Journal Ethelred Unraed's Journal: One for Teh Smooch: Dawkins and religion 35
1 1/2 cheers for Richard Dawkins
There's so much to applaud in Richard Dawkins, says Stephen Tomkins. Such as his rage against bad religion. But he's out of his depth in his new book, The God Delusion, when he attacks all forms of faith.
RICHARD DAWKINS IS RIGHT. His deicidal bestseller The God Delusion attacks the absurdities and cruelties, the contradictions and superstitions, the rip offs and fantasies of religion across the world and throughout history. I couldn't agree more. It's enough to make you wish Abraham hadn't been in when God called round.
The problem is, like other fundamentalists, Dawkins won't stop talking when he's finished talking sense. Rather than surveying the countless varieties of religion, weighing up their mixed record, and arguing that on balance we'd be better off without it, he is only willing to see the dark side, and writes off the whole thing, dismissing evidence that makes a monochrome worldview uncomfortable.
He sees the moral failures, but not the moral breakthroughs. He lists the atrocities and ignores the triumphs. He cuts through the supposed proofs of God's existence like a particularly moist sponge cake, but shows no conception at all of why people actually believe - other than that they're a bunch of morons who don't know any better.
Not unlike our own Pope Benedict's dealings with Islam, in fact. The Pope's argument in his celebrated lecture last month was that the Christian God is subject to reason, and therefore never allows religious violence; whereas Islam does not have this safeguard. Hence - according to the emperor he quoted - all the "evil and inhuman" things of Islam, such as Muhammad's command to "spread by the sword the faith he preached". Ah yes, so very unlike Christianity.
This quotation was the logical conclusion of the Pope's argument, and nothing in his lecture suggested he disagreed. Neither did his "apology" for "the reactions in some countries" to what he said, which of course was not an apology at all. He pointed out that the emperor's opinions were not his own, but until he says what his are, these words have to stand as an approximation.
This has all the marks of a fanatical worldview: they're all bad and wrong, we're totally right and good - and blind to the centuries of violence on our side and all that's good on theirs.
That a top believer such as the Pope should take such an extreme and indefensible stance is all grist to Dawkins's mill, of course. Except that his own fanaticism is just the same: an impassioned one-sidedness and ideologically-driven selective blindness.
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HAVING MADE SUCH A FUSS about one-sidedness (and I'm still warming up) let's be clear about how much Dawkins' writing has going for it. His science writing is not only fascinating, but a revelation, if that doesn't sound distastefully supernatural. He has taught a whole generation - even those of us who never learned which end of a test tube is up - not only how evolution works, but how that one simple principle explains countless things about our world.
What's more, his anti-God diatribes can be superb - articulate, intelligent, passionate and devastating. For a spiritual type, they're like a bracing walk down the prom on a windy day. If you're going to entrust your life to a religion, these are the sorts of test it needs to pass.
And there's so much in it to agree with - to applaud, in fact. His rage against the mindset that leads to sacred mass murder. His contempt for the bottomless pit of deliberate stupidity that is creationism. His scorn for high level theology that sees all evil in the world as good in disguise. His antipathy for scriptures that commend genocide, homophobia and misogyny. His ridicule of the idea that a practice or belief deserves respect because it can be labelled "religious", however ludicrous it might otherwise appear.
Bravo, in fact. At least one and a half cheers for Richard Dawkins.
But already we're running into problems. On that last point, for example, Dawkins tells us that "nearly everybody in our society accepts... that religious faith... should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect". Really? I don't, and I've got one. And I should think the audiences of The Life of Brian and Jerry Springer: the Opera would be surprised to hear that they are in such a tiny minority.
This is a forgivable exaggeration, except that such generalisations run through his polemic like nuts through a Snickers Bar / Christian Voice picket line. He quotes an appalling letter from a Christian to Einstein recommending intellectual dishonesty for the sake of faith, saying that it "damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind". No, it damningly exposes the weakness of a religious mind.
