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The Non-Elite: A Brief Meditation on the Nature of Atheist Humanism
Posted on March 17, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
rjosephhoffmann:
“
Everything old is new again. Except me.
Originally posted on The New Oxonian:
ERASMUSWhat concerns me most about the misapplication of the word ‘humanist’ to full frontal atheists is that most such humanists are not humanists at all. Not in any meaningful sense. To be solipsistic about it, if they were they would not be full frontal atheists.
By dint of past associations, I have a great many ‘friends’ (as Facebook misuses the term) who would call themselves new or raw or ‘out’ atheists—-Dawkinsites in short.
In a pinch they will say they like books (who doesn’t?), art (sort of), and music (some). But I always have the impression that you can’t press them too closely on what books, music or art they like. It probably isn’t Bach, Chagall, or Proust. It certainly isn’t the Bible—-in any translation, or any context.
And that is the problem. The loudest God-deniers-—not all but the loudest-—seem to lack cultural context. They are metaphor poor literalists…
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James E Lassiter
March 17, 2015 at 9:36 am
“The fundamental atheist error is that they see culture as something external to human experience, not something that forms the intellectual environment, the diet, that defines our lives and nourishes our existence.”
This is the very problem that forced me to leave a local “humanist” group. Specifically, it was my repeated failures to persuade them of the wrongness of their approach that left me no other option than depart. You hit the nail squarely on the head in this short essay.
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The Non-Elite: A Brief Meditation on the Nature of Atheist Humanism
Posted on March 17, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
rjosephhoffmann:
“
Everything old is new again. Except me.
Originally posted on The New Oxonian:
ERASMUSWhat concerns me most about the misapplication of the word ‘humanist’ to full frontal atheists is that most such humanists are not humanists at all. Not in any meaningful sense. To be solipsistic about it, if they were they would not be full frontal atheists.
By dint of past associations, I have a great many ‘friends’ (as Facebook misuses the term) who would call themselves new or raw or ‘out’ atheists—-Dawkinsites in short.
In a pinch they will say they like books (who doesn’t?), art (sort of), and music (some). But I always have the impression that you can’t press them too closely on what books, music or art they like. It probably isn’t Bach, Chagall, or Proust. It certainly isn’t the Bible—-in any translation, or any context.
And that is the problem. The loudest God-deniers-—not all but the loudest-—seem to lack cultural context. They are metaphor poor literalists…
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One thought on “The Non-Elite: A Brief Meditation on the Nature of Atheist Humanism”
James E Lassiter
March 17, 2015 at 9:36 am
“The fundamental atheist error is that they see culture as something external to human experience, not something that forms the intellectual environment, the diet, that defines our lives and nourishes our existence.”
This is the very problem that forced me to leave a local “humanist” group. Specifically, it was my repeated failures to persuade them of the wrongness of their approach that left me no other option than depart. You hit the nail squarely on the head in this short essay.
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Christopher Hitchens
Posted on March 18, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
Originally posted on The New Oxonian:
by admin Posted on December 17, 2011
Christopher HitchensHERE is no reason to eulogize Christopher Hitchens except that, had he stuck around to read the tributes, some of what is being said might have amused him. So we will read each what the other writes knowing he would have said it better, except he probably wouldn’t say it at all.
Hitchens in many ways belongs rhetorically to another era, which is why the twentieth and twenty-first century, what little he lived in it, is privileged to have known him. His verbal style was self-conscious, but seemed effortless, driven by the “true wit” (what Alexander Pope described as “nature to advantage dressed”) that was perfected in Restoration and eighteenth-century England coffee houses and left Thames-side by the sober English migrants who came to America to escape the kind of ridicule his sort had represented back home. Hitchens’s choosing to live in…
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Posted on March 18, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
Originally posted on The New Oxonian:
by admin Posted on December 17, 2011
Christopher HitchensHERE is no reason to eulogize Christopher Hitchens except that, had he stuck around to read the tributes, some of what is being said might have amused him. So we will read each what the other writes knowing he would have said it better, except he probably wouldn’t say it at all.
Hitchens in many ways belongs rhetorically to another era, which is why the twentieth and twenty-first century, what little he lived in it, is privileged to have known him. His verbal style was self-conscious, but seemed effortless, driven by the “true wit” (what Alexander Pope described as “nature to advantage dressed”) that was perfected in Restoration and eighteenth-century England coffee houses and left Thames-side by the sober English migrants who came to America to escape the kind of ridicule his sort had represented back home. Hitchens’s choosing to live in…
View original 1,165 more words
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Is “Beyond Belief” Beyond Critique?
Posted on May 8, 2011 by rjosephhoffmann
I don’t know Tristan Vick, the blogmeister at Advocatus Atheist, but I think I like him.
Back in April, when I wrote a series of articles criticizing New Atheism for being loud and obnoxious, Tristan said I was being loud and obnoxious and to put a lid on it. I was being so persistently obnoxious, in fact, that if I’d replied to the article then I would have been even louder. So I’m glad I waited. Time’s a healer.
Tristan points out:
“
“Obviously Hoffmann doesn’t know anything about the education of the New Atheists. Sam Harris is a philosopher turned Neuroscientist, and holds a PhD in modern Neuroscience from UCLA. Richard Dawkins is a world renowned evolutionary biologist and he was the University of Oxford’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Christopher Hitchens is an infamous atheist intellectual, a savvy journalist, and graduated from Oxford University. Meanwhile, Hoffman groups other atheists into this ‘unlearned’ category when he adds the abbreviation for and company (i.e., et al.) to his list of passionately despised New Atheists. So I can only assume he means other “uneducated” men like Dan Dennett (Philosopher, PhD), Victor Stenger (Physicist, PhD), Richard Carrier (Historian, PhD), David Eller (Anthropologist, PhD) among plenty of others. For the life of me I cannot seem to figure out how these men reflect the unlearned and unreflective side of New Atheism.”
Well, obviously I know (have always known) all of this, and leaving to one side whether credentials insulate you from being a jerk on occasion (it hasn’t helped me) a couple of other things need correction rather than apology.
The last 18th century wit?
First, I don’t passionately despise anyone–least of all any of the people in the paragraph above. I hugely admire what every single one of them has done in their academic discipline–from Richard Dawkins bringing science into public consciousness to Christopher Hitchens’s sometimes lone crusade for sanity in the world of politics.
I cannot think of a single person mentioned whose scholarship should be impugned or their credentials questioned in their speciality. And I am very grateful that Tristan knows and likes some of what I have written in the field of biblical criticism–which he’s obviously into in an impressive way.
The question really is whether when they (or yours truly) speak as atheists they deserve immunity from criticism, since there is not (yet) a professional qualification in the field that would entitle anyone to speak with greater authority on the subject than anyone else–not someone whose field is evolutionary biology, not someone whose field is anthropology, not someone working as a journalist. Naturally a good knowledge base, like a second Pinot Grigio at lunch, is nice to have, but when we speak about atheism, we’re all amateurs. If some atheists admire certain people as spokesmen because they’re “raw and rude” (I think I’m quoting PZ on how young people like it), there are others who like it medium-well and slightly tenderized. You can substitute Chinese-food metaphors here if you like.
That fundamental point is already implicit in the discussion. I’m guessing that Dr Coyne and Dr Myers don’t bring the language of the blogosphere with them to professional meetings. I don’t either. One of the joys of blogging about things we’re all equally amateurs in is that we can release the verbal energy diffusely that we can’t use on colleagues directly. You might want to tell old Dr Jenkins that as contributions to science his papers might just as well have appeared in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, but you won’t say that to his despicable face. That’s why it’s nice to have a cause you believe in–a mission– and a space to share it with people whose offices aren’t next door. Blogs make us prophets in small kingdoms. But they still don’t make us experts. Popular atheists shouldn’t mind developing fan clubs and cohorts. But fan clubs and cohorts should be careful about turning their enthusiasm for good ideas and sexy styles into appeals to authority. I myself am working on a sexy style.
Without any backup for this, I’d guess that 80% of the best academics at the best colleges and universities embrace some form of unbelief and keep it to themselves. And besides this, scholarship in most humanistic disciplines (including the study of religion) is implicitly atheistic–everything from history to philosophy to literature. There’s no room for “supernaturalism”–and that includes God theories–in public or most good private universities. That battle has been won in methodology, if not in the classroom. If you don’t believe me, try getting an article published in a peer-reviewed journal by arguing that Joan of Arc’s visions were real.
The larger, discussable, popular atheism that seeps out of the academy in the form of books, lecture tours, debates and blogs (no, I’m not saying it all originates there; but Tristan’s list suggests that it is a major pipeline for discussion and feeds into a thousand internet channels) isn’t subject to the same kind of “peer review” that scholars expect when they are speaking or writing as professionals and experts in their field. That’s what makes the “raw and rude” atheism of the blogosphere different from the assumed and methodological atheism of the academy–even though the two forms aren’t opposed and not really in conflict–except as to tenor and style.
Unfortunately, the people-part of popular atheism won’t always cotton to the sometimes elitist-feeling, genteel-seeming atheism of the marble halls. Ask anybody in the list above who has been in full-time academic employment and climbed the tenure ladder about the process: the answer will be roughly the same. No professor would last very long if she mimicked or abused the religious sentiments of a religious devotee during a classroom discussion–no matter how strongly she’s convinced that education means, among other things, getting over it. When I see atheist comrades being a little too–how you say in your language–robust in this matter once freed from the shackles of classroom teaching, I have to admit my discomfort. Easy enough at this point to let sparks fly: I seem deficient in my commitment to the truth. (As in Hoffmann coddles believers). And my plainspoken colleague seems deficient in kindness and generosity. But can’t we have, or try to have, both?
Within the last five years I was asked directly by a [here nameless] department chair (and I quote) “How does your atheism affect your teaching of history.” I responded somewhat pointedly that if he had asked that question of a Catholic or a gay I would report it to the dean, but as it was about atheism I would let it ride. He was curious, so I said, “Because even though there is no God, he has played an enormous role in human history.” (He found it amusing.)
Toynbee
Does the fact that in popular atheism ideas are thrown onto the battlefield and caught in a crossfire mean that there should be no review or critique of what atheists say at all? That doesn’t seem likely, does it? There has to be review, there will always be criticism.
But that doesn’t mean that atheists should leep quiet about each other when they find members of the home-side bending the rules of healthy discourse. That includes me. It needs to be said that not all outrageous statements, even if they’re funny, benefit atheism. And I think name-calling and petulance hurts all of us. In saying this, I hope for agreement, not a dozen replies that begin “See, Hoffmann is learning. There is still hope.”
Once upon a time, a guy could get excommunicated from the Church for calling a preist a bastard, even if the priest was one. In some states (believe it or not) it is still a tort (libel per se, or something equally preposterous) to speak ill of (cough) a lawyer. Academics have never enjoyed such privilege. That’s a good thing, as long as we keep the discussion at the level of ideas. Unlike priests and lawyers, there is nothing sacred about being an academic, despite the fact some academics would like there to be.
So here’s the deal. As long as we’re clear that academic credentials confer no privilege or special dignity in a discussion–a conversation that has to be democratic, no matter how close to the earth we walk–I completely agree that calling people “superjerks” is out of bounds. We need to develop language that shows the big old largely religious world that atheism isn’t coming apart at the seams. Again. Tristan says,
“
“Criticizing atheism, mind you, is a good thing. It helps us persistent, loud mouthed, fundamental atheist types check our arguments and hone, refine, and improve them. Criticism only seeks to make us stronger critical thinkers. We can learn from positive as well as negative criticism, and criticism allows us the opportunity to learn from our mistakes, perchance to grow better and learn to reason better. But Hoffmann isn’t offering advice; he’s being a dick.”
Can’t say I love being a dick, but I do love what he says about criticism. The worst thing unbelievers can do is split up into grumbling factions of science-atheists, humanities-atheists, and social science-atheists (talk about dicks: just kidding) to see whose atheism is the purest form of the product. I think keeping the discussion going, even if it occasionally roils into disagreement and criticism, is better than sulking or going it alone. There’s a lot we have to talk about to each other in a world that winks at the grief caused by religious devotion but scorns the wisdom that unbelief represents.
So Tristan: while I can apologize for being a dick, I can’t apologize for being critical, and don’t think you’d want me to. When I am all grumbly and obnoxious, I really don’t mind your telling me.
We all need to get to know each other’s ideas a little better.
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21 thoughts on “Is “Beyond Belief” Beyond Critique?”
s. wallerstein
May 8, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Actually, from what I’ve seen, you turn obnoxious grumbling into a virtue.
Hitch, the greatest wit since Johnson?
Oscar Wilde?
Bertrand Russell?
Nietzsche
Hitchens is witty, but goes for the cheap shot too often to be in the all-time pantheon of wit.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 8, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Hi Sam, yes. Actually, Johnson wasn’t a witty as Wilde. But Hitch can be witty; he sharpens it. But I’ve also said that he’s the last 18th century man, and that too many American new atheists want to “be” like him and for all kinds of reasons fail miserably to achieve anything resembling his Oxford junior common room style.
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steph
May 8, 2011 at 8:13 pm
I think there’s a bit more of Wilde in the garnish here, and Evelyn Waugh too. But Hitch might be a little bit Jonathon Swift. He too had a brilliantly sharp wit and an eye for satire, and lingered in the same halls three centuries before.
steph
May 8, 2011 at 6:41 pm
I’d describe the critique posted here as a bubbling crock pot of Groucho Marx, George Bernard Shaw with a good dollop of Falstaff as well. It always serves up the flavour of good taste.
Reply
s. wallerstein
May 8, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Steph is right to add Groucho Marx to the list, and how about Woody Allen?
Yes, Dr. Hoffmann, Hitch does outclass all the other new atheists. His wit is very British. I tried reading God is not Great in Spanish translation, a public library book, and his humor did not translate well.
Reply
SocraticGadfly
May 9, 2011 at 1:04 am
In the case of Harris, I have no problem critiquing his credentials, either. The IMmoral Landscape seems to indicate his philosophy PhD diploma is worth little more than crapper paper.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 9, 2011 at 8:45 am
Re Harris. His case sort of illustrates the inappropriate authority or credentials worship I’m talking about. he had no special reputation as a “neuroscientist” and as far as I know has never held a university appointment in the field. That doesn’t undermine him, but it does make one wonder (therefore) why being a neuroscientist has anything to do with what kind of wisdom he possesses when he writes atheist polemic, as in the End of Faith, or not very satisfying speculation about morality, as in the Moral Landscape, which has been roundly listed as a failure by both scientists and ethicists. The same with Richard Carrier, who is a bright guy–but that, not a PhD, should be enough to carry him [no pun intended].
Reply
Tristan D. Vick
May 10, 2011 at 4:06 am
In the case of Sam Harris, I think a lot of confusion is due to the fact that he doesn’t articulate everything he’s thinking–or that is related to the field. Other neuroscientists have done a better job of it, I think.
Steven Novella for example.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/atheism-and-morality-jon-topping-responds/#more-2884
rjosephhoffmann
May 10, 2011 at 8:23 am
Right, and not every book by an atheist new or old is a home run. Maybe the first order of business is to squash the myth that there are differences of “content” or message (as opposed to style) between the two.
s. wallerstein
May 9, 2011 at 12:05 pm
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/04/philosophy-of-lying-truth-ian-leslie/
Here is an article by Julian Baggini, in which he states that his method is not so much to proclaim the
Truth, but to stimulate the discussion of certain issues, which at times involves pointing out the virtues of religion to atheists, etc.
I believe that you (Hoffmann) use the same method and that the New Atheists simply do not understand that.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 9, 2011 at 12:11 pm
Thanks; yes, Julian and are on the same page and on the same hit list with the News, I’m afraid.
