I’m losing count
Mark Vernon went to the “let’s pretend we get to tell atheists what to do next” debate (debate? it doesn’t sound like a debate – more like a self-congratulatory chat) and explains about it for CisF Belief. It is, predictably, very smug predictable stuff. It assumes from the outset that gnu atheism is obviously stupid and bad and wrong and laughable, and proceeds from there.
Marilynne Robinson was articulate on how the New Atheism erases the human by treating us as crudely material entities…She had a great quip. The theist looks at phenomena like the fine tuning and thinks, amazing. The (old) atheist looks at phenomena like the fine tuning and thinks, amazing. The New Atheist looks at phenomena like the fine tuning and thinks, well that’s that answered then.
See what I mean? What’s great about that? It’s not funny, and it’s meaningless. There’s no such thing as “The New Atheist” in the sense it’s used there – there’s nothing about putative new atheists that can be generalized in such a way that that “quip” describes anything real. It’s only a combination of contempt and smugness that makes Robinson and Vernon think otherwise.
And this points to one of the most irritating aspects of the backlash against gnu atheism, which is that a favorite trope about them/us is about the tribalism, the community-thinking, the demonization of The Other. Well of course there is plenty of that, as there is with any kind of agreement or “movement” or other commonality – there is always the risk of thinking to well of self and group and too ill of everyone else, but you sort of have to take that risk if you want to accomplish anything at all (apart from meditation).
And in any case – why do new atheist-haters focus so sharply on that among new atheists and ignore it in themselves and their allies? Look at Mark Vernon for a classic example, along with the parties to that “debate.” The whole thing looks like an exercise in brainless finger-pointing and “ew” shouting.
Even Vernon noticed that.
All in all, the implicit message was that the New Atheism is anti-humanist…Such analysis was only to be expected, given the speakers. But I did wonder why the New Humanist had no defender of New Atheism on the panel. The editor does seem to be having doubts about whether the defence is worth listening to.
Little wonder many in the audience started to shift in their seats and a certain frustration emerged during the questions.
Well quite. Why, exactly, is the New Humanist staging a pseudo-debate in which three people throw yet more crap at other atheists?
Your guess is as good as mine.
I wonder if throwing a gnu atheist under a bus will be a demonstration sport at the London Olympics? There’s certainly some contenders for the Gold medal if it is.
Any panel with Roger Scruton on it is likely one that I would not wish to hear from.
You know, I get to wondering, if you were to prepare lists of new atheists and – what is one to call them if not accommodationists? Enlightened atheists? – if you wouldn’t find that the former includes more people who have had personal experience with religion (not categorically, of course). Enlightened atheists seem to regard religion as a collection of lovely, if fictional, stories that people tell themselves. The stories give meaning to their lives, and it seems cruel to keep telling them that the stories are false. They (the EAs) don’t seem to get that, if you have been raised to believe, you are to understand that an inability to believe represents a great moral failing that you should struggle to overcome. Note to Caspar Melville: Christians ain’t Jeddi knights.
“Any panel with Roger Scruton on it is likely one that I would not wish to hear from.”
Agreed.
Does anyone understand why this is a “great quip”? Seriously, I have no idea what Vernon or Robinson are even talking about here. What is “that,” and what is the “answer” they are referring to? Are they saying that Gnu Atheists think they have the answer to everything? If so, what does it have to do with “fine tuning”?
Ye Olde Atheists?
I like this comment:
It should be getting more recommends.
Enlightened atheists seem to regard religion as a collection of lovely, if fictional, stories that people tell themselves. The stories give meaning to their lives, and it seems cruel to keep telling them that the stories are false.
This is the same kind of thinking that leads ye olde atheists like whatisname to say that ‘Africa needs religion’. After all, the religious and especially Africans are to damn childish to hear the truth. It might hurt their feelings.
So apparently Robinson’s idea of what “humanism” is, is that everyone just stands around gobsmacked about how amazing everything is all the time? Well that’s wonderful, but what happens next?
I guess they were taking a leaf out of CNN’s book, when they discussed atheism on Paula Zahn with no atheists around to disturb the atheist-bashing. “Let’s discuss Gnu Atheism, with no one to defend it, and see what the objectively unassailable outcome is.” It’s the ultimate othering, when the other is unfit even to be invited to participate in a discussion about its future.
I’m finding that joke really mystifying because it doesn’t even vaguely correlate with – well, never mind with reality, it doesn’t even correlate with prejudice. (I’d have thought the punchline would be something like ‘Ha! That’ll shut those religionists up!’ or something.)
I still wonder where Ingersoll fits in this Old/New Atheist yadda…
” . . . though a whole lot was said about what a mistake the New Atheism has been.”
Delicious, using the past tense to dismiss a whole parcel of people. There they go, one with the dinosaurs, into the sunset of oblivion, leaving the world to “higher” beings like mammals, human beings and eventually, to top it all, people who believe in something even higher than human beings.
