I’ve started to wonder whether this “New Atheism” isn’t more a fad than an authentic movement, one generating light without heat and sound without fury. Christopher Hitchens remarked that “high on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that ‘it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.’” I’ll concede that it’s about as compelling a needlepoint pattern as “Footprints in the Sand,” but what does Hitchens mean by this? He goes on to explain, “You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn’t have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis.”
How right he is. Sam Harris, for instance, has squeezed two books—number two the mere dribbling dregs of the first effort—from his hysterical complaints about the darkness of religious ignorance. Lord knows that Harris doesn’t have so much as a post-Halloween stub of candle to offer in its stead. It’s too bad for him that effective persuasion is not as easy a game as Stump the Yokel, and doubly so that people with brains, like Damon Linker, are paying attention.
In the penultimate chapter of his best-selling book The God Delusion, biologist and world-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins presents his view of religious education, which he explains by way of an anecdote. Following a lecture in Dublin, he recalls, “I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Lest his readers misunderstand him, or dismiss this rather shocking statement as mere off-the-cuff hyperbole, Dawkins goes on to clarify his position. “I am persuaded,” he explains, “that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”
Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion—to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state—is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism. And not just his. Over the past four years, several prominent atheists have made similarly inflammatory claims in a series of best-selling books. . . . In The End of Faith, writer Sam Harris argues that “the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”
This is just the sort of approach that made some people call Ayaan Hirsi Ali a “fundamentalist.” In her case, I’d argue that having suffered the most brutal treatment available to a woman in an Islamic country—short of being burned alive—is an acceptable excuse for rhetorical overkill. As for Sam Harris, I doubt that readers will find me too cynical in asking whether his bombast is more about upping his Amazon sales ranking than it is about convincing believers to stray from the fold. There’s something in Harris’s vituperative style that makes me doubt he could be civil to a former believer, much less a believer straddling the fence between the clouds and the sulfur.
I hasten to add that Damon Linker is far from perfect, as David B. Hart wrote about Linker’s Theocons some time ago in The New Criterion. When someone hell-bent on sniffing out religious fanatics falls on his face doing so, only to turn hard on his hooves and go after hellions like Dawkins and Harris, you can bet something’s gone wrong. I do have some appetite for the bitter fruits of the New Atheism—but keep in mind that Hirsi Ali has endured great evil, whereas Sam Harris has “endured” the snuffling pique of wishing everyone would shut up and listen to him.
I’d like weaponized Islam to shape up or get shipped out. I won’t encourage the ridicule and alienation of the many religious voters, including Muslims, who share that hope.
Even so, I won’t shy away from an important footnote: This piece, by the Asia Times’s “Spengler,” about Hirsi Ali, Islam, and atheism. It helps to have a pseudonym when you make statements like these: “The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.”
kid blast
Congrats on your courage. I
Congrats on your courage. I confess to weakness. The strength to persist after reading "Why do Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism? That is not true of other religions" is not at my disposal.
shriber1
"Christopher Hitchens
"Christopher Hitchens remarked that “high on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that ‘it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.’” I’ll concede that it’s about as compelling a needlepoint pattern as “Footprints in the Sand,” but what does Hitchens mean by this? He goes on to explain, “You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn’t have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis.” "
Hitchens as usual misses the point of the Chinese saying.
The point is that people would rather curse something or someone than do something practical.
The people who invented candels, btw, didn't curse the darkness, they invented candles.
shriber1
nature and religion
“Even so, I won’t shy away from an important footnote: This piece, by the Asia Times’s “Spengler,” about Hirsi Ali, Islam, and atheism. It helps to have a pseudonym when you make statements like these: “The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.” “
It would help if people knew history, Stefan.
Spengler, whatever his faults and I am speaking as an agnostic, does know his history.
Early in the Bolshevik revolution (coup d’etat really since the real revolution was made in February by left liberals and not by the Bolsheviks) Lenin and Trotsky sent communist emissaries to explain to the Muslim leaders in the Muslim areas of the Russian Empire about the nature of Communism and how much closer it was than to the world view of the Koran than to the world view of Christianity.
“Atheism” in itself is not closer to the world view of Islam, that is a stretch, but the kind of ideology espoused by Bolshevik atheism certainly is.
The one thing that certain forms of atheism (there is more than one kind) have in common with Islam is a uni-dimensional view of nature.
To the atheist nature encompasses both human reality as well as the natural world. Mankind is merely one more object within a greater nature.
For the Muslim nature and mankind are also part of the same reality which is encompassed in the Koran; strictly speaking for the Muslim there is no such thing as “nature” only the world of Allah.
This is probably what Spengler had in mind, Stefan.
As a Jewish agnostic I believe in the separation of mankind from nature. Mankind is a part of nature, but humanity also transcends nature. This is something that neither Atheists nor Muslims can countenance.
Josh Strawn
I don't think it's a
I don't think it's a fad--Dawkins published 'The Selfish Gene' in 1976 (I think), a year in which computer modeling of the brain was hardly what it would be a decade later or one after that and the one following. The blow dealt by Copernicus and Darwin, but again in the late 20th and three decades is hardly a long time in the span of this history. The data has been in, but in 2001, the urgency was made most evident. The movement is far larger and more diverse than its figureheads and will probably only contribute more and more savvy people to the conversation in the coming years.
I think also, that we must be careful to make the mistake of seeing the current American experience as the only one, since we are only (as with mass terrorism) experiencing it for the first time ourselves, whereas Britain's encounter with terrorism and religion over the course of the last few decades certainly helped empty their churches and make it one of the most godless places on Earth. The current American situation--ultra-right Christians waging culture wars, supporting the Republican party domestically and Jewish messianism abroad while Islamist terror cells plot the destruction of our major cities...I think our time has just finally come to recognize centuries-old superstition for the intolerable danger it is.
shriber1
"I think our time has just
"I think our time has just finally come to recognize centuries-old superstition for the intolerable danger it is."
"our time?"
What do you mean by "our?"
Dawkins is a British subject, and Hitchens was one too till recently.
Most, not all, but most of the leading so doctrinaire atheists are Brits.
Great Britain is also in a state of decline and much of what is going on there politically can be attributed to that.
Moreover, if Dawkins published his first book on the subject in 1976 then you can't attribute the phenomenon to current events.
The same with Hitchens who has been peddling and anti Zionist anti-Judaism line for many decades now.
Hitchens used to be pals with David Irving, the Holocaust denier. When he was accused of rank antisemitism he suddenly discovered a "Jewish mother" which he apparenlty he had been keeping in the closet or the attic or someplace equally dusty.
David Strauss
Wrong
"Lord knows that Harris doesn’t have so much as a
post-Halloween stub of candle to offer in its stead."
The absence of an alternative does not make your own choice correct or ethical. For example, it would not be a valid argument against abolitionism to say that abolitionists fail to offer an economic alternative.
It is also absurd to require that someone who proves something wrong also provide something "right."
Anonymous
LY
As a biologist, does Dawkins really want to bannish something that is unique to the human species?
Stefan Beck
Re: Wrong
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