Reply
Ophelia Benson
May 11, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Is that fair? Given that you’ve admitted (if I understand you correctly, and I think I do) that you were being “loud and obn…..” about “the News”? Couldn’t that be why you’re on the putative hit list, if indeed you are on any such list?
I don’t think “new atheists” demand any immunity from criticism. I don’t know of any who do. What I and other tenth-level “news” dislike is wild exaggeration and generalization like that of Jacques Berlinerblau.
rjosephhoffmann
May 11, 2011 at 12:49 pm
I think I was for a spell. I don’t think I am any longer. My new leaf commitment is to be at least and more indulgent of the sins of the atheist tribe as I am of foolish religionists. There are so many fewer of us. In fact, I’m going to blog about it soonish.
Ophelia Benson
May 11, 2011 at 12:57 pm
So you’re off the list then. It’s not true (pace s wallerstein) that the New Atheists Don’t Understand. The new atheists understand Everything.
s. wallerstein
May 11, 2011 at 2:12 pm
This is a historical moment, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Tristan D. Vick
May 10, 2011 at 2:24 am
Thank you Mr. Hoffmann, sir. I appreciate you taking the time to engage me.
I guess I will reply here first and then do a copy and paste to your
blog. I would do it the other way around except today I am out of
town and only have my Kindle to send a reply on a poor wireless
connection with.
The part where you said “Blogs make us prophets in small kingdoms” is
entirely true. It makes me wonder how much of blogging (and writing
critical exposes in general) is simply rhetoric aimed at maintaining
the the kingdoms of our own devising, and how much is genuine concern
and due criticism.
Which is to say, although agree criticism is necessary, sometimes
the rhetoric can run away with us and get out of control. Rhetoric
gone wild, you might say.
Perhaps my language was not as tempered as it should have been in
calling you a dick, but in my defense, we all have our ‘dickish’
moments.
I hope you understand that comment was specifically in regard to your
having singled out PZ Myers for the fourth or fifth consecutive time,
not just in one article either. At the time it seemed that you were
only offering criticism of this one particular atheist thinker and no
others, on top of grouping all the other outspoken New Atheists
together with him, lending to the skewed view that this is what
all atheists must think.
In addition, it appears your rhetoric may have gone wild, when you
threw out that childish ad hominem that PZ was a “Super jerk.” Such
playground talk seemed, to me, less like a proper criticism and more
like a critical attack on someone’s character.
Whether or not it was provoked, or deserved, it just seemed to be a
little bit dickish. But perhaps what shocked me even more was the
implication that we needed it pointed out to us. Oh, that crazy PZ is
so over the top, and he is being a jerk again, I mean, super jerk.
I could be entirely off on this, but it seemed like you were saying
(implying) that any fan of PZ was in the same league of ‘jerkiness’.
Perhaps it was the earlier usage of the et al. (and others) which
threw me off. It felt like, since you were grouping all New Atheists
together anyway, and coming off the negativity of previous New Atheist
criticism, that you were implying all New Atheists were a little bit
jerky (at least the so-called “uneducated” jerks who hang on every
word of their overlord blog king, the so-called Super jerk).
Although I consider myself part of the New Atheist movement, and am a
fan of PZ, nonetheless, I go out of my way to try not to be an
uneducated jerk and mindless follower. Which is why I thought some of
your comments were unwarranted (at least overly stereotypical),
therefore I felt apologies were in order.
I hope that clarifies and explains the whole “dick debacle.”
Admittedly, I may have let the rhetorical situation run away too, and I probably was more derisive than critical. I hope we can open up a discourse free of our egos and perhaps talk more personally about the greater atheistic concerns, and challenges, facing us. Which I feel we are both attempting, to the best of our abilities.
Reply
Tristan D. Vick
May 10, 2011 at 3:57 am
[I hope this one is a little bit easier to read]
Thank you Mr. Hoffmann, sir. I appreciate you taking the time to engage me.
I guess I will reply here first and then do a copy and paste to your blog. I would do it the other way around except today I am out of town and only have my Kindle to send a reply on a poor wireless connection with.
The part where you said “Blogs make us prophets in small kingdoms” is entirely true. It makes me wonder how much of blogging (and writing critical exposes in general) is simply rhetoric aimed at maintaining the the kingdoms of our own devising, and how much is genuine concern and due criticism.
Which is to say, although agree criticism is necessary, sometimes the rhetoric can run away with us and get out of control. Rhetoric gone wild, you might say.
Perhaps my language was not as tempered as it should have been in calling you a dick, but in my defense, we all have our ‘dickish’ moments.
I hope you understand that comment was specifically in regard to your having singled out PZ Myers for the fourth or fifth consecutive time, not just in one article either. At the time it seemed that you were only offering criticism of this one particular atheist thinker and no others, on top of grouping all the other outspoken New Atheists together with him, lending to the skewed view that this is what all atheists must think.
In addition, it appears your rhetoric may have gone wild, when you threw out that childish ad hominem that PZ was a “Super jerk.” Such playground talk seemed, to me, less like a proper criticism and more like a critical attack on someone’s character.
Whether or not it was provoked, or deserved, it just seemed to be a little bit dickish. But perhaps what shocked me even more was the implication that we needed it pointed out to us. Oh, that crazy PZ is so over the top, and he is being a jerk again, I mean, super jerk.
I could be entirely off on this, but it seemed like you were saying (implying) that any fan of PZ was in the same league of ‘jerkiness’.
Perhaps it was the earlier usage of the et al. (and others) which threw me off. It felt like, since you were grouping all New Atheists together anyway, and coming off the negativity of previous New Atheist criticism, that you were implying all New Atheists were a little bit jerky (at least the so-called “uneducated” jerks who hang on every word of their overlord blog king, the so-called Super jerk).
Although I consider myself part of the New Atheist movement, and am a fan of PZ, nonetheless, I go out of my way to try not to be an uneducated jerk and mindless follower. Which is why I thought some of your comments were unwarranted (at least overly stereotypical),
therefore I felt apologies were in order.
I hope that clarifies and explains the whole “dick debacle.”
Admittedly, I may have let the rhetorical situation run away too, and I probably was more derisive than critical. I hope we can open up a discourse free of our egos and perhaps talk more personally about the greater atheistic concerns, and challenges, facing us. Which I feel we are both attempting, to the best of our abilities.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 10, 2011 at 6:24 am
Thanks Tristan; I’m going to blog about this today or tomorrow.
Reply
Pingback: Is “Beyond Belief” Beyond Critique? « Religion And More…
Karla McLaren
May 11, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Dear Joseph,
I love the self-awareness you have, and your humor makes me fall out of my chair. I know you’re grieving right now, but I want to tell you how much I respect your willingness to lower the sharp, sharp stiletto of your wit (in this instance; I command you to use it elsewhere). It’s excellent mentoring, and I thank you for it!
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 19, 2015 at 1:28 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
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Is “Beyond Belief” Beyond Critique?
Posted on May 8, 2011 by rjosephhoffmann
I don’t know Tristan Vick, the blogmeister at Advocatus Atheist, but I think I like him.
Back in April, when I wrote a series of articles criticizing New Atheism for being loud and obnoxious, Tristan said I was being loud and obnoxious and to put a lid on it. I was being so persistently obnoxious, in fact, that if I’d replied to the article then I would have been even louder. So I’m glad I waited. Time’s a healer.
Tristan points out:
“
“Obviously Hoffmann doesn’t know anything about the education of the New Atheists. Sam Harris is a philosopher turned Neuroscientist, and holds a PhD in modern Neuroscience from UCLA. Richard Dawkins is a world renowned evolutionary biologist and he was the University of Oxford’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Christopher Hitchens is an infamous atheist intellectual, a savvy journalist, and graduated from Oxford University. Meanwhile, Hoffman groups other atheists into this ‘unlearned’ category when he adds the abbreviation for and company (i.e., et al.) to his list of passionately despised New Atheists. So I can only assume he means other “uneducated” men like Dan Dennett (Philosopher, PhD), Victor Stenger (Physicist, PhD), Richard Carrier (Historian, PhD), David Eller (Anthropologist, PhD) among plenty of others. For the life of me I cannot seem to figure out how these men reflect the unlearned and unreflective side of New Atheism.”
Well, obviously I know (have always known) all of this, and leaving to one side whether credentials insulate you from being a jerk on occasion (it hasn’t helped me) a couple of other things need correction rather than apology.
The last 18th century wit?
First, I don’t passionately despise anyone–least of all any of the people in the paragraph above. I hugely admire what every single one of them has done in their academic discipline–from Richard Dawkins bringing science into public consciousness to Christopher Hitchens’s sometimes lone crusade for sanity in the world of politics.
I cannot think of a single person mentioned whose scholarship should be impugned or their credentials questioned in their speciality. And I am very grateful that Tristan knows and likes some of what I have written in the field of biblical criticism–which he’s obviously into in an impressive way.
The question really is whether when they (or yours truly) speak as atheists they deserve immunity from criticism, since there is not (yet) a professional qualification in the field that would entitle anyone to speak with greater authority on the subject than anyone else–not someone whose field is evolutionary biology, not someone whose field is anthropology, not someone working as a journalist. Naturally a good knowledge base, like a second Pinot Grigio at lunch, is nice to have, but when we speak about atheism, we’re all amateurs. If some atheists admire certain people as spokesmen because they’re “raw and rude” (I think I’m quoting PZ on how young people like it), there are others who like it medium-well and slightly tenderized. You can substitute Chinese-food metaphors here if you like.
That fundamental point is already implicit in the discussion. I’m guessing that Dr Coyne and Dr Myers don’t bring the language of the blogosphere with them to professional meetings. I don’t either. One of the joys of blogging about things we’re all equally amateurs in is that we can release the verbal energy diffusely that we can’t use on colleagues directly. You might want to tell old Dr Jenkins that as contributions to science his papers might just as well have appeared in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, but you won’t say that to his despicable face. That’s why it’s nice to have a cause you believe in–a mission– and a space to share it with people whose offices aren’t next door. Blogs make us prophets in small kingdoms. But they still don’t make us experts. Popular atheists shouldn’t mind developing fan clubs and cohorts. But fan clubs and cohorts should be careful about turning their enthusiasm for good ideas and sexy styles into appeals to authority. I myself am working on a sexy style.
Without any backup for this, I’d guess that 80% of the best academics at the best colleges and universities embrace some form of unbelief and keep it to themselves. And besides this, scholarship in most humanistic disciplines (including the study of religion) is implicitly atheistic–everything from history to philosophy to literature. There’s no room for “supernaturalism”–and that includes God theories–in public or most good private universities. That battle has been won in methodology, if not in the classroom. If you don’t believe me, try getting an article published in a peer-reviewed journal by arguing that Joan of Arc’s visions were real.
The larger, discussable, popular atheism that seeps out of the academy in the form of books, lecture tours, debates and blogs (no, I’m not saying it all originates there; but Tristan’s list suggests that it is a major pipeline for discussion and feeds into a thousand internet channels) isn’t subject to the same kind of “peer review” that scholars expect when they are speaking or writing as professionals and experts in their field. That’s what makes the “raw and rude” atheism of the blogosphere different from the assumed and methodological atheism of the academy–even though the two forms aren’t opposed and not really in conflict–except as to tenor and style.
Unfortunately, the people-part of popular atheism won’t always cotton to the sometimes elitist-feeling, genteel-seeming atheism of the marble halls. Ask anybody in the list above who has been in full-time academic employment and climbed the tenure ladder about the process: the answer will be roughly the same. No professor would last very long if she mimicked or abused the religious sentiments of a religious devotee during a classroom discussion–no matter how strongly she’s convinced that education means, among other things, getting over it. When I see atheist comrades being a little too–how you say in your language–robust in this matter once freed from the shackles of classroom teaching, I have to admit my discomfort. Easy enough at this point to let sparks fly: I seem deficient in my commitment to the truth. (As in Hoffmann coddles believers). And my plainspoken colleague seems deficient in kindness and generosity. But can’t we have, or try to have, both?
Within the last five years I was asked directly by a [here nameless] department chair (and I quote) “How does your atheism affect your teaching of history.” I responded somewhat pointedly that if he had asked that question of a Catholic or a gay I would report it to the dean, but as it was about atheism I would let it ride. He was curious, so I said, “Because even though there is no God, he has played an enormous role in human history.” (He found it amusing.)
Toynbee
Does the fact that in popular atheism ideas are thrown onto the battlefield and caught in a crossfire mean that there should be no review or critique of what atheists say at all? That doesn’t seem likely, does it? There has to be review, there will always be criticism.
But that doesn’t mean that atheists should leep quiet about each other when they find members of the home-side bending the rules of healthy discourse. That includes me. It needs to be said that not all outrageous statements, even if they’re funny, benefit atheism. And I think name-calling and petulance hurts all of us. In saying this, I hope for agreement, not a dozen replies that begin “See, Hoffmann is learning. There is still hope.”
Once upon a time, a guy could get excommunicated from the Church for calling a preist a bastard, even if the priest was one. In some states (believe it or not) it is still a tort (libel per se, or something equally preposterous) to speak ill of (cough) a lawyer. Academics have never enjoyed such privilege. That’s a good thing, as long as we keep the discussion at the level of ideas. Unlike priests and lawyers, there is nothing sacred about being an academic, despite the fact some academics would like there to be.
So here’s the deal. As long as we’re clear that academic credentials confer no privilege or special dignity in a discussion–a conversation that has to be democratic, no matter how close to the earth we walk–I completely agree that calling people “superjerks” is out of bounds. We need to develop language that shows the big old largely religious world that atheism isn’t coming apart at the seams. Again. Tristan says,
“
“Criticizing atheism, mind you, is a good thing. It helps us persistent, loud mouthed, fundamental atheist types check our arguments and hone, refine, and improve them. Criticism only seeks to make us stronger critical thinkers. We can learn from positive as well as negative criticism, and criticism allows us the opportunity to learn from our mistakes, perchance to grow better and learn to reason better. But Hoffmann isn’t offering advice; he’s being a dick.”
Can’t say I love being a dick, but I do love what he says about criticism. The worst thing unbelievers can do is split up into grumbling factions of science-atheists, humanities-atheists, and social science-atheists (talk about dicks: just kidding) to see whose atheism is the purest form of the product. I think keeping the discussion going, even if it occasionally roils into disagreement and criticism, is better than sulking or going it alone. There’s a lot we have to talk about to each other in a world that winks at the grief caused by religious devotion but scorns the wisdom that unbelief represents.
So Tristan: while I can apologize for being a dick, I can’t apologize for being critical, and don’t think you’d want me to. When I am all grumbly and obnoxious, I really don’t mind your telling me.
We all need to get to know each other’s ideas a little better.
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21 thoughts on “Is “Beyond Belief” Beyond Critique?”
s. wallerstein
May 8, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Actually, from what I’ve seen, you turn obnoxious grumbling into a virtue.
Hitch, the greatest wit since Johnson?
Oscar Wilde?
Bertrand Russell?
Nietzsche
Hitchens is witty, but goes for the cheap shot too often to be in the all-time pantheon of wit.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 8, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Hi Sam, yes. Actually, Johnson wasn’t a witty as Wilde. But Hitch can be witty; he sharpens it. But I’ve also said that he’s the last 18th century man, and that too many American new atheists want to “be” like him and for all kinds of reasons fail miserably to achieve anything resembling his Oxford junior common room style.
Reply
steph
May 8, 2011 at 8:13 pm
I think there’s a bit more of Wilde in the garnish here, and Evelyn Waugh too. But Hitch might be a little bit Jonathon Swift. He too had a brilliantly sharp wit and an eye for satire, and lingered in the same halls three centuries before.
steph
May 8, 2011 at 6:41 pm
I’d describe the critique posted here as a bubbling crock pot of Groucho Marx, George Bernard Shaw with a good dollop of Falstaff as well. It always serves up the flavour of good taste.