Could we now have a general discussion about what a dreadful mistake all organised religion has been? There’s an awful lot to be said about that particular mistake.
I don’t understand that “quip”. If it refers to the strong anthropic argument and to the easily exploited credulity of theists then it’s spectacularly weak. It seems to be funny if you want an excuse to laugh at its target. Which is a bit hateful.
That is a particularly naughty cognate of denying the antecedent. If human beings are beautifully complex products of genes and memes rather than the mere playthings of an infinitely capricious murderer, torturer and rapist then I’m not sure how pretending otherwise would be “pro-humanist”.
Maybe the solution to the conundrum is that Vernon misquoted Robinson. If you tweak her great quip just a little, it makes a lot more sense:
Better, no? It’s punchy and pithy and trenchant, deftly exposing the reason why the New Atheist is such a despicable worm.
Perhaps there is something perniculously religious about these humanists? Is this not the heart of the matter. Are you not being expunged from the club. Heretics perhaps? Am I getting close.
The quip is actually a creationist canard, and much like a lot of creationist canards it is a wank from a wanking wanker. It holds that whether a given view on humanity is soothing to our egos or not is actually an important element to whether we should support it.
Further, “New Atheist” litrature and points out with elements such as fine tuning the universe is not in fact fine tuned, nor are we for that matter. Life undergoes evolution in which it fits its environment to a point, but rarely absolutely perfectly. For example, us humans do not actually fit our environment perfectly, we are often destructive to it, often with disasterous results.
It is infuriating, because it’s such a strawman, as anyone with any soul who read Dawkins would acknowledge.
It’s just more factionalising, as Eric pointed out in an excellent comment, but entirely pointless. The labelling of accommodationists is an over-populated field, but I’m going to suggest another nonetheless! Nouvelle atheist – a tiny serving of the right ingredients that just doesn’t satisfy.
Yes, I read Caspar’s piece in the NH shortly after I wrote my last post, and then went out and did some gardening. I didn’t get back online until this morning. He seems all very congratulatory — except that he acknowledges he didn’t really brief his panellists about concentrating on the question: Where do we go now?
But the very interesting thing about the discussion panel, which made a sport of dissing the “New Atheists” (I used to think that was a good name, and was ready to go with it. I take that back.) If it hadn’t been for Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett, the discusion wouldn’t have even taken place, and yet the discussion was premised on the notion that the “New Atheism” has got boring, and we need something new. Well, we don’t get something new by dismissing the very phenomenon which started the ball rolling in the first place.
Besides, if that was the question that Caspar (the friendly ghost, right?) wanted to answer, why would he have had a panel that had only one atheist on it, and not one who could have been called a “New Atheist”? (I now see the point of “Gnu Atheist”, because it is an implicit refusal to be the Other.) Mind you, I like Roger Scruton — have done ever since he started off teaching philosophy in the 60s of last century — which seems long ago and far away now: he’s curmudgeonly, he’s clever, he’s literate, and, as the mischievousness shows, he’s also pretty realistic about the state of religion today. In fact, his comments about religion were perhaps the most damning of the evening. According to Caspar this is what he said:
Now, that’s putting the epistemological differences between religion and atheism is a nice succinct, and damning way. This is what makes religion dangerous, which is why Scruton is a Christian in a gentlemanly Anglican way, which doesn’t make any real knowledge claims at all. It just lives out a nostalgic idea in the English countryside.
But, even so, you’re not going to get where the future of atheism is from either Scruton or Robinson. And you’re certainly not going to find it by disparaging the very trend in atheism which has made atheism such a public phenomenon that even the pope had to take account of it. And the pope had to use slander as a gambit. This should show just how powerful the so-called “New Atheism” really is, and why people like Caspar should at least show a little respect for it, instead of yawning and saying he’s bored already. (It’s his bread and butter, actually.) But, of course, the future is not going to be decided by committee! It’s probably going to happen when some very bright atheist publishes a book that graps our attention and takes us the next step of the way. Perhaps it’s being written now.
But what Caspar should not have done is to gather together a group of people who were bound to belittle the achievement of “New Atheism” with no one there to point out a few home truths. After all, Dawkins’ book alone generated an entire industry in religious responses, of which Marilynne Robinson’s is one of the latest. And she, apparently, was even allowed to get away with the “scientism” canard, which Caspar must have known is untrue. And it wasn’t witty in the slightest, even though Caspar and Vernon thought it was a great quip, for some reason. And there have been any number of responses to the charge of scientism, as he must know — and if he doesn’t he simply has been following the story line.
In his summary on the NH website, Caspar tries to justify his panel discussion by suggesting that perhaps what people have against him is that he is “prepared to debate with people who have views that are different from mine.” But that’s not what he was doing, and he must have known that. He wasn’t just debating with those who differ; he was agreeing with them egregiously. And this is accommodationism, and it takes the gadfly out of atheism and turns it into a housefly. But religion is dangerous, as Scruton pointed out, and we need to be more than just a little pest.
