An excellent discovery
Chris Hedges’ book I don’t believe in atheists. My copy has been pre-owned, as they say (I ordered from Powells, since it isn’t published in this country) by a believer in scientism, whose pencil annotations are most illuminating. The book grew out of a public debate with Hitchens (whom the author, in an an interview with Salon, dismissed as an Ann Coulter of the left) and Sam Harris; and it’s interesting to see the annotations of a true unbeliever who can’t see anything wrong with a faith in progress. I will have to write more, lots more, but this is the first book I have come across which sees the New Atheists as morally outrageous – which of course they are.
Two lovely quotes from the book, one Hedges; the second, apparently, from Ibsen
To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been thing to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is catastrophic.
and
To live is to war against the trolls.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 8:16 am and is part of God, Literature, USA. There is a feed for responses you can follow.
Told you.
I don’t think it’s quite as good as WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, also by Hedges, which is a masterpiece (and has some very fine Catullus translations in it, too)
‘To live is to war against trolls’ is a centrepiece quote in one of Robertson Davies’ books too – I think the middle part of THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY.
JamesP on: December 3rd, 2008Morally outrageous? That’s absurd. The delusion of god doesn’t give us morality. On what basis can you say that?
janm on: December 3rd, 2008James, yes: I had the war book already, and admire it.
Janm: Harris argues for torture; for killing people because they think funny; for first use of nuclear weapons against Muslims. All these things are morally outrageous. They don’t follow necessarily from atheism. But that’s not the point.
Nick Humphrey and Dawkins have played with the idea that children should be removed from fundamentalist parents for no other reason than their parents’ religious belief. That’s also outrageously tyrannical.
acb on: December 3rd, 2008On that basis, of course, Christianity and most other religions are at least equally morally outrageous (possibly the Jains deserve a pass).
Had you instead said, “some individual New Atheists take some morally outrageous positions”,[1] it would have been difficult to object. But if you want to make a blanket judgement about the New Atheists as a group, I don’t it’s fair to go beyond “they can be tedious”.
fn1. You’re right that Harris is a good example of this, of course. An ihm ist ein mittelalterlicher Dominikaner verlorengegangen.
Mrs Tilton on: December 3rd, 2008Dennett, though in other ways a bullying arsehole, should be exempted from these strictures. He’s too clever not to notice when he’s advocating genocide, though perhaps we ought to jump up and down and demand that he distance himself from the advocates of violence. But I think that Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins might reasonably be described as the core New Atheists.
Since it is a vital part of their schtick that they are morally superior to the Christians, I don’t think that the misdeeds of mediaeval Dominicans let them off the hook. And, you know, there is moral progress among Dominicans. I don’t know any now who would behave like their spiritual forebears.
I’m tired and probably not making much sense, but I think that anyone who wants to extirpate religion—and that’s what most of these guys would like to see happen—is wandering into morally dangerous territory. Voltaire didn’t know better. After Stalin, we do.
acb on: December 3rd, 2008“this is the first book I have come across which sees the New Atheists as morally outrageous – which of course they are.”
I’d like to hear more about what you mean by “morally outrageous”. I’ve read far too many people who want me to believe that a man who criticizes religion is just as dangerous/intolerant as a religious fanatic. I hope this is not your point. The idea that there is no essential difference between a fundamentalist and someone who criticizes religion can of course be very convenient, but I think we should keep well away from it.
What about Marx, Freud and Bertrand Russell (“Why I’m not a Christian”) who all criticized religion – are they also morally outrageous?
“Dennett, though in other ways a bullying arsehole, should be exempted from these strictures. He’s too clever not to notice when he’s advocating genocide, though perhaps we ought to jump up and down and demand that he distance himself from the advocates of violence. But I think that Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins might reasonably be described as the core New Atheists.”
If Dennett is too clever, that leaves three of them who aren’t, right? Do you mean that Hitchens is advocating genocide? I’ve read his book and can’t remember anything about it. What page number did you find this on?