Reply
s. wallerstein
May 8, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Steph is right to add Groucho Marx to the list, and how about Woody Allen?
Yes, Dr. Hoffmann, Hitch does outclass all the other new atheists. His wit is very British. I tried reading God is not Great in Spanish translation, a public library book, and his humor did not translate well.
Reply
SocraticGadfly
May 9, 2011 at 1:04 am
In the case of Harris, I have no problem critiquing his credentials, either. The IMmoral Landscape seems to indicate his philosophy PhD diploma is worth little more than crapper paper.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 9, 2011 at 8:45 am
Re Harris. His case sort of illustrates the inappropriate authority or credentials worship I’m talking about. he had no special reputation as a “neuroscientist” and as far as I know has never held a university appointment in the field. That doesn’t undermine him, but it does make one wonder (therefore) why being a neuroscientist has anything to do with what kind of wisdom he possesses when he writes atheist polemic, as in the End of Faith, or not very satisfying speculation about morality, as in the Moral Landscape, which has been roundly listed as a failure by both scientists and ethicists. The same with Richard Carrier, who is a bright guy–but that, not a PhD, should be enough to carry him [no pun intended].
Reply
Tristan D. Vick
May 10, 2011 at 4:06 am
In the case of Sam Harris, I think a lot of confusion is due to the fact that he doesn’t articulate everything he’s thinking–or that is related to the field. Other neuroscientists have done a better job of it, I think.
Steven Novella for example.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/atheism-and-morality-jon-topping-responds/#more-2884
rjosephhoffmann
May 10, 2011 at 8:23 am
Right, and not every book by an atheist new or old is a home run. Maybe the first order of business is to squash the myth that there are differences of “content” or message (as opposed to style) between the two.
s. wallerstein
May 9, 2011 at 12:05 pm
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/04/philosophy-of-lying-truth-ian-leslie/
Here is an article by Julian Baggini, in which he states that his method is not so much to proclaim the
Truth, but to stimulate the discussion of certain issues, which at times involves pointing out the virtues of religion to atheists, etc.
I believe that you (Hoffmann) use the same method and that the New Atheists simply do not understand that.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 9, 2011 at 12:11 pm
Thanks; yes, Julian and are on the same page and on the same hit list with the News, I’m afraid.
Reply
Ophelia Benson
May 11, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Is that fair? Given that you’ve admitted (if I understand you correctly, and I think I do) that you were being “loud and obn…..” about “the News”? Couldn’t that be why you’re on the putative hit list, if indeed you are on any such list?
I don’t think “new atheists” demand any immunity from criticism. I don’t know of any who do. What I and other tenth-level “news” dislike is wild exaggeration and generalization like that of Jacques Berlinerblau.
rjosephhoffmann
May 11, 2011 at 12:49 pm
I think I was for a spell. I don’t think I am any longer. My new leaf commitment is to be at least and more indulgent of the sins of the atheist tribe as I am of foolish religionists. There are so many fewer of us. In fact, I’m going to blog about it soonish.
Ophelia Benson
May 11, 2011 at 12:57 pm
So you’re off the list then. It’s not true (pace s wallerstein) that the New Atheists Don’t Understand. The new atheists understand Everything.
s. wallerstein
May 11, 2011 at 2:12 pm
This is a historical moment, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Tristan D. Vick
May 10, 2011 at 2:24 am
Thank you Mr. Hoffmann, sir. I appreciate you taking the time to engage me.
I guess I will reply here first and then do a copy and paste to your
blog. I would do it the other way around except today I am out of
town and only have my Kindle to send a reply on a poor wireless
connection with.
The part where you said “Blogs make us prophets in small kingdoms” is
entirely true. It makes me wonder how much of blogging (and writing
critical exposes in general) is simply rhetoric aimed at maintaining
the the kingdoms of our own devising, and how much is genuine concern
and due criticism.
Which is to say, although agree criticism is necessary, sometimes
the rhetoric can run away with us and get out of control. Rhetoric
gone wild, you might say.
Perhaps my language was not as tempered as it should have been in
calling you a dick, but in my defense, we all have our ‘dickish’
moments.
I hope you understand that comment was specifically in regard to your
having singled out PZ Myers for the fourth or fifth consecutive time,
not just in one article either. At the time it seemed that you were
only offering criticism of this one particular atheist thinker and no
others, on top of grouping all the other outspoken New Atheists
together with him, lending to the skewed view that this is what
all atheists must think.
In addition, it appears your rhetoric may have gone wild, when you
threw out that childish ad hominem that PZ was a “Super jerk.” Such
playground talk seemed, to me, less like a proper criticism and more
like a critical attack on someone’s character.
Whether or not it was provoked, or deserved, it just seemed to be a
little bit dickish. But perhaps what shocked me even more was the
implication that we needed it pointed out to us. Oh, that crazy PZ is
so over the top, and he is being a jerk again, I mean, super jerk.
I could be entirely off on this, but it seemed like you were saying
(implying) that any fan of PZ was in the same league of ‘jerkiness’.
Perhaps it was the earlier usage of the et al. (and others) which
threw me off. It felt like, since you were grouping all New Atheists
together anyway, and coming off the negativity of previous New Atheist
criticism, that you were implying all New Atheists were a little bit
jerky (at least the so-called “uneducated” jerks who hang on every
word of their overlord blog king, the so-called Super jerk).
Although I consider myself part of the New Atheist movement, and am a
fan of PZ, nonetheless, I go out of my way to try not to be an
uneducated jerk and mindless follower. Which is why I thought some of
your comments were unwarranted (at least overly stereotypical),
therefore I felt apologies were in order.
I hope that clarifies and explains the whole “dick debacle.”
Admittedly, I may have let the rhetorical situation run away too, and I probably was more derisive than critical. I hope we can open up a discourse free of our egos and perhaps talk more personally about the greater atheistic concerns, and challenges, facing us. Which I feel we are both attempting, to the best of our abilities.
Reply
Tristan D. Vick
May 10, 2011 at 3:57 am
[I hope this one is a little bit easier to read]
Thank you Mr. Hoffmann, sir. I appreciate you taking the time to engage me.
I guess I will reply here first and then do a copy and paste to your blog. I would do it the other way around except today I am out of town and only have my Kindle to send a reply on a poor wireless connection with.
The part where you said “Blogs make us prophets in small kingdoms” is entirely true. It makes me wonder how much of blogging (and writing critical exposes in general) is simply rhetoric aimed at maintaining the the kingdoms of our own devising, and how much is genuine concern and due criticism.
Which is to say, although agree criticism is necessary, sometimes the rhetoric can run away with us and get out of control. Rhetoric gone wild, you might say.
Perhaps my language was not as tempered as it should have been in calling you a dick, but in my defense, we all have our ‘dickish’ moments.
I hope you understand that comment was specifically in regard to your having singled out PZ Myers for the fourth or fifth consecutive time, not just in one article either. At the time it seemed that you were only offering criticism of this one particular atheist thinker and no others, on top of grouping all the other outspoken New Atheists together with him, lending to the skewed view that this is what all atheists must think.
In addition, it appears your rhetoric may have gone wild, when you threw out that childish ad hominem that PZ was a “Super jerk.” Such playground talk seemed, to me, less like a proper criticism and more like a critical attack on someone’s character.
Whether or not it was provoked, or deserved, it just seemed to be a little bit dickish. But perhaps what shocked me even more was the implication that we needed it pointed out to us. Oh, that crazy PZ is so over the top, and he is being a jerk again, I mean, super jerk.
I could be entirely off on this, but it seemed like you were saying (implying) that any fan of PZ was in the same league of ‘jerkiness’.
Perhaps it was the earlier usage of the et al. (and others) which threw me off. It felt like, since you were grouping all New Atheists together anyway, and coming off the negativity of previous New Atheist criticism, that you were implying all New Atheists were a little bit jerky (at least the so-called “uneducated” jerks who hang on every word of their overlord blog king, the so-called Super jerk).
Although I consider myself part of the New Atheist movement, and am a fan of PZ, nonetheless, I go out of my way to try not to be an uneducated jerk and mindless follower. Which is why I thought some of your comments were unwarranted (at least overly stereotypical),
therefore I felt apologies were in order.
I hope that clarifies and explains the whole “dick debacle.”
Admittedly, I may have let the rhetorical situation run away too, and I probably was more derisive than critical. I hope we can open up a discourse free of our egos and perhaps talk more personally about the greater atheistic concerns, and challenges, facing us. Which I feel we are both attempting, to the best of our abilities.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 10, 2011 at 6:24 am
Thanks Tristan; I’m going to blog about this today or tomorrow.
Reply
Pingback: Is “Beyond Belief” Beyond Critique? « Religion And More…
Karla McLaren
May 11, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Dear Joseph,
I love the self-awareness you have, and your humor makes me fall out of my chair. I know you’re grieving right now, but I want to tell you how much I respect your willingness to lower the sharp, sharp stiletto of your wit (in this instance; I command you to use it elsewhere). It’s excellent mentoring, and I thank you for it!
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 19, 2015 at 1:28 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
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Killing History: The ISIS War on Civilization
Posted on March 8, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
Image result for nimrud
One of the key features of the book religions is iconoclasm—literally, idol smashing. The ancient Hebrews developed a dislike for statues and images sometime in the first millennium BCE, and after occasionally reverting to worshiping them decided to prohibit them outright because their God “was a jealous god, above whom, there can be no others” (Exodus 20,4).
This was more wishful thinking than fact, since in military encounters with the many-godded nations that surrounded them Israel habitually lost to these other gods.
The Christians tried for a while to ignore their rich pagan legacy of temples and statues, but finally succumbed to the temptation to make icons, name churches after saints, and produce thousands of images to encourage their veneration.
Image result for iconoclasm
Later, Christians in the East decided to clamp down on the practice, finding it more than a little like the idol-worship condemned in the Decalogue. And later still, during the Reformation, Christians in the West went through various spasmodic attempts to cleanse the protestantized churches of their statuary and altars and demolish the monasteries that had become factories for producing them.
In its early days, Islamic iconoclasm expressed itself in refitting Christian churches as mosques, chipping away at mosaics, whitewashing frescoes, converting bell towers and baptisteries into minarets, as well as effacing (literally cutting the nose off) Christian statues. Catholic Christians in turn reclaimed more than a few churches, especially in Spain, and duly set about giving them new altars and stony or chalky saints.
Image result for mosque at cordova
Hence What is happening in Syria and Iraq with the destruction of the antiquities at Nimrud and Hatra has a history. But it is a history with a difference. Radical monotheism has always expressed itself as an incentive to destroy the shrines of your religious enemies It is a tangible way of saying that my beliefs are better than yours–that my doctrine is the right doctrine, based on my book and my revelation—which are also right where yours is wrong. Only love and religion produce such strong emotional extremities of beauty and destruction.
But one should not be be misled by the mere fact that iconoclasm has a history: religious rivalries of the kind I have described happened in the real time of contemporaneous disputes; they constituted a kind of ritual and theological warfare between living religious movements. The wholesale attack on the civilization of the planet in the name of religion–the artistic and aesthetic murders we are witnessing–are scarcely related to any dispute anyone in the contemporary world is having or wants to have–religious, theological or otherwise. To most onlookers, shredding manuscripts and hammering 3000 year old artefacts to powder is not an event we can locate in a contemporary matrix or in the lexicon of irrational and savage behaviour. It has the irrationality of a tornado without any of the natural beauty of a violent, natural storm. That is because we do not expect storms to be rational. We expect humans to be rational.
Many of my Muslim friends are aghast at what is going on in the Middle East, just as the world was aghast in 2001 at the dynamiting of the sixth-century CE Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. There is something especially sickening about these displays of the craven mind, especially because the ones affected by this assault on history are not affected out of religious devotion to ancient images but because they know that antiquity is physically limited: we instinctively know there is a moral imperative to preserve these uncommon treasures of our human past. That is where the revulsion comes from.
Yet the generality of the Muslim world can only come up with feeble scolds like “Unislamic” to describe what is being done by madmen to restore Islam to its native purity and intolerant righteousness. And when we search for appropriate analogies, as Barack Obama absurdly tried to do recently, we are instructed that it “hasn’t been long ago since Christians and Jews did violent things in the name of religion”–a platitude so venomously inexact that it can only have been spoken by a politician. Mr Obama’s larger point seems to have been that no religion has a monopoly on violence. Yet to the casual observer, the thought that irate Presbyterians or Chasidic Jews would today burn “apostates” in cages or take sledgehanmmers to priceless relics of the past seems more than a little far-fetched,
What’s the Matter with Ahmed? A World without a Past
The actual modus operandi of Islamic state is a radical belief in the “totalizing imperative.” It incorporates into its monotheism both the largely defunct Jewish doctrine of election (the belief that a god chooses some people, nations, or forms of belief over others), the Christian mission to “evangelize” the world to believe in a unique message of salvation, together with a driving obsession with the finality of its eschatological vision: There is no god but Allah; no Prophet beside or after Muhammad; and no revelation outside the Quran.
For some Muslims, like the branch of Islam represented by Islamic State, the entail of this finality is that there is also only one correct interpretation of this profession of faith: not only Christians or unbelievers must be converted or face death, but also other Muslims who adhere to a heretical variant of the Takfirist-Salafist form of Sunni Islam to which they belong. However, understanding the ideological species of Islam that IS represents does not explain their success, their growing popularity with Muslim youth from a variety of sectarian backgrounds, or the brutishness of their methods.
Image result for jihadi john
Theologically, both in its normal and “extreme” iterations Islam only superficially resembles Christianity. The intuition of most Jews and Christians that Islam is ontically different from the other book traditions is actually a fairly precise judgment. Islam is not “where” Christianity was five hunded years ago or a thousand years ago. It is not a religion poised on the brink of reformation, enlightenment, and modernity but a religion whose cardinal assumptions seem to drive it repeatedly back into the cavernous recesses of its beginnings. The most startling example of this recidivism is its view of history.
Judaism values its history as a history of suffering, almost uninterrupted between the Exile of the sixth century BCE and 1945. But in dispersion, Jews came to see the value of history: history became their home, the Bible the sentimental record of their own contribution to civilization. The Persians, the Syrians and for a while the Romans–all immersed in their own national mythologies–permitted the Jews their cult, their temple, even the illusion of having “kings,” but no Jewish civilization arose out of Jerusalem or the dead north of Samaria. By the second century of our era it had virtually disappeared from the map. The historical destiny of Jews was expressed in their story as wanderers, survivors, and eventually in scholarship and ethics. Jews were in history, as Eric Osborn once said of the biblical tradition, like a fish is in water.
Christianity given the choice between discarding the Hebrew legacy of their “Old” Testament or accepting it, accepted it in a symbolic and prophetic way—but at a time when Judaism too was beginning to understand religious origins more liberally, as though both faiths had a mechanism for self- correction and adaptation. For all the murderous petulance that characterized Jewish-Christian relations from the time of the Crusades to the time of the Inquisition to the Holocaust, Christians clung stubbornly to the premise that they were honorary Jews, adopted sons and daughters of the promise made to Abraham. That is, they shared a common history of salvation, and one of the ways they were able to do this was grounded in the preservation of history and the acceptance over time of the transformative power of civilization through (sometimes cautious) acceptance of learning. It is fair to say that both Judaism and Christianity today are essentially ethical movements whose doctrines and protagonists—up to and including God himself—are symbolic statements of what Paul Tillich once described as “ultimate concern.” The existence of literalist strains of Christianity and Judaism do not undermine this essential pattern of demythologizing and adaptation.