He says that religion must be fought because of its attitudes to homosexuality, of which he offers a survey: the Taliban, the 1950s British justice system (not strictly speaking a religious group), Jerry Falwell, Senator Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, Gary Potter and, you guessed, Fred Phelps. "This," we are told, "is the sort of morality that is inspired by religious faith." A slightly skewed sample, perhaps? You might as well list CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and GP Taylor and say that Christians tend to write bestselling fantasy novels. We who are many may be one body, but we sure as hell aren't of one mind.
"Faith is evil," Dawkins tells us, "precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument." Whose faith? Not many I know. There are 12,000 members of the Ship of Fools discussion boards, where Christians are constantly probing the bases of their faith and revelling in, let alone brooking, argument. Is there evidence for Dawkins's statement, or are we just expected to take it on you-know-what?
He tells us that "theology - unlike science, or most other branches of human scholarship - has not moved on in eighteen centuries" - which invites scepticism from anyone who has heard of, for example, Protestantism.
His dealings with the Christian Bible are equally sweeping. He debunks the Christmas story, the single most obviously legendary part of the four Gospels, and tells us that "the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world."
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BEYOND ALL THESE UNREASONABLE generalisations about religion, however, the greatest failure of Dawkins's case is his refusal to recognise any good that any religion has done. He talks about the crusades, but not medieval hospitals. He tells the story of Oral Roberts getting $8 million out of his flock to stop God killing him, but not of William Wilberforce (along with a lot of other Christians) devoting his life to fighting the slave trade. He details Catholic opposition to science, but not the work of monasteries - and Islamic scholars - who rescued Greek philosophical writings from oblivion.
Christian Voice is here, but not Christian Aid. Neither are the 19th-century reformers and philanthropists: Shaftsbury, Fry, Müller, Barnardo. Religious conflict in Northern Ireland, yes. Christian peace-building organisations, no. Etc., etc.
The most outrageous example is Martin Luther King. He does get a brief mention - but not as someone driven by faith to fight for justice and equality; not as someone inspired by his religion to achieve change without violence; not as someone who was sustained through fear for his life and for his family by an encounter with Jesus. Instead, King was one of those leaders "whose religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil obedience directly from Gandhi, who was not." And that's it.
This massive distortion is presumably accidental, and therefore symptomatic of being out of one's depth writing a 400-page treatise on religion. For one rather obvious thing, Gandhi was quite religious himself, so even Dawkins's version of events hardly leaves God out of it. What's more, Ghandi's non-violence was inspired by both Tolstoy (a Christian) and Jesus (also arguably a Christian), and specifically by the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy's non-violence was also inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. King's non-violence was inspired by study of all three - Ghandi, Tolstoy, Jesus. It's very hard to look at this family tree of non-violence in a way that makes the religion incidental.
"It was the Sermon on the Mount," said King himself, "that originally inspired the negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action." But the fact that religion can be - amid all the trash - an irresistible force for social justice seems to be something that Dawkins's theory simply can't cope with.
I started off by likening him to the Pope. In fact, this ability to ignore or invert any evidence that doesn't fit with one's worldview reminds me more than anything of the way fundamentalists read the Bible, and creationists do science.
Could the world do with a bit less religion? Quite possibly. But what we really need is fewer fanatics.
Well said, I say.
My argument (Score:2)
Imagine what assholes these people would be if they didn't think that Jesus was looking over their shoulder. Imagine how nasty, mean, and self absorbed they would be if they didn't at least make a token effort.
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Or they might go out and conquer the Universe and assign themselves strange titles.
Oh wait, I'm doing that already. Carry on.
Anyway, I gather that Dawkins' solution to the religion question is to replace religious bigoted assholes with atheist bigoted assholes. I'm not sure I see the improvement.
Cheers,
Ethelred
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the end.