Håkan Lindgren on: December 3rd, 2008Not to speak for ACB, but to the extent there is anything new about the New Atheists it’s that they not only advocate atheism, but suggest that all non-secular humanist beliefs and practices are inherently dangerous to humanity. That’s morally outrageous, and the same criticism applies to those theists who can’t countenance any narratives other than their own. But that part is old news.
Marx and Freud both criticized religion, but each was wise enough to know that no change would come out of mere propaganda or polemics. (Freud correctly predicted quite the opposite effect of appeals to reason). They were both, as well, products of a time that invested far more faith in science than anyone today has any right being.
Chris Schoen on: December 3rd, 2008I think there might be less to the New Atheism, Andrew, than you suggest; certainly less genocide.
Dennett might FAIK be an arsehole, but I have never found him bullying. (Too clever by half? Sure. But many of us have learned to engage such people without weeping.)
Dawkins? One pardons him as one does Claudel. No, really; anyone who writes that beautifully deserves enormous slack, for all that I know there is much slack in his case to be taken up. And that’s if he were nought but a facile pen; but he is more. He was my first guide into a world more wonderful than Faerie, not least (but not only) for being real. I feel enormous gratitude to him for that and always will. So when he mounts his hobbyhorse, I won’t disown him, even if I do cast nervously about for relief as one would at a family gathering when an otherwise beloved uncle starts going on about The War.
Hitchens? Not quite at the pay grade of the rest of your bêtes noires, I’d say. Yes, he writes (or at least once did write) very well. But though one pardons Claudel, one is not so quick to pardon Céline. Hitchens fancies himself the latter-day Orwell, but he is, poor thing, only a latter-day Cockburn père. Still, his schoolboy antireligion is by far the least of his sins.
Indeed, other than Harris, the Zoolander of New Atheism, none of these men could fairly be accused of winking at murder, let alone genocide.
Now I find the lot of them, at least when they are wearing their New Atheist regalia, dismal and boring—and I largely agree with them about religion! If I could reduce to a minimum religion’s influence on public life, I’d be content. And if I achieved that I wouldn’t think it necessary to eradicate religion altogether, even if I had a magic wand that could do so without hurting anybody. But if I did have that magic wand, I’d be tempted to wave it anyway. Not, you understand, because I think it crucial to wipe out every last vestige of faith. Rather, simply to get those awful New Atheist bores finally to shut their cake holes.
Mrs Tilton on: December 3rd, 2008Dawkins’ writing has taken an abysmal turn, style-wise, in the last few years, mind you. A man in need of an editor.
JamesP on: December 4th, 2008Mrs T: I have been saving myself for you. Seriously. I had meant to comment on this for a while, and been distracted by the dreary necessities of earning a living. Also, anyone who could make that crack about Hitchens and Céline is well worht waiting for. I’m yours the moment you leave that dreary husband.
I think that Dawkins’ confidence that no atheist ever killed anyone for atheist reasons goes rather further than winking at murder. Her may never have read anything about the Spanish Civil War; he may never have read the Gulag archipelago or any other book about Stalinism; he may never have asked himself what happened to the Buddhists or Muslims of China and he’s most unlikely to have listened if anyone told him. But he might, you know, have wondered a little about the historical background to the Power and the Glory.
Similarly, Hitchens is sanguine in every way about the killing of Muslims. For all the fuss about the secular federalist omelette he’s making in Iraq, the bit he gets really passionate about is smashing the necessary eggs.