The scenes out of Iraq show us the demonic side of monotheism: the desire to erase history as a way of laying claim to finality. In Islam, the Qur’an is the final book, Muhammad the final prophet and the straight path of Islam the only path. It is true that Judaism and Christianity once believed similarly rigid things about their truth- claims, but both of the original monotheisms underwent political and social disconfirmation that made it impossible to sustain the original doctrines in their original form or with the same intensity. Historical reality became the mechanism for adaptation and correction. Judaism for example was never a “resurrection” faith even in the time of Jesus. Its messiah was never an otherworldly figure, except after hopes of a this-worldly deliverer began to vanish. Picking up on the minor theme of a divine son of God and messiah, Christianity too began in disappointment—its saviour had been executed by the Roman magistracy in Palestine with the collusion of Jewish leaders. He had saved nobody, alienated many, and died an agitator and tax rebel. This disappointment was rationalized (with plenty of help from popular Jewish apocalyptic texts) into a belief in a “second coming” when “all will be revealed”—a belief that could not be sustained over thousands of years of non-fulfillment. In short, the core doctrines of Christianity and Judaism were disconfirmed by historical outcomes that could not have been foreseen in 700 BCE or 1000 CE. History chipped enthusiasm down to size and taught these religions to live in a world that was increasingly demystified by science and explicable without the need for religion.
By contrast, the self-definition of Islam in its most extreme form–that it is final in every respect—has not been disconfirmed. It is axiomatic that it cannot be. Islam is counter-culturally and trans-historically true. And because the Salafi form of Islam does not recognize the analogy of its experience in Jewish and Christian antecedents (perhaps the most blatant example of its irrationalism) its zealots believe that they can effectively usher in the conditions for the Judgement. They will do this by submitting fully to their interpretation of the will of Allah as announced by his human vizier, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, otherwise known as the Caliph Ibrahim.
Image result for caliph ibrahim
They will do this by beheading unbelievers, torching heretics, forcing teenage girls into marriage with Muslim fighters. They will do this by executing Shia Muslims, destroying the Assyrian Christians and their churches and homes, torturing and killing the Mandaens and Yazidis who have hung on by their nails for over a thousand years of persecution and indifference. They will do this by smashing the priceless treasures of the ancient Akkadian Near East in Mosul’s Museum, and bulldozing the sites of ancient Nineveh and Nimrud, including the Mosque of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul. They will do this by destroying thousands of books and manuscripts in Mosul’s libraries. Just as they have already done it by destroying Hatra using explosives and bulldozers. One attacker was filmed declaring,
“
“These ruins that are behind me, they are idols and statues that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah. The Prophet Muhammed took down idols with his bare hands when he went into Mecca. We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries.” (Morgan Winsor (5 March 2015). “ISIS Destroys Iraqi Archaeological Site Of Nimrud Near Mosul”. IBT. Retrieved 8 March 2015.)
In the ISIL vision of the world, pre-Islamic history must not exist. Indeed it does not exist. In their world every trace of a history that does not corroborate their narrow definition of the truth is demonic: it must be erased, destroyed, turned to rubble because God the all-powerful must (somehow) be threatened by 3000 tear old artefacts that stand deserted and quiet in the sands of Iraq . History in their religious universe is a kind of illusion, a deception sent by the devil to distract earlier races and people from the true faith. It cannot be preserved. It must be erased, repealed. History is the incarnation of the Unislamic, and the the pre-Islamic is the greater part of that intolerable period before Allah revealed his will to the final Prophet. The only position for a believer, on this calculation, is to regard art, architecture, music, science, free inquiry and philosophy as heretical, while rape, arson, torture, destruction, beheading and violence (aided, to be sure by smart phones and slick media presentations) is the will of God.
The poisonous logic of the Caliph Ibrahim and his ISIL fighters is that by burying the remains of the past the past will lie still and stay dead. But quite the opposite is happening: ruins that are largely untended in the Iraqi desert are now objects of veneration to millions who had never heard of them, and their ancient ghosts have been set free to roam and haunt the modern palaces of government and civilization–and more importantly, the modern consciousness. No religion proves it is the fulfillment of history by hiding the evidence of the history that came before it. That is called lying. Deception. It is what the Islamic State is based on and, when it lay still and permanently dead in the destruction it has wreaked, what it will be remembered for.
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9 thoughts on “Killing History: The ISIS War on Civilization”
Dewey Boshers
March 8, 2015 at 12:42 pm
Interesting take on this horrific organization. I think you give them too much credit though. They are just a bunch of brutal thugs with aspirations of power who are trying to use Islam to justify their sadism and cruelty. Also my understanding is that most of what was destroyed in Mosul were replicas and not the originals. Apparently they were carted off to Bagdad in anticipation of what Isil might do.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 11, 2015 at 10:01 pm
Some replicas. some original–but Nimrud and Hatra all bulldozed, all original
Reply
vxxc2014
March 9, 2015 at 5:46 am
ISIS aka D’aesh are the same people the last 10+ years. The same people and org we fought.
Perhaps next time the Defenders of Civilization are doing their dirty work they shouldn’t be back-stabbed because it isn’t pretty or telegenic – and we were. Wretches who never heard of history now mourn and venerate it’s annihilation at a safe distance as usual. Up close they’ll do whatever it takes to stay alive another day, including veneration of ISIS – and they’ll believe in ISIS too.
Ye educated Folks stop them. Not our problem.
Reply
Bob Reykdal
March 9, 2015 at 8:36 am
Thank you. A glimpse into the ISIS mind.
Reply
fletchclem
March 10, 2015 at 1:18 am
Glad to see a fresh post. Missed them!
Reply
C. Pendray
March 11, 2015 at 6:51 pm
Let us hope that sooner, rather than later, it will come to “lay still and permanently dead in the destruction it has wreaked”. I fear the later, rather than expect the sooner; for as yet we do not hold such evil accountable for that which it is and the horrors it does. There are far too many Islamic/Islamist sympathizers at the helm (such as Obama) who pay no mind to the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of innocents lost, be they Christian or Jew; Buddhist or Hindu, Sikh, or even Muslim, and all inbetween.
Reply
juliaergane
March 12, 2015 at 4:47 pm
And Klio weeps. There is no cure for psychopathy, which this is but one example. Islam will never be acknowledged as the failed religion it is because it is too embarrassing. It would admit that the Q’ran is not perfect. No piece of religious literature is. There are lovely people who do not take it to the Nth degree (of course they must be neutralized) as well as the mystic Sufis; but, they are out-shouted by these ********.
Reply
scotteus
March 13, 2015 at 12:01 am
“A glimpse into the ISIS mind” Well, I guess if one can call it a “mind”. I would call it a near perfect example of religious nihilism. True, nihilism exists in all religions(and pretty much all things); however, this one is particularly virulent and destructive. Paradoxically, ISIS seems full of Ideology, but lacking in coherent ideas; in fact, they’re against ideas.
Reply
Pingback: [JH] Σκοτώνοντας την Ιστορία: Ο πόλεμος του ISIS κατά του Πολιτισμού | On the way to Ithaca
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Killing History: The ISIS War on Civilization
Posted on March 8, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
Image result for nimrud
One of the key features of the book religions is iconoclasm—literally, idol smashing. The ancient Hebrews developed a dislike for statues and images sometime in the first millennium BCE, and after occasionally reverting to worshiping them decided to prohibit them outright because their God “was a jealous god, above whom, there can be no others” (Exodus 20,4).
This was more wishful thinking than fact, since in military encounters with the many-godded nations that surrounded them Israel habitually lost to these other gods.
The Christians tried for a while to ignore their rich pagan legacy of temples and statues, but finally succumbed to the temptation to make icons, name churches after saints, and produce thousands of images to encourage their veneration.
Image result for iconoclasm
Later, Christians in the East decided to clamp down on the practice, finding it more than a little like the idol-worship condemned in the Decalogue. And later still, during the Reformation, Christians in the West went through various spasmodic attempts to cleanse the protestantized churches of their statuary and altars and demolish the monasteries that had become factories for producing them.
In its early days, Islamic iconoclasm expressed itself in refitting Christian churches as mosques, chipping away at mosaics, whitewashing frescoes, converting bell towers and baptisteries into minarets, as well as effacing (literally cutting the nose off) Christian statues. Catholic Christians in turn reclaimed more than a few churches, especially in Spain, and duly set about giving them new altars and stony or chalky saints.
Image result for mosque at cordova
Hence What is happening in Syria and Iraq with the destruction of the antiquities at Nimrud and Hatra has a history. But it is a history with a difference. Radical monotheism has always expressed itself as an incentive to destroy the shrines of your religious enemies It is a tangible way of saying that my beliefs are better than yours–that my doctrine is the right doctrine, based on my book and my revelation—which are also right where yours is wrong. Only love and religion produce such strong emotional extremities of beauty and destruction.
But one should not be be misled by the mere fact that iconoclasm has a history: religious rivalries of the kind I have described happened in the real time of contemporaneous disputes; they constituted a kind of ritual and theological warfare between living religious movements. The wholesale attack on the civilization of the planet in the name of religion–the artistic and aesthetic murders we are witnessing–are scarcely related to any dispute anyone in the contemporary world is having or wants to have–religious, theological or otherwise. To most onlookers, shredding manuscripts and hammering 3000 year old artefacts to powder is not an event we can locate in a contemporary matrix or in the lexicon of irrational and savage behaviour. It has the irrationality of a tornado without any of the natural beauty of a violent, natural storm. That is because we do not expect storms to be rational. We expect humans to be rational.
Many of my Muslim friends are aghast at what is going on in the Middle East, just as the world was aghast in 2001 at the dynamiting of the sixth-century CE Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. There is something especially sickening about these displays of the craven mind, especially because the ones affected by this assault on history are not affected out of religious devotion to ancient images but because they know that antiquity is physically limited: we instinctively know there is a moral imperative to preserve these uncommon treasures of our human past. That is where the revulsion comes from.
Yet the generality of the Muslim world can only come up with feeble scolds like “Unislamic” to describe what is being done by madmen to restore Islam to its native purity and intolerant righteousness. And when we search for appropriate analogies, as Barack Obama absurdly tried to do recently, we are instructed that it “hasn’t been long ago since Christians and Jews did violent things in the name of religion”–a platitude so venomously inexact that it can only have been spoken by a politician. Mr Obama’s larger point seems to have been that no religion has a monopoly on violence. Yet to the casual observer, the thought that irate Presbyterians or Chasidic Jews would today burn “apostates” in cages or take sledgehanmmers to priceless relics of the past seems more than a little far-fetched,
What’s the Matter with Ahmed? A World without a Past
The actual modus operandi of Islamic state is a radical belief in the “totalizing imperative.” It incorporates into its monotheism both the largely defunct Jewish doctrine of election (the belief that a god chooses some people, nations, or forms of belief over others), the Christian mission to “evangelize” the world to believe in a unique message of salvation, together with a driving obsession with the finality of its eschatological vision: There is no god but Allah; no Prophet beside or after Muhammad; and no revelation outside the Quran.
For some Muslims, like the branch of Islam represented by Islamic State, the entail of this finality is that there is also only one correct interpretation of this profession of faith: not only Christians or unbelievers must be converted or face death, but also other Muslims who adhere to a heretical variant of the Takfirist-Salafist form of Sunni Islam to which they belong. However, understanding the ideological species of Islam that IS represents does not explain their success, their growing popularity with Muslim youth from a variety of sectarian backgrounds, or the brutishness of their methods.
Image result for jihadi john
Theologically, both in its normal and “extreme” iterations Islam only superficially resembles Christianity. The intuition of most Jews and Christians that Islam is ontically different from the other book traditions is actually a fairly precise judgment. Islam is not “where” Christianity was five hunded years ago or a thousand years ago. It is not a religion poised on the brink of reformation, enlightenment, and modernity but a religion whose cardinal assumptions seem to drive it repeatedly back into the cavernous recesses of its beginnings. The most startling example of this recidivism is its view of history.
Judaism values its history as a history of suffering, almost uninterrupted between the Exile of the sixth century BCE and 1945. But in dispersion, Jews came to see the value of history: history became their home, the Bible the sentimental record of their own contribution to civilization. The Persians, the Syrians and for a while the Romans–all immersed in their own national mythologies–permitted the Jews their cult, their temple, even the illusion of having “kings,” but no Jewish civilization arose out of Jerusalem or the dead north of Samaria. By the second century of our era it had virtually disappeared from the map. The historical destiny of Jews was expressed in their story as wanderers, survivors, and eventually in scholarship and ethics. Jews were in history, as Eric Osborn once said of the biblical tradition, like a fish is in water.
Christianity given the choice between discarding the Hebrew legacy of their “Old” Testament or accepting it, accepted it in a symbolic and prophetic way—but at a time when Judaism too was beginning to understand religious origins more liberally, as though both faiths had a mechanism for self- correction and adaptation. For all the murderous petulance that characterized Jewish-Christian relations from the time of the Crusades to the time of the Inquisition to the Holocaust, Christians clung stubbornly to the premise that they were honorary Jews, adopted sons and daughters of the promise made to Abraham. That is, they shared a common history of salvation, and one of the ways they were able to do this was grounded in the preservation of history and the acceptance over time of the transformative power of civilization through (sometimes cautious) acceptance of learning. It is fair to say that both Judaism and Christianity today are essentially ethical movements whose doctrines and protagonists—up to and including God himself—are symbolic statements of what Paul Tillich once described as “ultimate concern.” The existence of literalist strains of Christianity and Judaism do not undermine this essential pattern of demythologizing and adaptation.
The scenes out of Iraq show us the demonic side of monotheism: the desire to erase history as a way of laying claim to finality. In Islam, the Qur’an is the final book, Muhammad the final prophet and the straight path of Islam the only path. It is true that Judaism and Christianity once believed similarly rigid things about their truth- claims, but both of the original monotheisms underwent political and social disconfirmation that made it impossible to sustain the original doctrines in their original form or with the same intensity. Historical reality became the mechanism for adaptation and correction. Judaism for example was never a “resurrection” faith even in the time of Jesus. Its messiah was never an otherworldly figure, except after hopes of a this-worldly deliverer began to vanish. Picking up on the minor theme of a divine son of God and messiah, Christianity too began in disappointment—its saviour had been executed by the Roman magistracy in Palestine with the collusion of Jewish leaders. He had saved nobody, alienated many, and died an agitator and tax rebel. This disappointment was rationalized (with plenty of help from popular Jewish apocalyptic texts) into a belief in a “second coming” when “all will be revealed”—a belief that could not be sustained over thousands of years of non-fulfillment. In short, the core doctrines of Christianity and Judaism were disconfirmed by historical outcomes that could not have been foreseen in 700 BCE or 1000 CE. History chipped enthusiasm down to size and taught these religions to live in a world that was increasingly demystified by science and explicable without the need for religion.
By contrast, the self-definition of Islam in its most extreme form–that it is final in every respect—has not been disconfirmed. It is axiomatic that it cannot be. Islam is counter-culturally and trans-historically true. And because the Salafi form of Islam does not recognize the analogy of its experience in Jewish and Christian antecedents (perhaps the most blatant example of its irrationalism) its zealots believe that they can effectively usher in the conditions for the Judgement. They will do this by submitting fully to their interpretation of the will of Allah as announced by his human vizier, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, otherwise known as the Caliph Ibrahim.
Image result for caliph ibrahim
They will do this by beheading unbelievers, torching heretics, forcing teenage girls into marriage with Muslim fighters. They will do this by executing Shia Muslims, destroying the Assyrian Christians and their churches and homes, torturing and killing the Mandaens and Yazidis who have hung on by their nails for over a thousand years of persecution and indifference. They will do this by smashing the priceless treasures of the ancient Akkadian Near East in Mosul’s Museum, and bulldozing the sites of ancient Nineveh and Nimrud, including the Mosque of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul. They will do this by destroying thousands of books and manuscripts in Mosul’s libraries. Just as they have already done it by destroying Hatra using explosives and bulldozers. One attacker was filmed declaring,
“
“These ruins that are behind me, they are idols and statues that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah. The Prophet Muhammed took down idols with his bare hands when he went into Mecca. We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries.” (Morgan Winsor (5 March 2015). “ISIS Destroys Iraqi Archaeological Site Of Nimrud Near Mosul”. IBT. Retrieved 8 March 2015.)
