Re: The following article about the newest kind of Atheists
There is an argument for religion -not necessarily for "God"- that has
been
overlooked in most if not all debates. It is inexplicable that it has been
overlooked
because the grounds for this position are little different than the grounds
of
identity politics, which has been alive and well for a very long time.
Here is the argument :
There is a major problem with Atheism, it requires you to repudiate your
heritage.
It requires you to reject the good in all those religious people who
effectively
"made you" over the long centuries, medieval monks who transcribed books
that became part of our intellectual legacy, ancient people who created
foundational myths that have had many uses over the years from the arts
and literature to Stravinsky and Freud, more recent people who gave all
of us the Red Cross, the (Baptist) University of Chicago, and the overt
faith of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in fighting the Depression
and in fighting WWII. This list is ridiculously incomplete.
What does an Atheist "do" with Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Florence
Nightingale, and so many others? Yes, you can also ask, and it is an
important
question, what does a believer do with David Hume, even with the insights
of more modern Atheists like Sam Harris, -and I admire both of them
greatly-
but let us not overlook the obvious: There have been and still are far
more
men and women of faith who have contributed to the stock of good in the
world than there have been Atheists who have done so.
There is also one's family. But about this it seems to me that believers
are
just as wrong, by and large, as Atheists. I'm not 100% sure about this,
but in looking back over the millennia, my family has included Norse
Pagans,
Goddess worshipping Hebrews from pre-monarchy Canaan, people who
regarded the Greek myths as part of their religion, Asian animists, and,
of course, medieval Catholics and Reformation-era Protestants.
I would not be here today except for a combination of lucky breaks,
a lot of hard work, creativity, endurance, courage, you-name-it, of all
those people who eventually passed their DNA down to me. So the
question must be: What was it about the beliefs and values of all those
people, extending back to the Neolithic era, who made me possible?
Needless to say, everyone should ask the exact same question
about themselves. If you don't, what does that say about you?
Yes, people can be mistaken in their beliefs; there should be no argument
about that at all. But to say that a religion includes mistakes is not the
same
thing as saying that all of religion is a mistake. And this being the case,
what about the need to extract the good in your heritage, which, if you
go back even to the 19th century and are from a 20th century Atheist
family,
almost certainly included devout believers. On what grounds can a
modern-day
Atheist disown his or her ancestors?
In a sense Atheism is treason to one's family. I would add that any form of
religious exclusionism is also the same thing. That is, "my religion is
the
only true religion" is indefensible. That still leaves the option of saying
that "my religion is the best religion," but best does not mean "only."
None of this speaks to questions about the existence of God or the Tao
or the Dharma or the divinity of Christ, or whether the Holy Spirit is
a Goddess, or any such questions. The point derives from Durkheim
but looks at individuals instead of communities. You would not exist
except for your religious ancestors. You owe them respect, don't you?
How can you show them respect if you completely repudiate the
faith -and faiths- they lived for?
For me the task is identifying the good in all the religions that were
responsible for my existence, a chain that extends back thousands of years.
How about you ?
Billy
Richard Dawkins has lost: meet the new new atheists
Theo Hobson ("The Spectator," April 13, 2013)
The atheist spring that began just over a decade ago is over, thank God.
Richard Dawkins is now seen by many, even many non-believers, as a joke
figure, shaking his fist at sky fairies. He’s the Mary Whitehouse of our day.
So what was all that about, then? We can see it a bit more clearly now. It
was an outpouring of frustration at the fact that religion is maddeningly
complicated and stubbornly irritating, even in largely secular Britain. This
frustration had been building for decades: the secular intellectual is
likely to feel somewhat bothered by religion, even if it is culturally weak.
Oh, she finds it charming and interesting to a large extent, and loves a
cosy carol service, but religion really ought to know its place. Instead it
dares to accuse the secular world of being somehow -deficient.
The events of 9/11 were the main trigger for the explosion of this latent
irritation. There was a desire to see Islamic terrorism as the symbolic
synecdoche of all of religion. On one level this makes some sense: does not all
religion place faith above reason? Isn’t this intrinsically dangerous? Don’
t all religions jeopardise secular freedom, whether through holy wars or
faith schools? On another level it is absurd: is the local vicar, struggling
to build community and help smelly drunks stay alive, really a force for
evil — even if she has some illiberal opinions? When such questions arise, a
big bright ‘Complicated’ sign ought to flash in one’s brain. Instead, in
the wake of 9/11, many otherwise thoughtful people opted for simplicity
over complexity. They managed to convince themselves that religion is
basically bad, and that the brave intellectual should talk against it. (This
preference for seeming tough and clear over admitting difficult complexity is
really cowardice, and believers are prone to it too.)
