Is anyone else tired of Evangelical Atheism?

[NorthboundZax]

Boy, am I fried.

Once I realized (seems so obvious in retrospect) that Joseph Smith didn't have the kinds of prophetic power/authority he claimed to have, and that there was no more reason to credit many of the wild tales found in "the scriptures" than those found in a Hans Christian Andersen anthology, I presumed (amongst many other things) that I'd never again have to think much about the bizarro acid trip found at the end of the Bible, known as "Revelations". Yet, here we are, in an intellectual world dominated by THE FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE - Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.

This must be some sort of Golden Era for intellectually respectable atheism; and while I have no particular religious beliefs (I confine myself to religious hopes these days), and find many religious beliefs very silly, and have admired Chris Hitchens since I first saw him on CNN's "Crossfire" when I was a teenager, I'm really pretty fried.

One reason I'm fried is that the Four Horseman so easily - and I think, unthinkingly - move from an explanation of why many religious beliefs couldn't possibly be true (fair enough), to a discussion about why certain religious beliefs are evil (of course), to a claim that "religion in toto is evil". And that, my friends, is an unbearably crude judgment. Perhaps "religion" is an exaggerator or magnifier of certain human propensities, good and bad; but to assert, or even hint, that "religion is the root of all evil", or that it is equivalent to it, is to my mind, very ignorant.

Chris Hitchens, for example, sub-titles his book "How Religion Poisons Everything". What kind of claim is that? This is the same guy who, in his book, recounts the story of a Sudanese Muslim cabdriver who finds a large amount of money in the back of his cab, forgotten there by Hitchens's wife while a passenger, and who then makes a huge effort to figure out just who the money belonged to, and return it all to their house. Hitchens remarks that the cabdriver refused to take 10% of the money, on grounds that he was only doing his Islamic duty. Is it really MORE likely that the cabdriver would have done this good deed, if he was not religious at all? I'm not suggesting that agnostics or atheists would have taken it; at least I certainly don't think I would, and I haven't a clue who's running the universe or whether I'll ever have to account for my actions on earth. But it cannot be imagined that what the cabdriver understood about right and wrong, as derived from his religion, did not influence his actions. How then can "religion poison EVERYTHING"? What nonsense.

There are many people on this planet who, for whatever reason, find themselves lonely, incapable of self-discipline, depressed, etc., whose lives are transformed for the better, by any measure, by their conversion to a particular religion. How many drunks have to "feel the Holy Spirit" at the evangelical tent meeting, and never touch another drop, etc., before one of the horseman can admit that while religion is capable of exacerbating our worst tendencies, under certain circumstances for certain people, it is also capable of exacerbating their best tendencies? Apparently, there is no adequate number. Neither the abolitionist movement, nor the Civil Rights movement, both inspired by certain religious understandings and motivations, nor angelic Muslim cabdrivers, nor religious beliefs which aid thousands of drug addicts in maintaining their sobriety, add perspective in some minds to religion's role in Martin Luther's anti-semitism, or its cover for Joseph Smith's serial sexual predation, or its lunatic manifestations in radical Islam. There is good, there is bad, there is white, there is black, there is grey, there are a multitude of circumstances and variables - and yet, the Four Horseman only see black, only unremitting evil, a scourge which they have a moral duty to destroy - I might say, in a veritable crusade (hmm) - for all time.

And that is not all they see; they see a Utopian vision just about as stupid and naïve as the one seen by early Mormon communists or contemporary "Left Behind" rapturistas: they see a John Lennon-esque world which, were it not for religion, would experience a dramatic decrease in war and suffering. That is, they see a massive, profound (and entirely unprecedented) transformation in human nature itself, through atheism - which, needless to say, is exactly what the theists they disdain see, just through theism.

Yet the Soviet butchers didn't need a religion to become devils incarnate - their humanity was more than adequate to that task. Neither did National Socialist leaders require a religion for their savagery. Neither did oriental despots like Mao or Pol Pot. All of these men were devils incarnate - FAR more wicked than even the Satan of Christian mythology could be, as according to that mythology, he is not permitted to take life directly. And all of them existed not in some far distant past, which might excuse the Four Horseman from not considering their cases, but just in one single contemporary lifetime.

And it is no use for the Horsemen to get around this by asserting that the cults of personality which these savages perpetuated amounted to "religions", for that is to stretch the definition of the word far beyond what they themselves mean when they use it normally. That tactic, in fact, amounts to a confession that it is not "religion" per se which is the cause of all the horror they observe at all. There is, simply, no reason provided by history to "imagine" that an atheist world would be a "kinder, gentler" place, than a theist one, as dangerous or nutty as certain religious beliefs might be at any particular time.

One final thing which I find perplexing in all this. The Horseman are united in their belief that religion has an earthly provenance; that its seat is simply the human mind. So to use the word "religion" where one really means "certain products of the human mind", is to consistently refer to a proximate cause where an ultimate cause is really meant; and one effect of this is to absolve the accusers of having to do the much harder work of exploring the depths of the human psyche itself. It is rather like announcing that one has finally identified "the root of all criminal behaviour: people who behave criminally!". Or maybe better, that the root of human aggression may be found in the weapons used in that aggression. These "one true theories" actually don't tell us anything at all. (No wonder they have zero predictive value).