In the ISIL vision of the world, pre-Islamic history must not exist. Indeed it does not exist. In their world every trace of a history that does not corroborate their narrow definition of the truth is demonic: it must be erased, destroyed, turned to rubble because God the all-powerful must (somehow) be threatened by 3000 tear old artefacts that stand deserted and quiet in the sands of Iraq . History in their religious universe is a kind of illusion, a deception sent by the devil to distract earlier races and people from the true faith. It cannot be preserved. It must be erased, repealed. History is the incarnation of the Unislamic, and the the pre-Islamic is the greater part of that intolerable period before Allah revealed his will to the final Prophet. The only position for a believer, on this calculation, is to regard art, architecture, music, science, free inquiry and philosophy as heretical, while rape, arson, torture, destruction, beheading and violence (aided, to be sure by smart phones and slick media presentations) is the will of God.
The poisonous logic of the Caliph Ibrahim and his ISIL fighters is that by burying the remains of the past the past will lie still and stay dead. But quite the opposite is happening: ruins that are largely untended in the Iraqi desert are now objects of veneration to millions who had never heard of them, and their ancient ghosts have been set free to roam and haunt the modern palaces of government and civilization–and more importantly, the modern consciousness. No religion proves it is the fulfillment of history by hiding the evidence of the history that came before it. That is called lying. Deception. It is what the Islamic State is based on and, when it lay still and permanently dead in the destruction it has wreaked, what it will be remembered for.
About these ads
Share this:
Facebook88
Twitter4
Email
Reddit
Print
Related
New Ethics and Atheist Newbies
In "atheism"
Why I Am an Unbeliever: Carl van Doren
God and We the People
With 5 comments
Bookmark the permalink.
Post navigation
← Five Good Things about Atheism
The God Viruses →
9 thoughts on “Killing History: The ISIS War on Civilization”
Dewey Boshers
March 8, 2015 at 12:42 pm
Interesting take on this horrific organization. I think you give them too much credit though. They are just a bunch of brutal thugs with aspirations of power who are trying to use Islam to justify their sadism and cruelty. Also my understanding is that most of what was destroyed in Mosul were replicas and not the originals. Apparently they were carted off to Bagdad in anticipation of what Isil might do.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 11, 2015 at 10:01 pm
Some replicas. some original–but Nimrud and Hatra all bulldozed, all original
Reply
vxxc2014
March 9, 2015 at 5:46 am
ISIS aka D’aesh are the same people the last 10+ years. The same people and org we fought.
Perhaps next time the Defenders of Civilization are doing their dirty work they shouldn’t be back-stabbed because it isn’t pretty or telegenic – and we were. Wretches who never heard of history now mourn and venerate it’s annihilation at a safe distance as usual. Up close they’ll do whatever it takes to stay alive another day, including veneration of ISIS – and they’ll believe in ISIS too.
Ye educated Folks stop them. Not our problem.
Reply
Bob Reykdal
March 9, 2015 at 8:36 am
Thank you. A glimpse into the ISIS mind.
Reply
fletchclem
March 10, 2015 at 1:18 am
Glad to see a fresh post. Missed them!
Reply
C. Pendray
March 11, 2015 at 6:51 pm
Let us hope that sooner, rather than later, it will come to “lay still and permanently dead in the destruction it has wreaked”. I fear the later, rather than expect the sooner; for as yet we do not hold such evil accountable for that which it is and the horrors it does. There are far too many Islamic/Islamist sympathizers at the helm (such as Obama) who pay no mind to the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of innocents lost, be they Christian or Jew; Buddhist or Hindu, Sikh, or even Muslim, and all inbetween.
Reply
juliaergane
March 12, 2015 at 4:47 pm
And Klio weeps. There is no cure for psychopathy, which this is but one example. Islam will never be acknowledged as the failed religion it is because it is too embarrassing. It would admit that the Q’ran is not perfect. No piece of religious literature is. There are lovely people who do not take it to the Nth degree (of course they must be neutralized) as well as the mystic Sufis; but, they are out-shouted by these ********.
Reply
scotteus
March 13, 2015 at 12:01 am
“A glimpse into the ISIS mind” Well, I guess if one can call it a “mind”. I would call it a near perfect example of religious nihilism. True, nihilism exists in all religions(and pretty much all things); however, this one is particularly virulent and destructive. Paradoxically, ISIS seems full of Ideology, but lacking in coherent ideas; in fact, they’re against ideas.
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Atheist Martyrs? Gnus to me.
Posted on April 20, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
Originally posted on The New Oxonian:
“
“If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were only made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities.” (Edward Grant: God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2001)
Have there been atheist martyrs–women and men who suffered and died as a consequence of their rejection of God?
This thoughtful question came up when I recently suggested that I detect a trend in the small but dwindling new atheist community to pad the bona fides of their young tradition with things that didn’t really happen. We know that real Gnus love science and aren’t too keen on history, especially a history that suggests that Once upon a Time there was a lonely wood-cutter living good without God by the edge of a forest outside Düsseldorf who kept his opinions about God to himself and was never molested, his humble house never…
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Atheist Martyrs? Gnus to me.
Posted on April 20, 2015 by rjosephhoffmann
Originally posted on The New Oxonian:
“
“If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were only made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities.” (Edward Grant: God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2001)
Have there been atheist martyrs–women and men who suffered and died as a consequence of their rejection of God?
This thoughtful question came up when I recently suggested that I detect a trend in the small but dwindling new atheist community to pad the bona fides of their young tradition with things that didn’t really happen. We know that real Gnus love science and aren’t too keen on history, especially a history that suggests that Once upon a Time there was a lonely wood-cutter living good without God by the edge of a forest outside Düsseldorf who kept his opinions about God to himself and was never molested, his humble house never…
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Five Good Things about Atheism
Posted on September 28, 2010 by rjosephhoffmann
It seems I cannot win.
Meself
When I chart the vague, occasional and ambiguous virtues of religion (mainly historical) I am accused of being intellectually soft. When I tell atheists they run the risk of turning their social solidarity into tent revivals or support groups I risk expulsion from the ranks of the Unbaptized and Wannabe Unbaptized.
It is a terrible position to be in, I can tell you, and I have no one to blame but myself.
To make amends and win back my disillusioned readers I am devoting this blog to the good things about atheism.
As far as I can tell, there are five:
1. Atheism is probably right: there is almost certainly no God. At least not the kind of pluriform god described by the world’s religions. If there were, we would know it in the way we know other things, like potholes and rainbows, and we would know it not because of syllogisms that begin “All things that exist were created,” or through the contradictory revelations of competing sects.
We would know it because we are hardwired to know.
The weakest argument of all, of course, is existence since existence raises the question of God; it does not answer it. The difference between a god who is hidden (invisible), or does not wish to be known (elusive), or cannot be demonstrated rationally is the same thing as a God who may as well not exist. Not to assign homework but have a look at John Wisdom’s famous parable recited in Antony Flew’s essay, “Theology and Falsification,” (1968).
2. Atheism is courageous. Not valorous perhaps, not deserving of medals. But it takes a certain amount of courage not to believe what a vast majority of other people believe to be true. You learned that much as a kid, when a teacher said to you, after some minor tragedy in the playground, “Just because your best friend decides to jump over a fence onto a busy road doesn’t mean you need to do it too.”
The pressure to believe in God is enormous in twenty-first century society, and all but irresistible in certain sectors of America–the fundamental international base line for irrationality. Having to be religious or needing not to seem irreligious is the greatest tragedy of American public life and a sure recipe for the nation’s future mediocrity. It dominates political campaigns and the way kids learn history in Texas.
Texas edits textbooks
Theological differences aside, what Muslims and Christians and other godfearers have in common is an illusion that they are willing to defend aggressively–in certain cases murderously.
Even when it does not reach that level of viciousness, it can make the life of the uncommitted, unfaithed and unchurched miserable. Atheists deserve credit for having to put up with this stupidity. That is bravery, defined as forbearance.
Many atheists realize that the fervour displayed by religious extremists has deep psychological roots–that history has witnessed its bloodiest moments when causes were already lost. The legalization of Christianity (312?) came within three years of the final assault against Christians by the last “pagan” emperor. The greater number of the wars of religion (1562-1592) occurred after the Council of Trent (adj. 1563) had made Catholic doctrine unassailable–written in stone–for Catholics and completely unacceptable for Protestants. The Holocaust happened largely because Rassenhasse flowed naturally from two done deals: worldwide economic collapse and Germany’s humiliation in the Great War of 1914-1918. The Klan became most violent when its utility as an instrument of southern “justice” was finished.
Most of the available signs suggest that religion will not succumb to creeping irrelevance in the next six months. Religions become violent and aggressive as they struggle for breath. The substitution of emotion and blind, often illiterate, faith in support of threadbare dogmatic assertions is part of this struggle. So is an unwillingness to accept any alternative consensus to replace the old religious one.
Atheism symbolizes not just unbelief in God but the nature of that alternative consensus. That is why atheism is especially opprobrious to belief in an a era when most questions are settled by science and investigation.
Yet even without the security of dogma, religions usually provide for the emotional needs of their adherents in ways that science does not. They have had centuries, for example, to convince people that the miseries endured in this life are simply a preparation for a better one to come. A purposeless world acquires meaning as a “testing ground” for initiation into future glory. There is no art of consolation for the atheist, just the world as it is. Granny may have lost the power of speech after her third stroke, but she knows there is a wolf behind the door: religion knows this instinctively.
Being an atheist may be a bit lonely, but better “Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” (And Socrates was courageous, too.)
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space. Atheists know that the world we live in is dominated by religion: spires, minarets, ceremonial prayers, political rhetoric and posturing, ethical discussion. I am not convinced (alas) that atheists are “brighter” than anyone else, but they have to imagine ungiven alternatives and worlds of thought that have not been handed to them by tradition and custom.
Imagination however is that two-way street between vision and delusion. The given myths and symbols of a culture are imposed, not arrived at or deduced, and if not imposed then “imparted” by traditions. Jung was wrong.
Collective Unconscious?
Skeptics and unbelievers from Shelley and Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) to Richard Feynman, John Ellis, Ljon Tichy and Einstein in the sciences, Sir Michael Tippet, Bartok, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovitch in music, Bukoswki, Camus, Somerset Maugham, Joyce Carol Oates, Vonnegut in literature, have been imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, mental adventurers.
Far too often, unfortunately, atheists are the worst advocates for imagination.
They rather nervously limit their interest to the scientific imagination. They don’t see a connection between Monod and Camus. They consider their unbelief a “scientific” and “rational” position, not an imaginative one. When confronted with photographs of the Taj Mahal or recordings of Bach’s B-minor Mass, they point to shots from the Hubble telescope or (my personal favorite) soundtracks of earth auroral kilometric radiation.
Instead of owning the arts, they play the part of intellectual bullies who think poetry is for mental sissies.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have come to the conclusion that this is because they equate the imagination with the imaginary and the imaginary with the supernatural. The imagination produced religion, of course, hence the gods, but that does not mean that it is governed by religion, because if it were we never would have got round to science. The poet Charles Bukowski summed it up nicely in a 1988 interview: “For those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
4. Atheism is an ethical position. That does not make being an atheist a “moral” stance, but it does raise a question about whether it is possible to be good with God. Only an individual free from the commandments of religion and the threat of heaven and hell deserves credit (or blame) for his decisions, actions, and omissions. Atheists are required to assume that responsibility fully. Religious people are not.
This is why anyone who teaches his children that the story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament is a “moral fable” is just as bad as the fundamentalist who teaches it as history. What would you say about a brutish dog-owner who told his naturally stupid dog to piss anywhere but in the flower garden, then hied him to a shelter the minute he did what he couldn’t help doing to begin with? That is the story of Adam, without the benefit of two millennia of theology to disguise its simplest elements.
Bad Dog
Modern Christian theology has attempted to emphasize the love, mercy and compassion of this God: he is a God of second chances–redemption–after all.
But mainly the Christian message is little more than an attempt to rehabilitate God under the guise of teaching that it’s the humans who needed rehabilitating. They had to be given one more chance at the flowers in order to to show that God, after his initial temper tantrum, is really full of kindness and patience. That’s basically what the “New” Testament tries to do, after all, though in a highly problematical way.
At a basic level, an atheist is likely to detect that there is no ethical content to the stories of religion. The prototypes are Adam, the disobedient, Job, the sufferer, Noah, the obedient, and Abraham, the faithful.
But these figures are not ethical paragons. They are examples of the types of behavior religion requires. Religion evokes “good” in the “good dog” sense of the word–as a characteristic of obedience, not as an outcome of choice. That is not the kind of good any rational being would aspire to–and one of the reasons certain interpreters, like Augustine, thought that what was squandered in Eden was reason. But ethics is about reflection, discrimination, freedom, and decision. Religion, strictly and fairly speaking, does not provide for that; only unbelief does. If Augustine had understood things properly, he would have spit in God’s eye and said that Adam’s only rational choice was to do what he did, affirm who and what he was, and get on with his life without Yahweh. Instead, he creeps out of the garden, takes his punishment like a beaten spaniel, and lives in the hope that his master will throw him the occasional bone.
The expulsion from Eden
To the extent that modern liberal theologies try to say that religions have endorsed a policy of choice and reflection all along, the rebuttal is history.
5. Atheists are socially tolerant. By this, I mean that they do not have a history of violence against beliefs and practices they may privately abhor. They do not burn down churches, black or white. No matter how ardent their unbelief, they do not bomb mosques or blow themselves up at Sunday Mass to reduce the number of Catholics in the world. They are not responsible for the Arab-Israeli border wars. They have not created tens of thousands of displaced people in resettlement camps in Lebanon or torn whole African nations apart. In general, they do not mistake adventurism for preemptive wars.
They may support separation of church and state in sometimes strident ways, but not violent ways: you will not see gangs of secularists tearing down nativity scenes at Christmas or storming historic court houses to get icons of the ten commandments removed from public view. –Even if they think these public displays of devotion are inappropriate and teach people bad habits.
All of these things are pretty obvious, even to believers whose gurus talk incessantly about the secular humanist and atheist “threat” without ever being able (successfully) to put a face on it. But they need to be recorded because religious people often assume that tolerance can only be practised within a religious or inter-religious context, Catholic to Baptist, Christian to Jew and Muslim. But atheism stands outside this circle.
Atheism, as atheism, stands as the rejection of all religious beliefs: it is befuddling to believers how such a position deserves tolerating at all. If there has to be an enemy–something a majority can identify as uniformly despicable–atheism has to be it. That is why hoi polloi in the darkest days of the communist threat, especially those who had no idea what the social and economic program of the Soviet Union was, considered the worst sin of the “Reds” in Russia, China, and Europe their disbelief in God.
As with goodness, tolerance needs to be exhibited non-coercively. Not because Jesus said “Love your enemies,” or because Muhammad preached sparing unbelievers, provided they capitulated to Islam. Not even because John Paul II apologized to Galileo in absentia. What supports the suggestion that atheists are tolerant (and need to continue to be seen as being tolerant) is that the virtue of tolerance emerges naturally from the rational premises of unbelief. What atheism says is that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence, not by force of arms or the power of priests and mullahs.
While atheists will never experience mass conversions to their cause “like a mighty wind” after a speech by a pentecostal preacher, the individual changes of mind from belief to skepticism will depend as much on the tone as on the substance of their message. By the same token, what atheist would trust the unbelieving equivalent of a spiritual awakening? It doesn’t happen that way. It happens one by one. Slowly. Just ask an atheist about how he “became” an unbeliever, and I wager that you will hear a life story, or something about how things just didn’t add up–a process, not a sudden emotional shudder but often a painful change of heart and (especially) mind.