The success of five or six atheist authors, on both sides of the Atlantic,
seemed to herald a strong new movement. It seemed that non-believers were
tired of all the nuance surrounding religion, hungry for a tidy narrative
that put them neatly in the right.
Atheism is still with us. But the movement that threatened to form has
petered out. Crucially, atheism’s younger advocates are reluctant to compete
for the role of Dawkins’s disciple. They are more likely to bemoan the new
atheist approach and call for large injections of nuance. A good example is
the pop-philosopher Julian Baggini. He is a stalwart atheist who likes a bit
of a scrap with believers, but he’s also able to admit that religion has
its virtues, that humanism needs to learn from it. For example, he has
observed that a sense of gratitude is problematically lacking in secular
culture, and suggested that humanists should consider ritual practices such as
fasting. This is also the approach of the pop-philosopher king, Alain de
Botton. His recent book Religion for Atheists rejects the ‘boring’ question of
religion’s truth or falsity, and calls for ‘a selective reverence for
religious rituals and concepts’. If you can take his faux-earnest prose style,
he has some interesting insights into religion’s basis in community,
practice, habit.
And liberal punditry has softened. Polly Toynbee’s younger sisters, so to
speak, are wary of seeing all of religion as a misogynist plot. When Zoe
Williams attacks religious sexism or homophobia she resists the temptation to
widen the attack and imply that all believers are dunces or traitors.
Likewise Tanya Gold recently ridiculed the idea of religion as a force for
evil.
‘The idea of my late church-going mother-in-law beating homosexuals or
instituting a pogrom is obviously ridiculous, although she did help with
jumble sales and occasionally church flowers.’
All these writers admirably refuse to lapse into a comfortably sweeping
ideology that claims the moral high ground for unbelief. Life’s complicated,
they admit. Institutional religion might be dubious, but plenty of its
servants buck that trend with a flair that puts secular culture to shame. To
adapt a Katharine Hepburn line, the time to make up your mind about religion
is never.
In these pages Douglas Murray recently recounted debating alongside Richard
Dawkins and being embarrassed by the crudity of his approach. Murray is
not one of life’s fence-sitters: it must have occurred to him that atheism
has polemical possibilities that would suit him rather well. But he has the
sense to turn down the role of the new Christopher Hitchens. A polemical
approach to religion has swung out of fashion. In fact, admitting that
religion is complicated has become a mark of sophistication. Andrew Brown of
the
Guardian has played a role in this shift: he’s a theologically literate
agnostic who is scornful of crude atheist crusading, and who sometimes ponders
his own attraction to religion. On a more academic level, the philosopher
John Gray has had an influence: he is sceptical of all relics of
Enlightenment optimism, including the atheist’s faith in reason.
What, if anything, do these newer atheists have to say? In previous
generations, the atheist was keen to insist that non-believers can be just as
moral as believers. These days, this is more or less taken for granted. What
distinguishes the newer atheist is his admission that non-believers can be
just as immoral as believers. Rejecting religion is no sure path to virtue;
it is more likely to lead to complacent self-regard, or ideological
arrogance.
It might sound odd to cite Alain de Botton as a critic of complacent
self-regard, but this is central to his stated purpose. Attending to the
religious roots of humanism can prod us out of seeing secular humanism as
natural,
the default position, and incite us to ponder our need for discipline,
structure, community, and so on. At one point he commends the Christian
perspective, that we are ‘at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful
creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge
of
anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death — and most of
all in need of God’. Is this mere posturing at depth, for ultimately he does
not affirm the idea of our need of God in a sustained, serious way? Yes and
no: it is also a mark of the intelligent humanist’s desire to avoid
simplistic ideologising and attempt some honesty about the human condition.
The
key novelty of the newer atheism, perhaps, is its attentiveness to human
frailty.
The religious believer might say: we do not need humanism to tell us this.
Indeed not, but it might not hurt non-believers, inoculated against all
religious talk, to hear of it.
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