"Religion" does not "poison everything"; poisonous thoughts and feelings, and the poisonous words and deeds which may emanate from them, poison things; but not even those "poison everything". Fortunately, generosity, honesty, empathy, courage, kindness, joy - everything good - posess an efficacy of their own, and are spread with great measure - by both theists, atheists, and the plain bewildered - around the world as well.

Comments welcome.

Tal

[_Runtu]

Welcome back, Talmage.

I appreciate your sentiments and agree with them. When we start making blanket statements about which groups of people and which beliefs are evil, we are nothing more than the mirror image of the self-righteous who scorn us as evil.

[_barrelomonkeys]

I couldn't agree more!

~ Bewildered

[_Canucklehead]

I haven't read Hitchens, so I can't comment on his book. However, I found Dawkins' book to be remarkable fair and balanced. Never did he claim that all religious beliefs are evil, or that religion is the root of all evil.

Rather, he confined himself to demonstrating that religions do not corner the market on values, and that some values espoused by some religions are evil (such as when they promote tribalism and unhealthy obsessions with human sexuality and the private acts of mature adults.).

He made the point that even religious people do not get their values entirely from their religion, since they inevitable pick and choose which parts of the Bible or Quaran or Book of Mormon that they follow. Obviously, they are basing this selection on some standard which comes from outside the texts themselves.

I have Hitchens' book in audio format. I'll probably get around to listening to it at some point, but it's not a high priority on my book list.

[_wenglund]

Coincedentally, Dr. Peterson's speech at this years FAIR Conference provided a sampling of various challenges he had to Hitchen's book. If I remember correctly, the entirity of his critique will be a collaborative effort with Dr. Hamblin, and as yet is still a work in progress. From what I gathered from his speech, though, his main point is not principly different from what I understand Tal's main point to be here.

May I say in support of the main point, I think that if we all were focused less on looking for the negative in others and harshly judging differing beliefs, and instead directed our engergies and attention towards "generosity, honesty, empathy, courage, kindness, joy - everything good", we each would be much better off as also the world in general.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[_Runtu]

Coincedentally, Dr. Peterson's speech at this years FAIR Conference provided a sampling of various challenges he had to Hitchen's book. If I remember correctly, the entirity of his critique will be a collaborative effort with Dr. Hamblin, and as yet is still a work in progress. From what I gathered from his speech, though, his main point is not principly different from what I understand Tal's main point to be here.

May I say in support of the main point, I think that if we all were focused less on looking for the negative in others and harshly judging differing beliefs, and instead directed our engergies and attention towards "generosity, honesty, empathy, courage, kindness, joy - everything good", we each would be much better off as also the world in general.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

It occurs to me that Tal must not have received the memo that all exmormons are supposed to be bitter atheists. Get with the program, dude!

[_Tal Bachman]

Canucklehead

Richard Dawkins recently did a televion show entitled "The Root of All Evil?", and I should very much like to see the portion of the transcript wherein he states, "there is no evidence that religion is the root of all evil, and much evidence that it is not".

[_Sethbag]

So far I'm a huge, huge Dawkins fan, and I'm a pretty big Hitchens fan, though I haven't read his "God is Not Great" book. I've just heard some interviews on the web with Dennet and Harris, so I don't have much to say about them.

I think Dawkins is 100% spot on when he says that there's no good reason why anyone should believe that the answers to the "why" questions offered up by the theologians are any better than the answers to these questions by anyone else.

I like the analogy "theologians are to gods what fairyologists are to fairies".

I don't like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot anymore than anyone else, but the blame for these guys lies not in their not having believed in someone's God. As you said, their humanity was more than adequate. The reason they killed more people than most other despots you can imagine in history is a combination of the fact that they had way more effective weapons, communications, and transportation, plus a more "target rich environment", if you will, ie: there were a lot more people to kill in the 20th Century than there had ever been before, and it was easier to kill them.

I think the Four Horsemen are essentially spot on. I agree that religion is a virus of the mind, and the mindset that it's desirable and admirable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and in fact to believe things for which there is lots of contrary evidence, is not doing humankind any good.

[_marg]

Canucklehead

Richard Dawkins recently did a televion show entitled "The Root of All Evil?", and I should very much like to see the portion of the transcript wherein he states, "there is no evidence that religion is the root of all evil, and much evidence that it is not".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_of_All_Evil%3F

"The Root of All Evil? is a television documentary, written and presented by Richard Dawkins, in which he argues that the world would be better off without religion.
The documentary was first broadcast in January 2006, in the form of two 45-minute episodes (excluding advertisement breaks), on Channel 4 in the UK.
Dawkins has said that the title "The Root of All Evil?" was not his preferred choice, but that Channel 4 had insisted on it to create controversy.[1] His sole concession from the producers on the title was the addition of the question mark. Dawkins has stated that the notion of anything being the root of all evil is ridiculous.[2] Dawkins's book The God Delusion, released in September 2006, goes on to examine the topics raised in the documentary in greater detail."

I suspect he considers religious organizations to have been responsible for much evil. I highly doubt he considers a belief in a non interfering God to be responsible for any evil.

[_mocnarf]

Tal, thanks your coments were an interesting read. Very much agree. Deep faith in one's religion will not necessarily prevent you from doing great evil, but neither will a great disbelief lead you to do great evil. Under special conditions men and women can be lead to do evil regardless of their faith or lack thereof.