I share your admiration entirely for the for prose style of the early Dawkins and for his extraordinary capacity to make wonder out of nothing. But—leaving god out of it entirely for a moment—when he talks about religion, he talks about stuff I know and partially understand; and simply considered as sociology, as history, or as history of ideas, let alone as philosophy—it’s all pernicious nonsense. The fact that he’s partially right about the importance of religion only makes the nonsense more pernicious.
acb on: December 6th, 2008Håkan, briefly: as Chris Schoen said, it is the intention to extirpate religion entirely which is outrageous. In the case of Hitchens, it is the setting up of religious believers of any sort as sub-humans who threaten all of civilisation. If they do that, how is civilisation to respond? With measures which, if they took them, we would condemn as genocidal. His support for the Iraq war, which, though not genocide, is certainly a monstrous war crime, is framed very largely as a narrative against “Islamism” and is justified by his support for secular Iraqis, who have about as much voice in Iraqi politics today as do leprechauns.
acb on: December 6th, 2008“Nick Humphrey and Dawkins have played with the idea that children should be removed from fundamentalist parents for no other reason than their parents’ religious belief. That’s also outrageously tyrannical.”
There are heated discussions, after the Baby P and Shannon Matthews cases- as to whether children should be removed from other parents if the parents show other forms of misbehaviour. Is that outrageously tyrannical? Is religious fundamentalism sometimes as damaging to a child as other deranged attitudes in their parents or carers? If a parent raises their child to believe that the rest of the human species is inferior for religious reasons and willl be tortured for eternity and quite right too, does that constitute child abuse? What of a child who is raised to believe that- say- jews or some other set of people are evil and ought to be killed? What is the moral difference in the two sets of parents? Should that child be left in their parents’ care?
“I think that Dawkins’ confidence that no atheist ever killed anyone for atheist reasons goes rather further than winking at murder. ”
Roger on: December 6th, 2008Why does it even go that far?
As far as I can tell- I’m not an admirer of his non-biological works so I haven’t read many of them- Dawkins distinguishes between atheism as non-belief in god and atheism as belief in no god. The latter often accompanies and is caused by other beliefs- held as irrationally and certainly as religious beliefs- which inspire behaviour as murderous as most religious beliefs. Dawkins’ problem here is that he assumes that the choice is religion or rationality, whereas humans mostly just aren’t rational.
Andrew:
Just because I criticize something doesn’t mean I want to exterminate it. Do the four atheists really say that they want to “extirpate” religion? If they do, please show me some quotations and I will shut up. If you can’t show that their stated purpose is to exterminate religion, instead of merely criticizing its flaws, it looks like you are using a cheap rhetorical trick, which could be used in just about any argument. If I’m complaining about my neighbours when they play their favourite music at maximum volume at 3 AM, you could say “So, you want to exterminate your neighbours?”
I’m not going to write endless comments on your blog arguing about atheism, but I would like to say this:
Despite all their talk about spiritual values and a life after death, our religions are very much interested in power over tangible, everyday things in the present, mortal life, such as marriage, divorce, education, abortions and so on. It’s almost as if the bishops and imams haven’t been paying attention to their own teaching. The religious beliefs which are getting louder today have not very much in common with the outlook on life that you would find in, for instance, John of the Cross (in my inadequate translation he has said things like “to achieve enjoying everything, wish to enjoy nothing”, “to achieve being everything, wish to be nothing”).
Instead, what goes for religion often looks suspiciously like politics – politics about marriage, abortions, education, etc. The advantage of calling your politics religion is that you make it impossible to touch – religious beliefs can’t be criticized, only respected. But to the extent that our religions are interested in worldly power they should expect to be criticized just like any other power hungry worldly power – political parties, corporations or nations.
Håkan Lindgren on: December 7th, 2008Håkan, I don’t want to clutter this up with familiar arguments, either. And I certainly don’t want to argue about the role of religion in politics, or rather the fact that religious groupings function often as political ones. Of course they do, and other groupings tend to work the same way. I quite see that this is obnoxious to those of us on the outside, and that it leads to all sorts of corruptions of power. No argument there. Of course, the same thing is true of all known political arrangements. I think that all political movements, on a large scale, need their myths: it is a very widespread and general criticism of managerial politics that it is uninspiring because it has none.