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I'll happily take Freeman Dyson's retort to that:
'Weinberg's statement [your quote] is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add an additional clause: "And for bad people to do good things--that takes religion." The main point of Christianity is that it is a religion for sinners. Jesus made that very clear. When the Pharisees asked his disciples, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?" he said, "I come to call not the righteous but sinners
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i've always found that defense strange. dogma is dogma.
Then why do you treat Dawkins' statements as dogma? I've yet to see you criticize him in any way, and any criticism of Dawkins, no matter how mild, is sure to draw you out into an argument. The article actually praises Dawkins much of the time, yet you still take issue with it and ignore the praise. That fairly reeks of a dogmatic approach to understanding -- and is just why I chose to post it, to make that point.
the current most dangerous dogma
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I conceded to pudge, although pudge used the term "RAPE" when it was clear Dawkins wasn't talking about rape. He indeed was molested as a child, so perhaps he has a bit more understanding in that than i do; however, i don't agree with him. i understand he's trying to make a point about scarring children for life with fears of hell. i had that fear for 25 years and it did me a great deal of damage. luckily, i'm ok now. i don't know what it's like to
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i understand he's trying to make a point about scarring children for life with fears of hell. i had that fear for 25 years and it did me a great deal of damage. luckily, i'm ok now. i don't know what it's like to be molested, so i cannot make that point and therefore, i have to disagree that "one is worse than the other".
Emotional or sexual abuse is always wrong no matter the context, but the mere act of raising a child in a religious environment is hardly emotional abuse. That's what I bridle at. The c
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Would you take exception to an implied accusation of being psychologically abnormal or defective for other reasons?
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Well, I am psychologically abnormal or defective. That's why I'm going to crush all resistance to my rule.
Some lunatics think they are Napoleon. Napoleon thought he was me.
Cheers,
Ethelred
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dawkins is absolutely not repulsive--in fact, i find him to be a worthy champion of waking people up, especially people like me who were stuck in a scary guilt/fear pattern. there are millions upon millions of people like that--this is not anecdotal. he often has debates with folks like you and they often wind up agreeing to disagree with no ill-will. dawkins just scratches his head and wonders how r
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i wouldn't call religion a form of inquiry, i'd call it a form of massive speculation. mythology perhaps.
Philosophy's not really any different, then.
dawkins is absolutely not repulsive--in fact, i find him to be a worthy champion of waking people up, especially people like me who were stuck in a scary guilt/fear pattern. there are millions upon millions of people like that--this is not anecdotal. he often has debates with folks like you and they often wind up agreeing to disagree with no ill-will. da
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Science doesn't claim to figure out what is divine and what is not. Arguing about what books were inspired by god just reveals the earth-bound sources of belief in god as opposed to there really being a god. i meant that to be inferred because obviously science is about the method and peer review. it's supposed to be. i don't understand why a bunch of ancient priests/popes needed to vote to decide what was holy and what wasn't. it just doesn't seem to work if somebody has
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Arguing about what books were inspired by god just reveals the earth-bound sources of belief in god as opposed to there really being a god. i meant that to be inferred because obviously science is about the method and peer review. it's supposed to be. i don't understand why a bunch of ancient priests/popes needed to vote to decide what was holy and what wasn't. it just doesn't seem to work if somebody has to vote on what god did. the inherent nature of a deist religion, i thought, was a belief in god. wha
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my impression was never that it was scientific--even when i was a christian--because there was no evidence to test against.
Actually, there is. Lots of it. Religious decisions (at least in catholic tradition) don't take place in a vacuum: They are weighed against previous accepted writings and Scripture. Scripture itself is evidence, as are the writings of, say, Basilius the Great (one of the Church Fathers) or the recorded decisions of the Council of Ephesus.
In fact, it's a lot like the study of histo
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isn't it arbitrary who the god actually is? why do these writings get the "special
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now, my question is this: isn't that assumption no different between the christian god and the FSM? couldn't you write tons of things about the FSM, bury them for 1000 years and then have people trying to sort it out somehow so it makes some semblance of sense to the believers?
