comparison doesn’t really make any sense and probably is playing off the current global woes of capitalism.

most troubling, however, is the criticism of “faith in the power of unaided reason” or contentless progress and the valuelessness of a secularist/naturalistic/”scientist” outlook.  as if the history of most religious traditions–especially the one Eagleton winds up defending!–have a respectable record of leading social change.  Fish (and maybe Eagleton) also criticizes these outlooks as being superficial and tending to the perpetuation of the status quo–something that is patently false.

it is quite baffling that someone would want to criticize nonreligious “candidates for guidance” that have often done a far better job in promoting social change in the last century plus for perpetuating the status quo while criticizing their “unaided reason” while ignoring the fact those religious traditions most often opposed so many of the changes in society we now all consider to be essential.  so what has been the “aided reason” of these traditions?  why have they failed spectacularly in the last few centuries?  and how dare they try to usurp the progress made at the expense of those traditions and despite their best efforts and then claim that other “candidates” are valueless and hubristic?

as I posted in the facebook exchange, what I most want is more brutal honesty about all these “candidates” and a critical look at their track records and what they have to say about and contribute to the world today, with a willigness on everyone’s part to disregard what we find disagreeable and preserve what is best.  but I cannot understand how a religious person and adherent of a particular tradition–esp. Christianity–could enage in this activity without being devastated by that track record.  and as much as I don’t want to throw myself headlong into the current religion vs. science and religion/atheism debates today, I really cannot stomach intellectual dishonesty of this sort and efforts to repackage what was won at the expense of a religion as part and parcel of that tradition and as a weapon for winning some new cultural war.

first atheist house of…ur, no-god?

an interesting NY Magazine article entitled, “If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?” the focus of the article is on whether or not atheists need a “church” of sorts in order to organize. while it is true that so-called “nouveau atheists,” along with brights/secular humanists/agnostics and co., have been focusing in recent months on the “positive” side of their views (as opposed to the always critical, negative approach), I think the discussion needs to be addressed to everyone. there shouldn’t be a new club formed; rather, the views of all freethinkers should be emphasized as being part of our shared cultural and intellectual heritage. it should always be about open and reasoned debate, thriving on disagreement and maximum input (but somehow hopefully different than the present state, where “maximum input” means as many people yelling and posting in all-caps as possible…).

Christopher Hitchens has been known to dismiss the idea of organizing and having “atheist” meetings on the basis that such thinkers should not need to get together to reaffirm each other on a weekly basis. that tends to have to opposite effect of what I just described (in terms of thriving on disagreement and reaosned debate).

in short: do atheists need a church? no. a book club, fine. conversations over coffee, great. overall I agree with Iaian Pender: “I think a knowing wink and a smile is enough.”