As for your demand for extirpation quotes – I will have to get back to you about that. I have a few blissful hours today in which I can write and think about things other than atheism and I mean to make the most of them.
acb on: December 7th, 2008Roger: we’re writing in the middle of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the UNDHR, and you think that it’s reasonable to break up families because of what the parents believe, rather than what they do?
As for Dawkins pretending atheist massacres didn’t happen, or that if they were massacres they can be reclassified as really religious—well, yes, I do think that counts as winking at them if not worse.
acb on: December 7th, 2008Andrew, focussing only on the Spanish Civil War; I don’t think you’re going to get very far proffering that conflict as evidence of killings-for-atheism’s-sake.
Yes, clergymen were killed, and I am quite willing to concede that many of those killings cannot be justified even by the standards of a people at war against an existential threat. But those loyal to the legitimate Spanish state were facing an existential threat. They were defending against an attempt by fascist terrorists to destroy Spanish democracy and replace it with a mass-murdering slave state, your basic boot-in-the-face-forever affair (and at that, of course, the traitors ultimately succeeded, to the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives over many decades). And the RC church, with one crucial exception that we shall address presently, was an integral member of that conspiracy and a key enabler of the fascists (and in some cases, active participants in their depredations). (And lest we forget, not every Spaniard loyal to the Republic was a atheist.)
Murder, even of a priest, can never be justified, But any claim that all killings of priests by Spanish loyalists were unjustified in a war for survival—in short, that all such killings were murder—is naive. These men were not killed solely because they wore dog-collars.
And if you doubt that, consider the exception I mentioned: RC priests in the Basque country. Though deeply religious and socially conservative, unlike their colleagues in the rest of Spain they remained by and large loyal to the Republic. If your hypothesis were correct, we should expect to find Basque priests killed by loyalist forces at roughly the same rate as priests elsewhere in Spain. Yet they were not. I daresay loyalists might have killed some priests in the Basque country but if so, I am not aware of it. I am, however, aware of a number of Basque priests killed by the franquista rebels; presumably, in the name of something other than atheism.
Mrs Tilton on: December 7th, 2008‘a atheist’? Now that’s embarrassing.
I should, of course, have written ‘a natheist’.
Mrs Tilton on: December 8th, 2008Roger,
Dawkins’ problem here is that he assumes that the choice is religion or rationality, whereas humans mostly just aren’t rational
Don’t know about Dawkins, but your problem is imagining that all is well and good so long as one is rational.
Andrew has provoked me to think about the SCW and that dreadful little Galician, Franco. But as long as he has brought the topic up, your contention deserves contemplation in its light. Franco believed lots of irrational nonsense. He believed, for example, that God (in its RC version) was offended when landowners were prevented by a democratically-elected parliament from starving their tied labourers. He believed that a conspiracy of communists, freemasons and Jews was plotting to ensure Spain remained a liberal democracy for ever (as though that were a bad thing). He believed that unleashing a legion of North African Muslims to rape Spanish Christian women and murder Spanish Christian men was the ‘Christian redemption’ of Spain.
But enough of this essentially superficial irrationality. If you look at the very core of Franco’s being, he was rational as the day is long—and that rationality was vastly worse than his many irrationalities. When it came to the thing that mattered more to him than anything else—getting and maintaining absolute dictatorial power under conditions of maximal humiliation to his enemies—Franco was supremely, ruthlessly, and successfully rational. And he got all he wanted, and died in his bed an old man. Would that he had been less rational—it might then have been possible to kill him before 1939 had run its course.
Mrs Tilton on: December 8th, 2008” you think that it’s reasonable to break up families because of what the parents believe, rather than what they do?”
Roger on: December 8th, 2008I think you will find most families raise their children to believe what they believe and people do tend to do what they think right. Would you favour leaving children in a family which teaches that other races are the devil’s spawn and inferior and ought to be exterminated, Andrew? I deliberately choose an extreme case, because I don’t know- or claim to know- where you can draw the line on a doctrine’s vileness, but if you allow parents absolute right to teach their children to follow their beliefs sooner or later you will face a dilemma.
