| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
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| Date: |
16 Aug 2005 05:22:47 PM |
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The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
Among the Non-Believers
The tedium of dogmatic atheism.
Chris Lehmann
http://www.reason.com/0501/cr.cl.among.shtml
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam
Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95
For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village
atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many
contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in
holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem,
on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing
opposition.
Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they've
ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in
thought that have furthered their cause-the Enlightenment and
Darwinism-have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass
allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the
seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom is too nuanced, too
unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold,
or wooly pagan.
The faithful, meanwhile, take some understandable offense at this broad
caricature of their mental capacity and ability to face life's harder
truths. So each side retreats to its corner, more convinced than ever
that the other is trafficking in pure, self-infatuated delusion for the
basest of reasons: Believers accuse skeptics and unbelievers of
thoughtless hedonism and nihilism; the secular set accuses the
believoisie of superstition and antiscientific senselessness.
Still, the vast majority of people comfortably tolerate the huge
paradoxes that so exercise the super-faithful and their
no-less-righteous secular pursuers. Americans are, after all, heir to
the greatest Enlightenment traditions in self-government and tolerance,
while also forming one of the most religion-mad polities in the
industrialized West.
Polls regularly show that at least 90 percent of Americans believe in
God; more than 80 percent agree that the deity is regularly performing
miracles in today's world; more than 80 percent also believe in an
afterlife and Heaven as an actual physical site for same. Even Jews,
who traditionally have not had any scriptural basis for believing in an
afterlife, have begun acquiring it as a sort of contact high. The
General Social Survey conducted annually by the National Opinion
Research Center at the University of Chicago found in the 1970s that a
mere 19 percent of American Jews confessed a belief in the afterlife;
in the 1990s, that proportion rose to an astonishing 56 percent.
In The End of Faith, Sam Harris, a UCLA philosophy grad student, has
seized on the all-too-real specter of Islamist terror as the occasion
to revisit the village atheist waterfront, compulsively itemizing all
the irrational, surly, atavistic features of faith. Never mind that,
among the world's one billion Islamic believers, the vast majority of
clerics and lay Muslims renounce the politicized brand of Islamist
dogma that extremists seek to inflict on Muslim and non-Muslim
populations alike. Identifying all Islamic beliefs with extreme
Islamist terror, as Harris does throughout the book, is a little like
saying that the Maoist guerrillas of Peru's Shining Path are cognate
with the Democratic Leadership Council.
Never mind, as well, that militantly atheist movements like Soviet and
Khmer Rouge communism-as well as volkish pagan ones like Nazism and
Tutsi supremacy-stand behind some of the worst mass violence of the
past century. Harris believes religious belief is the single greatest
threat to the survival of the human species. Religious faith is not
merely a maladaptive superstition, Harris writes; it is the "common
enemy" for all reasonable people concerned with the preservation of
the world as we know it. All extant religious traditions, to him, are
without exception "intellectually defunct and politically ruinous."
Harris' stolid-dare one say dogmatic?-failure to see anything in
contemporary religion other than the exclusive, world-conquering
fantasizing of monotheism at its worst keeps his book mired squarely in
a painfully anachronistic atheist's bill of indictments, cribbed in
most particulars from the heyday of Enlightenment skepticism. Like
Voltaire, Harris marvels that ardent believers actually worship words
when they think they profess fealty to God: "How can any person
presume that [theism] is the way the universe works?" Harris writes
in typical sputtering indignation. "Because it says so in our holy
books." Then, zeroing in for the kill, he asks, "How do we know our
holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so."
And even though the language from those books sounds occasionally
sonorous or beguiling, fueling that oceanic longing for repose within
the universe that religion is supposed to fulfill, we should not forget
for an instant that these words have been used to justify mass murder:
"Words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of
Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered
strangers by the thousands because of the inspiration he found
there."
Actually, all three of those authors routinely celebrated all manner of
grisly nonreligious state violence. And determined mass murderers can
find a rationale for killing in any handy text that comes along-say,
The Rights of Man or Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. But the
larger, painfully obvious objection to this argument is a structural
one: Reasoning backward under the impression that the destructive
results of this or that piece of writing invalidates its purchase on
our serious attention could make "E=mc squared" the most taboo
phrase in the language.