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46 thoughts on “Five Good Things about Atheism”
steph
September 28, 2010 at 11:03 pm
This is a very interesting post, not least because it makes me wonder whether I would have had the courage to reject a religious belief if I had been born into it. Although American and Middle Eastern atheists are courageous for not believing, as also Socrates certainly was, not all of us can claim to be courageous for not believing when there was never any pressure or desire in the first place. Despite unanswered questions … like ‘So why are we here?’ The answer for me is usually something like ‘Don’t know, but don’t forget the picnic because I know the surf’s up today.’ And it was precisely because I knew so many other atheists, of different flavours (former believers, anti religious, or like me, interested in believers’ beliefs despite not wanting to believe) that I didn’t always admit until very recently that I probably was one too. Not courageous – just conforming! although I defend my ‘atheist butism’ maybe…
You’re not in a terrible position though. When people disagree with you they tend to speak louder than people who agree. Although the Irish Oscar Wilde was referring to the British public, he said as long as three quarters of people disagreed with you, it was a sign of your sanity. More importantly though it’s a reflection of an independent mind not bowing obediently to convention for the sake of it. Without the reflection and insight into atheism and religion you provide, progress and learning is poorer. Ogden Nash wrote in part of ‘Seeing Eye to Eye is Believing’, “I believe that people believe what they believe they believe. When people reject a truth or an untruth it is not because it is a truth or an untruth that they reject it. No, if it isn’t in accord with their beliefs in the first place they simply say, “Nothing doing,” and refuse to inspect it.”
A long winded way of saying, with Groucho Marx “I can’t say I disagree with you” regarding the five good things – even six – about atheism in this post, and you’re absolutely right. And as always entertaining and beautifully written.
x
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Seth Strong
September 29, 2010 at 8:16 am
Although not in disagreement with the comment above by Steph, there is no winning on subjects like this. I get the impression that for every view into a subject you can find as an example writer, I can find another view that you haven’t incorporated or another way to look at the motivations of this type of people or that type of people. But I also think that’s a good place to include room for comments which can go further and onto tangents.
I totally endorse viewpoints that suggest atheism is not enough while simultaneously brandishing atheist as a priority description for people who might want to know things about me.
And also, if religion weren’t such a big deal to the extent that there are states acting to include creationism in science class, then I’d have a lot less incentive to investigate this subject. So for people in other countries and even other communities in America like maybe Oregon, their atheists might have less to say.
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chenier1
September 29, 2010 at 6:14 pm
At some point you will no doubt explain the basis for categorising Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao as “socially tolerant”, but you’ve obviously been having a hard time of it recently, so not now.
We’re back to the bit about two nations divided by the same language and different cultures; it is difficult for someone like myself, educated at a school founded in 1875 by radical feminists, in which Creationism was known to be too ridiculous even to be laughed at, to envisage any teacher trying to claim that the story of Adam and Eve is a moral fable; certainly none of mine ever attempted to do so, presumably because they did not wish to be laughed out of the classroom.
That and the fact that as far as Miss Buss and Miss Beale were concerned the Jesuits were pikers; no girl educated at a GPDST school was allowed to believe something because someone, however eminent, had said so. Even if the eminent Being doing the saying was God; it would be an affront to the memory of the suffragettes, who are ranked considerably above any saints.
Equally, since Job was not Jewish no-one ever attempted to claim that the God he was conversing with was the one addressed as father by Jesus, in the event of there actually being a ‘historical Jesus’, that is. Improbable as it may seem, the question of whether there really was a Jesus at all was included in the curriculum; as I recall the school chaplain was a bit unhappy about it but he went on to become an admittedly rather bad bishop, so presumably the powers that be forgave him for knuckling down.
All in all, I was educated to believe that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence; since someone claiming to be an atheist is now considered to warrant a round of applause without that person providing any argument or evidence at all, I shall declare myself to be an atheist roughly around the time when Hell freezes over…
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Seth Strong
September 30, 2010 at 9:03 am
Any chance you could summarize your opinion, chenier1. It appears you’re saying that you wouldn’t identify as atheist because of Stalin, Mao and two founders of the women’s college at Oxford. I admit I was extra confused when Job entered the conversation. The blog post’s treatment there struck me as rather benign.
I think it’s really swell that you found some evil fellows who identified as atheist. I’d like to know about nutjob atheists analogous to the abortion doctor snipers and the kidnappers of O’hare because dictators say a lot of things in order to control their masses and are rarely the epitome of the faiths or lack of faiths that they profess. At least, that’s my take on that. And yes, it is possible that people identifying as atheist can actually commit crimes. But I’m pretty sure I can dredge up statistics substantiating that people who identify as atheist are jailed proportionally less than their believer counterparts which would provide more support for the blog post claims (http://www.atheistempire.com/reference/stats/main.html under “Atheist Prison Population”).
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Eliyahu
October 8, 2012 at 11:43 am
The believers vs non-believers in jail is a fallacious argument, there is substantially more believers than non-believers so surely there will be in the prisons as well. If I survey a Starbucks and find more theists than atheists 3:1 does that mean that theists in general love coffee more than atheists? No :)
Seth Strong
October 9, 2012 at 4:35 pm
It would be a fallacious argument if the amount of believers in jail were proportional to the amount of believers at large. I haven’t put any recent effort into this topic (that comment you replied to is two years old) but I’m holding the stance that the amount of believers in jail is disproportionately larger and the amount of atheists disproportionately smaller than those populations are outside of jail. So more criminals claim faith.
It could be a conspiracy where all the atheists and associated non-believers get together and promise that when they go to jail, they check “Christian” or “Muslim” but I doubt that.
However, you might be saying that you know that the amount of believers in jail is proportional to the population outside of jail. Is that what you are saying?
steph
September 29, 2010 at 11:43 pm
I love the photo – your hands appear to recreate the angels’ wings in William Blake’s Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels… http://www.william-blake.org/Christ-in-the-Sepulchre,-Guarded-by-Angels.html
x
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rjosephhoffmann
September 30, 2010 at 11:30 am
I might want to distinguish the categories. Stalin and Mao were communists whose atheism was prescribed by the party, just as a thousand Christian rotters and not a few popes were Christian by default, not choice. That’s to say that they did not arrive at atheism as their fundamental intellectual position, but their “default” atheism gave the position in general a bad name–precisely because they symbolized pars pro toto what religious people in the west thought atheism is/was. I think we call this the fallacy of division.
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Ophelia Benson
October 1, 2010 at 12:41 pm
I disavow any claim to courage. It takes no courage whatseover for me to be an atheist, and it never has. It does take courage for some people, but only some. As for me, I’m a coward.
Imagination…really? Atheists shy away from art and imagination? Not the ones I know.
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Josh in California
October 1, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Didn’t you get the memo? All gnu atheists are emotionless Commander Datas–able to understand human art, literature, music, etc. intellectually but incapable of truly appreciating any of it.
(And every article about gnu atheism will include at least one off-the-wall generalization that only really applies to the small subset of atheists the author has actually interacted with.)
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Eric MacDonald
March 28, 2011 at 9:29 am
Yes, that stood out for me. Reading poetry is one of my favourite pastimes, and seldom a day goes by when I do not read some of my favourite poets: Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Herbert, Larkin, Auden, Lawrence, Owen, Stevens, Hopkins, …
While I think this post makes up to a certain extent for the earlier one lambasting the new atheists, it seems to me important to remember that the forces of religion are exceedingly powerful. Criticism is vital, but indiscriminate condemnation is not helpful.
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rjosephhoffmann
October 1, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Now, now–I said too many do. You are being modest as well: I think anyone who calls for common sense in this society is brave. It takes nothing to be Christine O’Donnell except a good dentist.
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Ophelia Benson
October 1, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I know, you did. I suppose I was just thinking about the atheists I know – who are more in the vein of Salman Rushdie (in a YouTube clip he posted on Facebook a couple of days ago) saying “they’re great stories, but they’re not true.” He’s a fan of great stories. Heh heh.
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Ed Jones
October 2, 2010 at 4:20 pm
For goodness sake, common sense – be Bright not Dim, go to Quodlibet:Atheist Attitude – Comments 6. 7 & 8. Begin with 7 then to 8 – but engage!
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Ed Jones
October 5, 2010 at 2:30 pm
steph,
Apologies for seeming rude. I take refuge in that I comment as a believer over against blatently offensive labeling, “Religion is for Dims” – “Religion (saith RD with essay approval) is the default position for the scientifically challenged of the world” – further without comment response, the advise “Ignore the believer” seems to rule. All the while attempting to introduce the contradiction (the absolute, radical, irredeemable difference), the stark phenemon: why these the pioneering physicists, the world’s greatest, in droves, go beyond physics, the hardest of the sciences, to embrace the mea-physical, mysticism, the tenderest of religions!
By pure happenstance, I have a peculiar interest in RJH essays which may be explained by the first 13 comments to the essay “The Importance of the Historical Jesus” which may suggest that orthodox Christianity does not represent true reilgion.
Reply
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Herzen
October 5, 2010 at 3:02 am
Stalin also claimed that he ran a democratic party-hence the elections with 99.9 percent majorities. Should we be nervous of Democracy?
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Seth Strong
October 5, 2010 at 8:54 am
Of course you should! As a citizen, you should always feel uneasy about the balance of your remaining liberties versus the concessions you make to the government.
It seems that you are pointing out that what someone labels themselves as isn’t necessarily what they are. Is there more to your point?
Reply
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 6:49 am
Re: courage
Surely being an atheist is not connected to courage. Coming out as one might be something else. A society that criminalises or stigmatises atheism is surely likely to have less open atheists than one that doesn’t, isn’t it?
Hope you saw my late addition to the B&W thread; it was posted before I had read this.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 6:59 am
We have much more evidence about societies that have persecuted Jews, heretics, and even Catholic or protestant disseneters than any that have actually persecuted atheists in the way, e.g., religion was discouraged under communist regimes. But your point is aggreable: there would be fewer atheists in a society that actually persecuted them.
Reply
Seth Strong
March 28, 2011 at 8:38 am
Being an atheist isn’t the only courageous thing but it can be. Most of my non believer friends are first generation atheists. We had to disappoint our parents before we could earn their respect. And some of us speak up louder because we have the privilege that our friends do not. I thing courageous is an adjective you can apply to atheism.
Reply
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 7:07 am
But are we not speaking about times in which being an atheist was far less acceptable than belonging to a faith that happened not to be dominant?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 8:03 am
You use the word “stigmatize,” and I’ll accept that. Actual persecutions of atheists have been pitifully infrequent and rare throughout history–no major purges or anything of the sort. i do notice a trend in some atheists circles to create such an era, but except for very minor incidents, like Shelley and Bradlaugh and the social “ostracism” often applied to atheist ideas, I can’t think of any real theatrical moments. Please tell me what you have in mind. Part of the issue is that atheism as we use the term today is a modern word without much pre-18th century history. it meant something very different in the ancient world, where even Jews and christians could be and were called atheists. I am now being told that some new atheists are receiving death threats; I have no reason to doubt this but I think the claim deserves investigation.
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Veronica
March 28, 2011 at 4:31 pm
You include Shelly among the imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, [and] mental adventurers, but you fail to mention that Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism after publishing his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_ and that the British courts denied Shelley custody of his two children.
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 4:39 pm
I actually posted the whole of Shelley’s Necessity to this site, with that information; no one wants to deny that Shelley paid a price–in fact, he’s one of the few who suffered. https://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/the-necessity-of-atheism/
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:12 am
To clarify, when you talk about religious minorities (persecuted or other), you are talking about communities of some kind, I assume. Which historical periods have seen atheists in sufficient numbers or concentration to qualify as a community? Is this not an outgrowth of how unacceptable it was? Are there not examples of philosophers in centuries past now assumed to have been atheists in all but name (because they were too attached to their lives and liberty to say so outright)?
Reply
Ophelia Benson
March 28, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Anaxagoras and Socrates to name two.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Well, I don’t think Socrates was our kind of atheist–too wordy–but certainly not some people’s idea of a religious Athenian. But the charge certainly included not believing in the myths.
Reply
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 3:12 pm
By “atheist” I did mean it in our more contemporary sense of simply not believing in the existence of god/s. Certainly I did not have believing Jews and Christians in mind. If Christians of one sect or another were persecuted, I suppose it was usually as heretics, whereas Jews might have been “Christ-killers.” Did you intend, in your reply, to claim that if there was less persecution of atheists as a group, it was because atheism was looked upon more favourably than any brand of religious belief?
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Bit more complicated: the modern position we call atheism coincides with a period where many countries were moving away from medieval persecutionist tactics, which were fundamentally inter-religious, as you also say. When we talk about modern atheism as a “movement”–yes, there isn’t much of it in an organized way until the 19th century when places like Conway Hall move quickly from Unitarianism to essentially an atheist stance, and by then laws protecting even the most radical groups are in place. The evolution of atheism in the modern period therefore correlates with toleration and actually benefits from it–which is why pseudo atheists, if they were, like Paine and even deists like Jefferson could get by with saying as much as they did critical of religion. I’d even argue that from that standpoint, elected officials and intellectuals are probably worse off today than they were in the 16th and 17th century. I think atheism is unpopular enough without trying to create a history of persecution that just doesn’t exist–but not because there haven’ always been skeptics and atheists. The closest I think we might come is the persecution of Socinians, who were in Italy and had to fee to Poland: they denied the trinity in the 16th and 17th century, and found a home in Poland for a while. The history of atheism in an organized way is closely tid to the development of rational religious movements in the pre- and early enlightenment, especially unitarianism, which is the first step on the slope towards rejecting revelation.
Bruce Gorton
March 28, 2011 at 10:32 am
On imagination I disagree – I write poetry (Not very good poetry, but it counts) and go in for photography basically because I can never quite draw what I see in my head fast enough.
We also have champions like Tim Minchin and the like. Atheists often make for great comedians, and comedy is to my mind the very highest form of creativity. It combines the best of poetry’s expression, with philosophy’s introspection.
I think it is one of those things that as a community we should highlight more – that we are not, as Steve Martin once claimed, lacking songs. That not only do we have art, but it is often great art.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 11:22 am
Hi Bruce: Are you disagreeing with this or some point made after it?
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space.
Reply
Seth Strong
March 28, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Rebellions take courage. Christians who think they are oppressed can probably qualify for that label as well. I would define courage as the willingness to step outside your comfort zone and risk social penalties for stating your opinion. Being an atheist is easy, potentially. Saying that’s what you’re doing is not always so. In my house it’s not courageous. But out here on the internet where it can affect job prospects, in laws, and other folks opinion of me? It’s courage.
Reply
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:18 pm
“The evolution of atheism in the modern period therefore correlates with toleration…”
I take that as confirmation of what I was fishing for; while minority faiths could get by even if persecuted, atheists didn’t even dare stick their heads above the parapets till certain rights had been anchored in society.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 8:29 pm
This is close to right, except we need to be careful about assuming a coherent “atheist” position before the coherent position, which is evolutionary, had developed. There are scholars like John Hick for example who have suggested that something like what we are calling atheism was “psychologically impossible” before the modern era, meaning that we are not talking about repression but about rational development. I would completely reject any suggestion that there was an enormous “atheist underground” in the 12th century for example–it just wasn’t possible. But what there WAS is just as important. Have a look at http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c25.htm Gordon Stein was the expert on the subject of the evolutionary identity of atheism. He died tragically after he had edited the Enc of Unbelief. But you can get the basic outline there.
Reply
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Thanks for the link. Will give it my attention shortly. I also was not expecting a 12th century atheist underground, but “psychologically impossible” does sound far-fetched. There must have been people centuries before us who decided that what was being preached just didn’t add up, even if they were smart enough to keep it to themselves. “Socially almost impossible” I could buy.