Mrs. Tilton: surely in the Spanish civil War clergymen were killed because in most of Spain the roman catholic church was a large landowner and was every bit as avaricious and harsh to the peasantry or landless labourers as other landowners- according to some observers even more so. In the Basque country, whatever the reason, individual clergymen tended to identify with the working class rather than the upper classes and so were not- and were not seen as- their enemies. Incidentally, Franco didn’t believe “that unleashing a legion of North African Muslims to rape Spanish Christian women and murder Spanish Christian men was the ‘Christian redemption’ of Spain”, even if he was a sincere christian himself. The people raped and/or murdered weren’t christian but atheistic anarchists, socialists and communists and so- in the eyes of many christians- were worse than muslims and deserved all they got.
It’s quite possible that Franco didn’t believe any of the nonsense he espoused- Andrea Barea, who served under Franco in Morocco and admired him in many ways, suggested that he probably wasn’t a fascist or personally religious but adopted both attitudes for his convenience.
” When it came to the thing that mattered more to him than anything else—getting and maintaining absolute dictatorial power under conditions of maximal humiliation to his enemies—Franco was supremely, ruthlessly, and successfully rational.”
Roger on: December 8th, 2008…which is evidence for the truth of Hume’s claim that reason is always the servant of the passions and never their master. What was rational about “getting and maintaining absolute dictatorial power under conditions of maximal humiliation to his enemies” or wanting to get it in the first place? I don’t think Dawkins understands that our human desires and urges are irrational in their bases and so- as I said- assumes that the alternatives are religion or rationality which just isn’t true.
“As for Dawkins pretending atheist massacres didn’t happen, or that if they were massacres they can be reclassified as really religious—well, yes, I do think that counts as winking at them if not worse.”
Roger on: December 8th, 2008Sorry- didn’t go on my last post for some reason:
How many atheist massacres have there been? How many massacres were the perpetrators killed just and only because they were atheists and thought that believers should be killed?
I don’t think you’ll find many, Andrew. Some of the most murerous massacres in history were committed by atheists, but they were atheists as a consequence of other beliefs, not simple atheists- people who don’t believe there is a god. The problem is that belief- any belief- in some kind of “higher purpose”, no matter how absurd or even vile, seems to be necessary- or at least advantageous- to humans as individuals and the behaviour it inspires is very harmful to other humans and perhaps- i’d say almost certainly- to the human species.
Sorry for being late into this very civilised mini-brouha, but surely all sane people know that atheists are the running lapdogs of religious intolerance. If you define yourself by what you don’t believe in, why expect a trouble-free life…?
Gunnar on: December 8th, 2008just a holding note: will come back later.
acb on: December 9th, 2008I’ve always thought it equally important to consider not only what one person’s belief system is (religious, political) but how they use it to define themselves from others. It could even be nationalism, race, gender. You can define your self as much by who you are as who you are not; they can be equally motivating.
Don on: December 9th, 2008Don, that’s true, except I don’t want to be “motivating”, because I’m not an atheist. I fear this is an old Jonathan Miller spiel (I think…) but why on earth would one go to the soul-destroying trouble of defining oneself as a non-believer in, um, trolls, or a living Elvis, or witches, or Tottenham Hotspur…?
Gunnar on: December 9th, 2008Surely the important thing about how you define or identify yourself isn’t whether it is motivating but what it motivates, Don. With atheists, where- as I and others have said- there’s a difference between people who would define themselves and be defined as “believing in no god” and those who would define themselves and be defined as “not believing in god” it might be better to distinguish between atheists for the first category and sceptics for the second.
Roger on: December 10th, 2008‘Atheists are the running lapdogs of religious intolerance.’ What comes next? Perhaps a statement to the effect that ‘revelation is not like a dinner party or painting a picture’?
Fragano Ledgister on: December 22nd, 2008Leave a Reply