But Harris' central message is the peril inherent in faith,
especially in today's world. As he is fond of reiterating, Islamist
terror means religious faith has crossed the line, become simply too
dangerous to dally with. The September 11 attacks, for Harris,
effectively refute all religious schemes of knowledge. Indeed, he
launches The End of Faith with a sensational account of a hypothetical
suicide bombing and segues promptly to the key object lesson: "Why is
it so easy-you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy-to guess the
[attacker's] religion?"
And should this be too subtle an exercise, Harris concludes his litany
of Enlightenment-era objections to medieval models of piety with this
rhetorical wallop: "All pretensions to theological knowledge should
now be seen from the perspective of a man just beginning his day on the
one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001,
only to find his meandering thoughts-of family and friends, of
errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener-inexplicably
interrupted by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between
being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the
concrete below." Thus again are we instructed that the perpetrators
of this most heinous act were "men of faith-perfect faith, as it
turns out-and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible
thing to be."
Yet Harris, who is otherwise so singularly obsessed with the
single-bullet religious origins of every sort of human infamy, from
forced castration to child labor, makes no mention here that suicide
bombings were in fact originally the handiwork not of the Islamist
faithful but of the Sri Lankan communist guerillas known as the Tamil
Tigers. None of this, of course, is to downplay the grave and horrific
nature of the Islamist terror threat; it is, however, to suggest that
if this sort of historical causation is more complicated than Harris
asserts it to be, so it might just be the case that faith is not always
and everywhere "so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds
that it forms a perverse, cultural singularity-a vanishing point
beyond which rational discourse proves impossible."
Nor is it the case, to take Harris' emotional (and rather crassly
manipulative) example of the hideously sacrificed World Trade Center
worker, that 9/11 unambiguously demonstrates the pure irreducible
lethality of religious belief. If those opinion polls are any reliable
indication, most of the victims of the terrors that day proclaimed
faith in warlike, atavistic deities too. As many as 800 of them were
adherents of Islam, a religion that Harris flatly asserts is not
"compatible with civil society" (rather a cold comfort, one
supposes, as they too laid aside their early morning coffee to ponder
their sudden mortal doom).
How can it be that the 9/11 suicide bomber, whose spiritual principles
and hateful political practices are denounced in the highest reaches of
mainstream Islamic observance, is "a man of perfect faith," and
that the innocent victims of those attacks, Muslim, Jew, Christian,
Jain, or Hindu, are automatically symbols of defiled secularism?
Harris' protracted 9/11 set piece isn't even a credible account of
how the religious world was affected by the terror attacks (let alone
responded to them); so much the less is it the hard and fast measure of
"all pretensions to theological knowledge."
It's obvious, of course, that a certain derangement of Muslim dogma
prompted these men into terrible action, but there are also, again,
more complicated forces in play, involving (just for starters) the
ruinous course of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the deeply
antidemocratic and dissent-resistant political traditions of the Middle
East, and a Saudi monarchy and gerontocracy propelling many
middle-class young men to the religious fringe. None of these by itself
is an explanation of any of the hijackers' behavior, but neither is
something that is-in the actually existing real world, if not in
Harris' imagination-as broad and variegated as "faith."
It's necessary to insist upon this point in some detail because
Harris, as it happens, is only getting warmed up with the 9/11
scaremongering. He's ready to roll up his sleeves and endorse
pre-emptive assaults on both individual bad believers and dangerous
Islamist regimes by any means necessary. In a world-class show of
"this hurts me more than it hurts you" disingenuousness, Harris
makes it clear that the fault for this state of affairs resides
entirely with the believers he thinks we may have to kill. "Some
propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill
people for believing them.
This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an
ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place
their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion,
while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against
others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people."
If we must, more in sorrow than in anger, expunge Islamist thought by
offing its adherents one by one, so we must also gird ourselves for the
big coming conflict with a nuclear-armed Islamic power, which prompts
Harris to flights of hypothetical fancy worthy of Herman Kahn (if not
Dr. Strangelove's Gen. Buck Turgidson). After all, Harris reasons,
"There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an
Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons....Notions of
martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the
United States to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on
the brink of Armageddon."
Cautioning further that we would never know the actual whereabouts of
such lethal weaponry in the hands of a Paradise-addled Islamist power,
Harris presses blithely on to the unthinkable: "In such a situation,
the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first
strike of our own." He of course allows that this opening feint of
pre-emptive war could trigger a "genocidal crusade" among the
Islamic world's nuke-wielding imams, but to paraphrase our Vietnam
strategists, sometimes you have to destroy a planet in order to save
it.