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I agree, far fetched. I think there must have been atheists in neolithic times. Just trying to avoid the disparity between what they would not have believed and what we do not believe, which is culturally determined and this highly uncertain. Our atheism has been greatly shaped by science and theirs could not have been.
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:52 pm
The science point is well taken. Unless one is prepared to swallow a 100% rate of self-delusion among prehistoric shamans, yes, there must have been neolithic atheists.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 29, 2011 at 7:38 pm
What would really be useful, and very difficult to produce, is a history of atheism that respected the way in which belief has been related to particular objects over time. Modern atheism has been the story of the rejection of a particular set of beliefs, defined primarily in biblical terms, since the early Enlightenment. –I just don’t want to see atheism becoming superstitious about its past; the Christians created a totally, or largely false story of their own martyrdom and persecution–let’s not do that with unbelief.
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Ed Jones
March 29, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I am forced to restate the above March 5th challenge. Joe, you said March 28th:: “Our atheism has been greatly shaped by science – -” as a positive statement. I am forced to take it indisputably to be the exact opposite – a negative statment; based on the thought of those identified as the world’s greatest physicists of the 20th century. They all embraced mysticism. A conclusion not of emotion, not of itituition, not of faith, but of a sustained use of the critical intellect. This followed after concluding that the great differenc betweeen the old and the new physics, given that they both were dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality, the new physics was forced to be aware of the fact. “We (the old) thought we were dealing with the world itself”. (Sir James Jeans)
Litte as they were in the position of simply living and thinking within the radition of one of the old religious traditions (e.g. Christianity), so equally little were they prepared to go over to a naive, rationalistically grounded atheism.
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Seth Strong
March 29, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Our modern atheism is in fact greatly shaped by science. Our horseman are pretty unanimous about that. And I would say the evolution versus creationism stand off is a purely science versus a popular religion even more than it is an argument against faith. And yet, some of us atheists, consider it to be analogous to the kind of half hatched nonsense that leads the uneducated to think Scientology is nice because it’s got science in the name. Real science is a good cure for a lot of those crazy thoughts which ail many people.
Reply
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Tristan Vick
June 13, 2011 at 9:55 am
I appreciate this article.
I think this has compelled me to write a similar list of positive reasons in support of atheism.
However, just a small nitpick, but I would change your preface to your list of good things about atheism which states:
“As far as I can tell, there are five:”
to
“As far as I can tell, there are at least five:”
Because, as we all know, there could be more we haven’t thought of yet. ;) Now I am off to think more on the subject.
Reply
Robert
July 15, 2011 at 8:46 am
You forgot the most important one.
Atheism is honest.
The rest are nice, but in reality, irrelevant.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
January 20, 2015 at 7:33 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
Reply
stizostideon
February 7, 2015 at 8:33 pm
“Religion evokes “good” in the “good dog” sense of the word–as a characteristic of obedience, not as an outcome of choice.” Well said.
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Five Good Things about Atheism
Posted on September 28, 2010 by rjosephhoffmann
It seems I cannot win.
Meself
When I chart the vague, occasional and ambiguous virtues of religion (mainly historical) I am accused of being intellectually soft. When I tell atheists they run the risk of turning their social solidarity into tent revivals or support groups I risk expulsion from the ranks of the Unbaptized and Wannabe Unbaptized.
It is a terrible position to be in, I can tell you, and I have no one to blame but myself.
To make amends and win back my disillusioned readers I am devoting this blog to the good things about atheism.
As far as I can tell, there are five:
1. Atheism is probably right: there is almost certainly no God. At least not the kind of pluriform god described by the world’s religions. If there were, we would know it in the way we know other things, like potholes and rainbows, and we would know it not because of syllogisms that begin “All things that exist were created,” or through the contradictory revelations of competing sects.
We would know it because we are hardwired to know.
The weakest argument of all, of course, is existence since existence raises the question of God; it does not answer it. The difference between a god who is hidden (invisible), or does not wish to be known (elusive), or cannot be demonstrated rationally is the same thing as a God who may as well not exist. Not to assign homework but have a look at John Wisdom’s famous parable recited in Antony Flew’s essay, “Theology and Falsification,” (1968).
2. Atheism is courageous. Not valorous perhaps, not deserving of medals. But it takes a certain amount of courage not to believe what a vast majority of other people believe to be true. You learned that much as a kid, when a teacher said to you, after some minor tragedy in the playground, “Just because your best friend decides to jump over a fence onto a busy road doesn’t mean you need to do it too.”
The pressure to believe in God is enormous in twenty-first century society, and all but irresistible in certain sectors of America–the fundamental international base line for irrationality. Having to be religious or needing not to seem irreligious is the greatest tragedy of American public life and a sure recipe for the nation’s future mediocrity. It dominates political campaigns and the way kids learn history in Texas.
Texas edits textbooks
Theological differences aside, what Muslims and Christians and other godfearers have in common is an illusion that they are willing to defend aggressively–in certain cases murderously.
Even when it does not reach that level of viciousness, it can make the life of the uncommitted, unfaithed and unchurched miserable. Atheists deserve credit for having to put up with this stupidity. That is bravery, defined as forbearance.
Many atheists realize that the fervour displayed by religious extremists has deep psychological roots–that history has witnessed its bloodiest moments when causes were already lost. The legalization of Christianity (312?) came within three years of the final assault against Christians by the last “pagan” emperor. The greater number of the wars of religion (1562-1592) occurred after the Council of Trent (adj. 1563) had made Catholic doctrine unassailable–written in stone–for Catholics and completely unacceptable for Protestants. The Holocaust happened largely because Rassenhasse flowed naturally from two done deals: worldwide economic collapse and Germany’s humiliation in the Great War of 1914-1918. The Klan became most violent when its utility as an instrument of southern “justice” was finished.
Most of the available signs suggest that religion will not succumb to creeping irrelevance in the next six months. Religions become violent and aggressive as they struggle for breath. The substitution of emotion and blind, often illiterate, faith in support of threadbare dogmatic assertions is part of this struggle. So is an unwillingness to accept any alternative consensus to replace the old religious one.
Atheism symbolizes not just unbelief in God but the nature of that alternative consensus. That is why atheism is especially opprobrious to belief in an a era when most questions are settled by science and investigation.
Yet even without the security of dogma, religions usually provide for the emotional needs of their adherents in ways that science does not. They have had centuries, for example, to convince people that the miseries endured in this life are simply a preparation for a better one to come. A purposeless world acquires meaning as a “testing ground” for initiation into future glory. There is no art of consolation for the atheist, just the world as it is. Granny may have lost the power of speech after her third stroke, but she knows there is a wolf behind the door: religion knows this instinctively.
Being an atheist may be a bit lonely, but better “Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” (And Socrates was courageous, too.)
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space. Atheists know that the world we live in is dominated by religion: spires, minarets, ceremonial prayers, political rhetoric and posturing, ethical discussion. I am not convinced (alas) that atheists are “brighter” than anyone else, but they have to imagine ungiven alternatives and worlds of thought that have not been handed to them by tradition and custom.
Imagination however is that two-way street between vision and delusion. The given myths and symbols of a culture are imposed, not arrived at or deduced, and if not imposed then “imparted” by traditions. Jung was wrong.
Collective Unconscious?
Skeptics and unbelievers from Shelley and Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) to Richard Feynman, John Ellis, Ljon Tichy and Einstein in the sciences, Sir Michael Tippet, Bartok, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovitch in music, Bukoswki, Camus, Somerset Maugham, Joyce Carol Oates, Vonnegut in literature, have been imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, mental adventurers.
Far too often, unfortunately, atheists are the worst advocates for imagination.
They rather nervously limit their interest to the scientific imagination. They don’t see a connection between Monod and Camus. They consider their unbelief a “scientific” and “rational” position, not an imaginative one. When confronted with photographs of the Taj Mahal or recordings of Bach’s B-minor Mass, they point to shots from the Hubble telescope or (my personal favorite) soundtracks of earth auroral kilometric radiation.
Instead of owning the arts, they play the part of intellectual bullies who think poetry is for mental sissies.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have come to the conclusion that this is because they equate the imagination with the imaginary and the imaginary with the supernatural. The imagination produced religion, of course, hence the gods, but that does not mean that it is governed by religion, because if it were we never would have got round to science. The poet Charles Bukowski summed it up nicely in a 1988 interview: “For those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
4. Atheism is an ethical position. That does not make being an atheist a “moral” stance, but it does raise a question about whether it is possible to be good with God. Only an individual free from the commandments of religion and the threat of heaven and hell deserves credit (or blame) for his decisions, actions, and omissions. Atheists are required to assume that responsibility fully. Religious people are not.
This is why anyone who teaches his children that the story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament is a “moral fable” is just as bad as the fundamentalist who teaches it as history. What would you say about a brutish dog-owner who told his naturally stupid dog to piss anywhere but in the flower garden, then hied him to a shelter the minute he did what he couldn’t help doing to begin with? That is the story of Adam, without the benefit of two millennia of theology to disguise its simplest elements.
Bad Dog
Modern Christian theology has attempted to emphasize the love, mercy and compassion of this God: he is a God of second chances–redemption–after all.
But mainly the Christian message is little more than an attempt to rehabilitate God under the guise of teaching that it’s the humans who needed rehabilitating. They had to be given one more chance at the flowers in order to to show that God, after his initial temper tantrum, is really full of kindness and patience. That’s basically what the “New” Testament tries to do, after all, though in a highly problematical way.
At a basic level, an atheist is likely to detect that there is no ethical content to the stories of religion. The prototypes are Adam, the disobedient, Job, the sufferer, Noah, the obedient, and Abraham, the faithful.
But these figures are not ethical paragons. They are examples of the types of behavior religion requires. Religion evokes “good” in the “good dog” sense of the word–as a characteristic of obedience, not as an outcome of choice. That is not the kind of good any rational being would aspire to–and one of the reasons certain interpreters, like Augustine, thought that what was squandered in Eden was reason. But ethics is about reflection, discrimination, freedom, and decision. Religion, strictly and fairly speaking, does not provide for that; only unbelief does. If Augustine had understood things properly, he would have spit in God’s eye and said that Adam’s only rational choice was to do what he did, affirm who and what he was, and get on with his life without Yahweh. Instead, he creeps out of the garden, takes his punishment like a beaten spaniel, and lives in the hope that his master will throw him the occasional bone.
The expulsion from Eden
To the extent that modern liberal theologies try to say that religions have endorsed a policy of choice and reflection all along, the rebuttal is history.
5. Atheists are socially tolerant. By this, I mean that they do not have a history of violence against beliefs and practices they may privately abhor. They do not burn down churches, black or white. No matter how ardent their unbelief, they do not bomb mosques or blow themselves up at Sunday Mass to reduce the number of Catholics in the world. They are not responsible for the Arab-Israeli border wars. They have not created tens of thousands of displaced people in resettlement camps in Lebanon or torn whole African nations apart. In general, they do not mistake adventurism for preemptive wars.
They may support separation of church and state in sometimes strident ways, but not violent ways: you will not see gangs of secularists tearing down nativity scenes at Christmas or storming historic court houses to get icons of the ten commandments removed from public view. –Even if they think these public displays of devotion are inappropriate and teach people bad habits.
All of these things are pretty obvious, even to believers whose gurus talk incessantly about the secular humanist and atheist “threat” without ever being able (successfully) to put a face on it. But they need to be recorded because religious people often assume that tolerance can only be practised within a religious or inter-religious context, Catholic to Baptist, Christian to Jew and Muslim. But atheism stands outside this circle.
Atheism, as atheism, stands as the rejection of all religious beliefs: it is befuddling to believers how such a position deserves tolerating at all. If there has to be an enemy–something a majority can identify as uniformly despicable–atheism has to be it. That is why hoi polloi in the darkest days of the communist threat, especially those who had no idea what the social and economic program of the Soviet Union was, considered the worst sin of the “Reds” in Russia, China, and Europe their disbelief in God.
As with goodness, tolerance needs to be exhibited non-coercively. Not because Jesus said “Love your enemies,” or because Muhammad preached sparing unbelievers, provided they capitulated to Islam. Not even because John Paul II apologized to Galileo in absentia. What supports the suggestion that atheists are tolerant (and need to continue to be seen as being tolerant) is that the virtue of tolerance emerges naturally from the rational premises of unbelief. What atheism says is that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence, not by force of arms or the power of priests and mullahs.
While atheists will never experience mass conversions to their cause “like a mighty wind” after a speech by a pentecostal preacher, the individual changes of mind from belief to skepticism will depend as much on the tone as on the substance of their message. By the same token, what atheist would trust the unbelieving equivalent of a spiritual awakening? It doesn’t happen that way. It happens one by one. Slowly. Just ask an atheist about how he “became” an unbeliever, and I wager that you will hear a life story, or something about how things just didn’t add up–a process, not a sudden emotional shudder but often a painful change of heart and (especially) mind.
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46 thoughts on “Five Good Things about Atheism”
steph
September 28, 2010 at 11:03 pm
This is a very interesting post, not least because it makes me wonder whether I would have had the courage to reject a religious belief if I had been born into it. Although American and Middle Eastern atheists are courageous for not believing, as also Socrates certainly was, not all of us can claim to be courageous for not believing when there was never any pressure or desire in the first place. Despite unanswered questions … like ‘So why are we here?’ The answer for me is usually something like ‘Don’t know, but don’t forget the picnic because I know the surf’s up today.’ And it was precisely because I knew so many other atheists, of different flavours (former believers, anti religious, or like me, interested in believers’ beliefs despite not wanting to believe) that I didn’t always admit until very recently that I probably was one too. Not courageous – just conforming! although I defend my ‘atheist butism’ maybe…
You’re not in a terrible position though. When people disagree with you they tend to speak louder than people who agree. Although the Irish Oscar Wilde was referring to the British public, he said as long as three quarters of people disagreed with you, it was a sign of your sanity. More importantly though it’s a reflection of an independent mind not bowing obediently to convention for the sake of it. Without the reflection and insight into atheism and religion you provide, progress and learning is poorer. Ogden Nash wrote in part of ‘Seeing Eye to Eye is Believing’, “I believe that people believe what they believe they believe. When people reject a truth or an untruth it is not because it is a truth or an untruth that they reject it. No, if it isn’t in accord with their beliefs in the first place they simply say, “Nothing doing,” and refuse to inspect it.”
A long winded way of saying, with Groucho Marx “I can’t say I disagree with you” regarding the five good things – even six – about atheism in this post, and you’re absolutely right. And as always entertaining and beautifully written.
x
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Seth Strong
September 29, 2010 at 8:16 am
Although not in disagreement with the comment above by Steph, there is no winning on subjects like this. I get the impression that for every view into a subject you can find as an example writer, I can find another view that you haven’t incorporated or another way to look at the motivations of this type of people or that type of people. But I also think that’s a good place to include room for comments which can go further and onto tangents.
I totally endorse viewpoints that suggest atheism is not enough while simultaneously brandishing atheist as a priority description for people who might want to know things about me.
And also, if religion weren’t such a big deal to the extent that there are states acting to include creationism in science class, then I’d have a lot less incentive to investigate this subject. So for people in other countries and even other communities in America like maybe Oregon, their atheists might have less to say.
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chenier1
September 29, 2010 at 6:14 pm
At some point you will no doubt explain the basis for categorising Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao as “socially tolerant”, but you’ve obviously been having a hard time of it recently, so not now.
We’re back to the bit about two nations divided by the same language and different cultures; it is difficult for someone like myself, educated at a school founded in 1875 by radical feminists, in which Creationism was known to be too ridiculous even to be laughed at, to envisage any teacher trying to claim that the story of Adam and Eve is a moral fable; certainly none of mine ever attempted to do so, presumably because they did not wish to be laughed out of the classroom.