If, in the unlikely event that a genuine (as in, serious) system of belief evolved around FSM, I'd be willing to entertain the notion. Until then, nah. ;-)
You're still thinking like a Protestant, though. ;-)
Protestantism is ba
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I've done a bit of reading on Spong and I wouldn't even call him a Christian.
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you know, most of the Protestant stuff I was taught was VERY close to Catholicism. It just didn't have as many sacraments, throwing around of smoke and water, and no praying to saints to get people out of purgatory. :) You could also "confess" directly to God instead of through the Priest. Other than that, it was not much different from Catholicism.
Well, that's not really what makes someone Catholic anyway. ;-)
To be catholic doesn't require incense or holy water. That makes you "high church" (which I
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i don't see what your problem with people who are religious but don't do evil things is unless your beliefs are threatened by their faith.
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i think you're right that it's not a good discussion point for people on opposing sides of the belief in a deity. it's mirror is that atheism enables people to act like cthulhu. i don't either argument really gets anyone anywhere.
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Why not work for an enlightened UNreligion - without needing to believe in some supersitition? A society can be structured to be good without the need for mythical beings.
I'm going to explicitly leave out the existence of God for the moment, or the specifics of Christian belief.
There are a number of reasons why I think your assumption is false, or at least imperfect. One is that the few experiments we've had in that direction have been unmitigated disasters. I'm referring to Stalinism, Maoism, Khmer Ro
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I agree that Dawkins does his cause a disservice in this instance - he's selectively picking bits out of history, just as he accuses those he rails against. But that's not my point: I think the idea of god is about as believable as the tooth fairy, yet I don't go around being mean to people. Religion doesn't seem to curb the worst excesses of human nature any more than any other sys
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All the examples you cite of failures had one thing in common: run by complete, megalomanical nutters who were extremely cruel.
But they had plenty of willing accomplices who believed what the nutters had to say. Otherwise their crimes wouldn't have taken place.
That also refutes Dawkins' assertion that, by telling people there is no afterlife, then they will act to value their own lives (or life in general) that much more. If anything it may well encourage a lot of people to act in an even more brutal
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the idea that removing religion from the equation would solve everything is incredibly simplistic. it does nothing to ov
the problems with this review are MANY (Score:2)
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This is fact. Just because ethelred and this author say, "well I don't!", frankly, doesn't mean crap. it's anecdotal.
And when you have contrary evidence staring you in the face, you wave it away, preferring to believe anecdotes that someone else tells you.
That's what the author is pointing out: Dawkins is (highly selectively!) using anecdotes for his arguments, and being downright slanderous in the process. That goes a long way to undo the good his arguments do, and he's only hurting himself along wit
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it's not having it both ways in my estimation. a book of nonsense is telling people to say that atheists are fiendish heretics. people pointing out how silly that is and suggesting the causes of this lie entirely in justifying that book carries a lot more weight than
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the problem is, if you read the books by dawkins and harris, they *don't* use anecdotal "evidence"--they point out the statistics that back up the conclusions they are drawing, instead of, "in my experience, all religious people are meanies."
As the reviewer notes, though, Dawkins is selective in his choice of statistics and examples, even going so far as to twist the motives of famous people beyond recognition. To claim Gandhi or MLK weren't acting out of religious faith is just farcical.
And I'm not ju
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the bible doesn't say that, but Americans do. ;)
Is one allowed on slashdot to point out the good things that atheist Bill Gates is doing through his foundation? As counterbalance Benny HInn needs a new plane. [bennyhinn.org]
Who's more likely to end up in your version of hell, Bill Gates or Benny Hinn?
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As counterbalance Benny HInn needs a new plane. Who's more likely to end up in your version of hell, Bill Gates or Benny Hinn?
I'm not sure I can answer your question, because my jaw fell off and I have to go look for it now.
More seriously, I can't tell you which one has the better chance, because it's not my position to judge. I can say that I'd wager Gates has a better chance, because if there's anything that strikes me as evil is when people twist God's church to evil self-aggrandizing ends, as Hinn