In any event, it was the believers who started it. Calling this course
of events "perfectly insane," Harris once again didactically
marvels at how our own pie-eyed tolerance of faith has brought us to
this grimmest of all passes: "I have just described a plausible
scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated
on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with
Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns."
Here again, Harris glides right by historical precedent-a
well-advised move for his argument, since the only power that has used
nuclear weapons on civilian populations (up to and including the
zealots in Pakistan and India who now belong to the nuclear club) is
our own secular, Enlightenment-bred American republic, steeped in
pragmatic self-regard far afield from faith-induced deliriums of jihad
and martyrdom. And its war-ending rationale in 1945 was very much of a
piece with the shoot-first reasoning of Harris' current doomsday
scenario. Presumably, it meant a great deal to the dignity of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki's incinerated citizens to reflect that they were being
sacrificed not to mad faith, but to the prerogatives of a properly
calculated nuclear assault, on the part of a Western power that was
only rationally pursuing a marginal military advantage.
It is a notorious hazard of the village atheist's vocation to mimic
many of the worst features of the dogma he obsessively denounces. That
certainly is the case with The End of Faith. Harris wishes to convict
religious belief of mulish literalism, while attacking its tenets in
the most bluntly prosaic and anachronistic terms he can muster. Harris
attacks the believing world's maudlin wish fulfillments and faulty
logic-and winds up exploiting lurid imagined scenarios of the final
moments of 9/11 victims as an argument-stilling tactic. Harris
excoriates the religious worldview's foreshortened use of fact and
evidence, and produces ahistorical, misleading summaries of the most
basic features of Muslim belief, geopolitical conflict, and religious
thinking generally.
Most tellingly, The End of Faith derides the callow apocalyptic temper
of the monotheistic traditions, while effectively seeking to bully
readers into accepting nuclear Armageddon as a justified response to
rampant fundamentalism. Lord knows there's plenty to criticize, and
be alarmed by, in today's religious scene. But even if we posit with
Harris that faith is itself "the enemy," then it behooves any
tough-minded strategist to know the enemy. And while I'm far from a
believer myself, I'd also suggest that it behooves any
village-atheist counselor of high-stakes nuclear conflict to ponder the
Psalms of Pogo, in which it is written that we have met the enemy, and
he is us.
Chris Lehmann is features editor for New York magazine and author of
Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm Press).
http://www.reason.com/0501/cr.cl.among.shtml
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| User: "Woden" |
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| Title: Re: The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
16 Aug 2005 08:21:51 PM |
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wrote in news:1124230967.907886.292530
@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
Among the Non-Believers
The tedium of dogmatic atheism.
WTF is "dogmatic" atheism? I was never introduced to any dogma before I
became an atheist. Did I miss something?
For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village
atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many
contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in
holy writ.
As compared to the masses of village idiots that believe this "holy writ"
crap.
(snip remainder of crap from "words of idiocy")
--
Woden
"religion is a socio-political system for controlling people's thoughts,
lives and actions based on ancient myths and superstitions, perpetrated
through generations of subtle yet pervasive brainwashing."
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| User: "God" |
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| Title: Re: The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
17 Aug 2005 01:25:05 AM |
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Cometh the hour, cometh
who, with imperceptibly subtle footwork in alt.atheism, gave us this:
The faithful, meanwhile, take some understandable offense at this broad
caricature of their mental capacity and ability to face life's harder
truths.
What mental capacity? What truths? Do tell, Turds, instead of just
pasting quotes.
David Silverman F.L.A.H.N. aa #2208
Either religion goes or civilisation does. It's that simple.
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| User: "*nemo*" |
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| Title: Re: The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
16 Aug 2005 06:55:19 PM |
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In article <1124230967.907886.292530@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wrote:
The tedium of dogmatic atheism.
Yes... let's talk tedium. The unending, crushing sameness of all these
threads posted by "wordsoftruth114"
OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod....
My head's about to explode!!!!!!!!!
--
Nemo - EAC Commissioner for Bible Belt Underwater Operations.
Atheist #1331 (the Palindrome of doom!)
BAAWA Knight! - One of those warm Southern Knights, y'all!