That and the fact that as far as Miss Buss and Miss Beale were concerned the Jesuits were pikers; no girl educated at a GPDST school was allowed to believe something because someone, however eminent, had said so. Even if the eminent Being doing the saying was God; it would be an affront to the memory of the suffragettes, who are ranked considerably above any saints.
Equally, since Job was not Jewish no-one ever attempted to claim that the God he was conversing with was the one addressed as father by Jesus, in the event of there actually being a ‘historical Jesus’, that is. Improbable as it may seem, the question of whether there really was a Jesus at all was included in the curriculum; as I recall the school chaplain was a bit unhappy about it but he went on to become an admittedly rather bad bishop, so presumably the powers that be forgave him for knuckling down.
All in all, I was educated to believe that intellectual assent is won by argument and evidence; since someone claiming to be an atheist is now considered to warrant a round of applause without that person providing any argument or evidence at all, I shall declare myself to be an atheist roughly around the time when Hell freezes over…
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Seth Strong
September 30, 2010 at 9:03 am
Any chance you could summarize your opinion, chenier1. It appears you’re saying that you wouldn’t identify as atheist because of Stalin, Mao and two founders of the women’s college at Oxford. I admit I was extra confused when Job entered the conversation. The blog post’s treatment there struck me as rather benign.
I think it’s really swell that you found some evil fellows who identified as atheist. I’d like to know about nutjob atheists analogous to the abortion doctor snipers and the kidnappers of O’hare because dictators say a lot of things in order to control their masses and are rarely the epitome of the faiths or lack of faiths that they profess. At least, that’s my take on that. And yes, it is possible that people identifying as atheist can actually commit crimes. But I’m pretty sure I can dredge up statistics substantiating that people who identify as atheist are jailed proportionally less than their believer counterparts which would provide more support for the blog post claims (http://www.atheistempire.com/reference/stats/main.html under “Atheist Prison Population”).
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Eliyahu
October 8, 2012 at 11:43 am
The believers vs non-believers in jail is a fallacious argument, there is substantially more believers than non-believers so surely there will be in the prisons as well. If I survey a Starbucks and find more theists than atheists 3:1 does that mean that theists in general love coffee more than atheists? No :)
Seth Strong
October 9, 2012 at 4:35 pm
It would be a fallacious argument if the amount of believers in jail were proportional to the amount of believers at large. I haven’t put any recent effort into this topic (that comment you replied to is two years old) but I’m holding the stance that the amount of believers in jail is disproportionately larger and the amount of atheists disproportionately smaller than those populations are outside of jail. So more criminals claim faith.
It could be a conspiracy where all the atheists and associated non-believers get together and promise that when they go to jail, they check “Christian” or “Muslim” but I doubt that.
However, you might be saying that you know that the amount of believers in jail is proportional to the population outside of jail. Is that what you are saying?
steph
September 29, 2010 at 11:43 pm
I love the photo – your hands appear to recreate the angels’ wings in William Blake’s Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels… http://www.william-blake.org/Christ-in-the-Sepulchre,-Guarded-by-Angels.html
x
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rjosephhoffmann
September 30, 2010 at 11:30 am
I might want to distinguish the categories. Stalin and Mao were communists whose atheism was prescribed by the party, just as a thousand Christian rotters and not a few popes were Christian by default, not choice. That’s to say that they did not arrive at atheism as their fundamental intellectual position, but their “default” atheism gave the position in general a bad name–precisely because they symbolized pars pro toto what religious people in the west thought atheism is/was. I think we call this the fallacy of division.
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Ophelia Benson
October 1, 2010 at 12:41 pm
I disavow any claim to courage. It takes no courage whatseover for me to be an atheist, and it never has. It does take courage for some people, but only some. As for me, I’m a coward.
Imagination…really? Atheists shy away from art and imagination? Not the ones I know.
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Josh in California
October 1, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Didn’t you get the memo? All gnu atheists are emotionless Commander Datas–able to understand human art, literature, music, etc. intellectually but incapable of truly appreciating any of it.
(And every article about gnu atheism will include at least one off-the-wall generalization that only really applies to the small subset of atheists the author has actually interacted with.)
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Eric MacDonald
March 28, 2011 at 9:29 am
Yes, that stood out for me. Reading poetry is one of my favourite pastimes, and seldom a day goes by when I do not read some of my favourite poets: Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Herbert, Larkin, Auden, Lawrence, Owen, Stevens, Hopkins, …
While I think this post makes up to a certain extent for the earlier one lambasting the new atheists, it seems to me important to remember that the forces of religion are exceedingly powerful. Criticism is vital, but indiscriminate condemnation is not helpful.
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rjosephhoffmann
October 1, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Now, now–I said too many do. You are being modest as well: I think anyone who calls for common sense in this society is brave. It takes nothing to be Christine O’Donnell except a good dentist.
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Ophelia Benson
October 1, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I know, you did. I suppose I was just thinking about the atheists I know – who are more in the vein of Salman Rushdie (in a YouTube clip he posted on Facebook a couple of days ago) saying “they’re great stories, but they’re not true.” He’s a fan of great stories. Heh heh.
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Ed Jones
October 2, 2010 at 4:20 pm
For goodness sake, common sense – be Bright not Dim, go to Quodlibet:Atheist Attitude – Comments 6. 7 & 8. Begin with 7 then to 8 – but engage!
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Ed Jones
October 5, 2010 at 2:30 pm
steph,
Apologies for seeming rude. I take refuge in that I comment as a believer over against blatently offensive labeling, “Religion is for Dims” – “Religion (saith RD with essay approval) is the default position for the scientifically challenged of the world” – further without comment response, the advise “Ignore the believer” seems to rule. All the while attempting to introduce the contradiction (the absolute, radical, irredeemable difference), the stark phenemon: why these the pioneering physicists, the world’s greatest, in droves, go beyond physics, the hardest of the sciences, to embrace the mea-physical, mysticism, the tenderest of religions!
By pure happenstance, I have a peculiar interest in RJH essays which may be explained by the first 13 comments to the essay “The Importance of the Historical Jesus” which may suggest that orthodox Christianity does not represent true reilgion.
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Herzen
October 5, 2010 at 3:02 am
Stalin also claimed that he ran a democratic party-hence the elections with 99.9 percent majorities. Should we be nervous of Democracy?
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Seth Strong
October 5, 2010 at 8:54 am
Of course you should! As a citizen, you should always feel uneasy about the balance of your remaining liberties versus the concessions you make to the government.
It seems that you are pointing out that what someone labels themselves as isn’t necessarily what they are. Is there more to your point?
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Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 6:49 am
Re: courage
Surely being an atheist is not connected to courage. Coming out as one might be something else. A society that criminalises or stigmatises atheism is surely likely to have less open atheists than one that doesn’t, isn’t it?
Hope you saw my late addition to the B&W thread; it was posted before I had read this.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 6:59 am
We have much more evidence about societies that have persecuted Jews, heretics, and even Catholic or protestant disseneters than any that have actually persecuted atheists in the way, e.g., religion was discouraged under communist regimes. But your point is aggreable: there would be fewer atheists in a society that actually persecuted them.
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Seth Strong
March 28, 2011 at 8:38 am
Being an atheist isn’t the only courageous thing but it can be. Most of my non believer friends are first generation atheists. We had to disappoint our parents before we could earn their respect. And some of us speak up louder because we have the privilege that our friends do not. I thing courageous is an adjective you can apply to atheism.
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Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 7:07 am
But are we not speaking about times in which being an atheist was far less acceptable than belonging to a faith that happened not to be dominant?
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rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 8:03 am
You use the word “stigmatize,” and I’ll accept that. Actual persecutions of atheists have been pitifully infrequent and rare throughout history–no major purges or anything of the sort. i do notice a trend in some atheists circles to create such an era, but except for very minor incidents, like Shelley and Bradlaugh and the social “ostracism” often applied to atheist ideas, I can’t think of any real theatrical moments. Please tell me what you have in mind. Part of the issue is that atheism as we use the term today is a modern word without much pre-18th century history. it meant something very different in the ancient world, where even Jews and christians could be and were called atheists. I am now being told that some new atheists are receiving death threats; I have no reason to doubt this but I think the claim deserves investigation.
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Veronica
March 28, 2011 at 4:31 pm
You include Shelly among the imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, [and] mental adventurers, but you fail to mention that Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism after publishing his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_ and that the British courts denied Shelley custody of his two children.
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 4:39 pm
I actually posted the whole of Shelley’s Necessity to this site, with that information; no one wants to deny that Shelley paid a price–in fact, he’s one of the few who suffered. https://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/the-necessity-of-atheism/
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:12 am
To clarify, when you talk about religious minorities (persecuted or other), you are talking about communities of some kind, I assume. Which historical periods have seen atheists in sufficient numbers or concentration to qualify as a community? Is this not an outgrowth of how unacceptable it was? Are there not examples of philosophers in centuries past now assumed to have been atheists in all but name (because they were too attached to their lives and liberty to say so outright)?
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Ophelia Benson
March 28, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Anaxagoras and Socrates to name two.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Well, I don’t think Socrates was our kind of atheist–too wordy–but certainly not some people’s idea of a religious Athenian. But the charge certainly included not believing in the myths.
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Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 3:12 pm
By “atheist” I did mean it in our more contemporary sense of simply not believing in the existence of god/s. Certainly I did not have believing Jews and Christians in mind. If Christians of one sect or another were persecuted, I suppose it was usually as heretics, whereas Jews might have been “Christ-killers.” Did you intend, in your reply, to claim that if there was less persecution of atheists as a group, it was because atheism was looked upon more favourably than any brand of religious belief?
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Bit more complicated: the modern position we call atheism coincides with a period where many countries were moving away from medieval persecutionist tactics, which were fundamentally inter-religious, as you also say. When we talk about modern atheism as a “movement”–yes, there isn’t much of it in an organized way until the 19th century when places like Conway Hall move quickly from Unitarianism to essentially an atheist stance, and by then laws protecting even the most radical groups are in place. The evolution of atheism in the modern period therefore correlates with toleration and actually benefits from it–which is why pseudo atheists, if they were, like Paine and even deists like Jefferson could get by with saying as much as they did critical of religion. I’d even argue that from that standpoint, elected officials and intellectuals are probably worse off today than they were in the 16th and 17th century. I think atheism is unpopular enough without trying to create a history of persecution that just doesn’t exist–but not because there haven’ always been skeptics and atheists. The closest I think we might come is the persecution of Socinians, who were in Italy and had to fee to Poland: they denied the trinity in the 16th and 17th century, and found a home in Poland for a while. The history of atheism in an organized way is closely tid to the development of rational religious movements in the pre- and early enlightenment, especially unitarianism, which is the first step on the slope towards rejecting revelation.
Bruce Gorton
March 28, 2011 at 10:32 am
On imagination I disagree – I write poetry (Not very good poetry, but it counts) and go in for photography basically because I can never quite draw what I see in my head fast enough.
We also have champions like Tim Minchin and the like. Atheists often make for great comedians, and comedy is to my mind the very highest form of creativity. It combines the best of poetry’s expression, with philosophy’s introspection.
I think it is one of those things that as a community we should highlight more – that we are not, as Steve Martin once claimed, lacking songs. That not only do we have art, but it is often great art.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 11:22 am
Hi Bruce: Are you disagreeing with this or some point made after it?
3. Atheists are more imaginative than most people. Religious people obviously have imagination too, but so much of their imaginative world is provided for them in myth, art, ritual and architectural space.
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Seth Strong
March 28, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Rebellions take courage. Christians who think they are oppressed can probably qualify for that label as well. I would define courage as the willingness to step outside your comfort zone and risk social penalties for stating your opinion. Being an atheist is easy, potentially. Saying that’s what you’re doing is not always so. In my house it’s not courageous. But out here on the internet where it can affect job prospects, in laws, and other folks opinion of me? It’s courage.
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Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:18 pm
“The evolution of atheism in the modern period therefore correlates with toleration…”
I take that as confirmation of what I was fishing for; while minority faiths could get by even if persecuted, atheists didn’t even dare stick their heads above the parapets till certain rights had been anchored in society.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 8:29 pm
This is close to right, except we need to be careful about assuming a coherent “atheist” position before the coherent position, which is evolutionary, had developed. There are scholars like John Hick for example who have suggested that something like what we are calling atheism was “psychologically impossible” before the modern era, meaning that we are not talking about repression but about rational development. I would completely reject any suggestion that there was an enormous “atheist underground” in the 12th century for example–it just wasn’t possible. But what there WAS is just as important. Have a look at http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c25.htm Gordon Stein was the expert on the subject of the evolutionary identity of atheism. He died tragically after he had edited the Enc of Unbelief. But you can get the basic outline there.
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Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Thanks for the link. Will give it my attention shortly. I also was not expecting a 12th century atheist underground, but “psychologically impossible” does sound far-fetched. There must have been people centuries before us who decided that what was being preached just didn’t add up, even if they were smart enough to keep it to themselves. “Socially almost impossible” I could buy.
rjosephhoffmann
March 28, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I agree, far fetched. I think there must have been atheists in neolithic times. Just trying to avoid the disparity between what they would not have believed and what we do not believe, which is culturally determined and this highly uncertain. Our atheism has been greatly shaped by science and theirs could not have been.
Stewart
March 28, 2011 at 8:52 pm
The science point is well taken. Unless one is prepared to swallow a 100% rate of self-delusion among prehistoric shamans, yes, there must have been neolithic atheists.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 29, 2011 at 7:38 pm
What would really be useful, and very difficult to produce, is a history of atheism that respected the way in which belief has been related to particular objects over time. Modern atheism has been the story of the rejection of a particular set of beliefs, defined primarily in biblical terms, since the early Enlightenment. –I just don’t want to see atheism becoming superstitious about its past; the Christians created a totally, or largely false story of their own martyrdom and persecution–let’s not do that with unbelief.
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Ed Jones
March 29, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I am forced to restate the above March 5th challenge. Joe, you said March 28th:: “Our atheism has been greatly shaped by science – -” as a positive statement. I am forced to take it indisputably to be the exact opposite – a negative statment; based on the thought of those identified as the world’s greatest physicists of the 20th century. They all embraced mysticism. A conclusion not of emotion, not of itituition, not of faith, but of a sustained use of the critical intellect. This followed after concluding that the great differenc betweeen the old and the new physics, given that they both were dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality, the new physics was forced to be aware of the fact. “We (the old) thought we were dealing with the world itself”. (Sir James Jeans)
Litte as they were in the position of simply living and thinking within the radition of one of the old religious traditions (e.g. Christianity), so equally little were they prepared to go over to a naive, rationalistically grounded atheism.
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Seth Strong
March 29, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Our modern atheism is in fact greatly shaped by science. Our horseman are pretty unanimous about that. And I would say the evolution versus creationism stand off is a purely science versus a popular religion even more than it is an argument against faith. And yet, some of us atheists, consider it to be analogous to the kind of half hatched nonsense that leads the uneducated to think Scientology is nice because it’s got science in the name. Real science is a good cure for a lot of those crazy thoughts which ail many people.
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Tristan Vick
June 13, 2011 at 9:55 am
I appreciate this article.
I think this has compelled me to write a similar list of positive reasons in support of atheism.
However, just a small nitpick, but I would change your preface to your list of good things about atheism which states:
“As far as I can tell, there are five:”
to
“As far as I can tell, there are at least five:”
Because, as we all know, there could be more we haven’t thought of yet. ;) Now I am off to think more on the subject.
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Robert
July 15, 2011 at 8:46 am
You forgot the most important one.
Atheism is honest.
The rest are nice, but in reality, irrelevant.
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rjosephhoffmann
January 20, 2015 at 7:33 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian.
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stizostideon
February 7, 2015 at 8:33 pm
“Religion evokes “good” in the “good dog” sense of the word–as a characteristic of obedience, not as an outcome of choice.” Well said.
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