Charter member, SMASH!!
http://home.earthlink.net/~jehdjh/Relpg.html
Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus
Quotemeister since March 2002
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| User: "Uncle Buck" |
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| Title: Re: The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
16 Aug 2005 10:01:36 PM |
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On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 23:55:19 GMT, *nemo*
<nemo0037@earthlink.dieSPAM.net> wrote:
In article <1124230967.907886.292530@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wordsoftruth114@email.com wrote:
The tedium of dogmatic atheism.
Yes... let's talk tedium. The unending, crushing sameness of all these
threads posted by "wordsoftruth114"
OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod OhGod....
My head's about to explode!!!!!!!!!
Yes, atheism is _so_ tedius, what with new discoveries on a reality
that's still as mysterious to us as it was on day one every single
day. And yet, _this_ wouldn['t be "tedium" <cue the churchly piano
music>:
Dude A: "Dude B, what do you want to do today?"
Dude B: "I think since we're in Heaven and all, Dude A, that you and I
should go sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy' down by the Throne of Gawd(TM)."
Dude A: "Okay, let's go..."
<Next morning>
Dude A: "Dude B, what do you want to do today?"
Dude B: "I think since we're in Heaven and all, Dude A, that you and I
should go sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy' down by the Throne of Gawd(TM)."
Dude A: "Okay, let's go..."
<next morning>
Dude A: "Dude B, what do you want to do today?"
Dude B: "I think since we're in Heaven and all, Dude A, that you and I
should go sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy' down by the Throne of Gawd(TM)."
Dude A: "Okay, let's go..."
<ad nauseum...>
<ten-billion years later>
Dude A: "Dude B, what do you want to do today?"
Dude B: "I think since we're in Heaven and all, Dude A, that you and I
should go sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy' down by the Throne of Gawd(TM)."
Dude A: "Okay, let's go..."
<126516216578191654749274672595364285265195145327856176507461726417624141657189715671171756414765657047561756156717561756175641756417561891967175167694159417255456
centuries later>
Dude A: "Dude B, what do you want to do today?"
Dude B: "I think since we're in Heaven and all, Dude A, that you and I
should go sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy' down by the Throne of Gawd(TM)."
Dude A: "Okay, let's go..."
<2354627471227562755275163257264876581575564272476578191654749274672595364285265195145327856176507461726417624141657189715671171756414765657047561756156717561756175641756417561891967175167694159417255456126516216578191654749274672595364285265195145327856176507461726417624141657189715671171756414765657047561756156717561756175641756417561891967175167694159417255456126516216578191654749274672595364285265195145327856176507461726417624141657189715671171756414765657047561756156717561756175641756417561891967175167694159417255456
millenium later>
Dude A: "Dude B, what do you want to do today?"
Dude B: "I think since we're in Heaven and all, Dude A, that you and I
should go sing 'Holy, Holy, Holy' down by the Throne of Gawd(TM)."
Dude A: "Okay, let's go..."
<and on and on and <...> ...>
--
L8r,
Uncle Buck
_o-O=~_o-O=~_o-O=~_o-O=~_o-O=~_o-O=~_o-O=
http://surrenderingtothefall.blogspot.com
~=O-o_~=O-o_~=O-o_~=O-o_~=O-o_~=O-o_~=O-o
"I absolutely detest it when people quote
themselves." - Me
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
16 Aug 2005 08:54:27 PM |
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In episode <1124230967.907886.292530@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wordsoftruth114 burst into the room and exclaimed:
The tedium of dogmatic atheism.
Says the troll who has relentlessly posted OFF TOPIC and UNWANTED crap on
alt.atheism.
--
Mark K. Bilbo - a.a. #1423
EAC Department of Linguistic Subversion
Alt-atheism website at: http://www.alt-atheism.org
--------------------------------------------------
"Come to think of it, there are already a million
monkeys on a million typewriters, and the Usenet
is NOTHING like Shakespeare!" -- Blair Houghton
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: The Tedium Of Dogmatic Atheism. |
17 Aug 2005 01:23:29 AM |
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In article <AM2dnUz6MK5OBZ_eRVn-sw@megapath.net>,
"Mark K. Bilbo" <alt-atheism@org.webmaster> wrote:
In episode <1124230967.907886.292530@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wordsoftruth114 burst into the room and exclaimed:
The tedium of dogmatic atheism.
Says the troll who has relentlessly posted OFF TOPIC and UNWANTED crap on
alt.atheism.
Yeah. Speaking of boring...
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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