I’m sorry I’ve gone on again so, but I do just want to add — since Ophelia seemed a bit grumpy on the last thread — that Butterflies and Wheels is very special, because it is so gadflyish, so insistently standing up against the stupidities of religion. We need more like Ophelia. Religion is destroying lives all over the world, maiming the minds of children, oppressing and murdering women, perverting sexuality into a kind of life-destroying dirtiness, restricting freedoms, and trying to take freedom away even from those who have achieved it at such cost. Where does the “New Atheism” go from here? Well, Caspar, let me tell you. It tries to so oppose religion that the religious don’t have the field all to themselves so that they can go on ruining people’s lives. It stands up for the values of freedom and dignity. And, right now, since, as PZ has just pointed out that some people have been arrested for burning a Qu’ran, we need to get some Qu’rans and Bibles together and burn them, and post our pictures on the web. When faith disappeared for me, I took all the Bibles I had and ripped them up and threw them in the garbage. I did it that way because that’s the way to show greatest disrespect for the Bible. Burning is the way of disposing of old Bibles and Prayer Books that is respectful. But, if people object to burning, I’ll do that too. As PZ says, a religion that goes ballistic when you burn their sacred book, should see it burnt all over the world.
Wow, I must be sleepy. There’s a whole lot of bad editing in that. I forgot the preview function, and thought I had already done it.
Hamilton –
I’m more of a “hate the sin, love the sinner” atheist feminist.
Eric –
You know who else burnt books…
But seriously, we need to tackle the repression, not mimic the religious factionalists. Burning a book is different from drawing a prophet.
Thanks Eric! :- )
The specialness of B&W is in very large part due to the terrific people who write or re-publish articles for it – Leo Igwe, Maryam Namazie, Edmund Standing, etc etc etc.
Don’t think I’ll be burning my copy of the Qu’ran, but point well made. Respectful atheists will assert, often quite clearly, that they see no rational basis for belief in supernatural agency, but they will never say that they find anything fundamentally wrong, as in harmful to society, with non-extremist theism. But there is something fundamentally wrong with theism and what it does to peoples’ minds. (Even the most liberal, as we see, are deprived the power of logic.) I’m rather late to this realization; five years ago I was a (wait for it, and try not to throw up in your mouth) Christian nonbeliever. But I now realize that, if we are honestly to improve the human condition, belief cannot be accommodated. Although believers should be, and no one should be allowed to pretend that they can’t see the distinction.
Having had the misfortune of reading an article by Marilynne Robinson in the Guardian a few months ago, I’m not at all surprised to discover that she’s a member of the atheist-bashing club.
If everyone started pointing out the flaws in wishy-washy hand-waving she’d be out of a job.
You know who else burnt books…
Godwin’s law sneaks in.
Seriously though, I am a bit bugged by the freethinkers who fetishsize books. Book burning is of two kinds, historic attempts at censorship, specifically engineered to make the content unavailable, and (especially in the modern, digital copy, mass market world) burning of individual books as a statement of disagreement or even contempt.
The two actions are completely different.
“the first time the phrase “New Atheism” was used was back in the 17th century, in response to Spinoza’s presumed atheism. Not much that’s new then.”
You are the ones calling it ‘New’, mate, not us.
The best part of the whole thing was audience questions. And the saddest part was how the panel dodged them all.
Frankly I think the New Humanist has done some damage here, giving pseudo-babble that even random audience recognizes as heavy bias.
I initially wrote a long response to Caspar’s blog entry recounting all the misrepresentations and strawmans that were set up in the debate, but it was so long and tedious that I decided against posting it.
I don’t think this is worrisome to be honest. It’s not like there weren’t pseudo-debates before that claim to talk about a movement and claim to characterize and discount it. The loser here is New Humanist, who basically alienates its own constituents doing this.
I think burning books sends entirely the wrong message, and is just asking to be exploited for propaganda purposes.
Apparently Erich Kästner witnessed the burning of his own books by the Nazis, and someone in the crowd recognised him, but he managed to slip away. (He was the author of “Emil and the Detectives”, supposedly the first novel about kids turning detective, a la Enid Blyton. The regime didn’t want children thinking for themselves of course.)
A commenter somewhere suggested that instead of burning the Koran, you should download it, and then delete the file.
All these pedantic discussions about “new” and “old” atheism, “humanist” atheism, “anti-humanist” atheism, theology-biology divide, etc. are a total waste of time and energy. Instead, if we focused on the following, we ‘ll have a better chance of dislodging religion and replacing it with reason:
(1) Make sure that government and religion are kept far, very far, apart. If you find them moving a whisker of a distance closer, inform, dissent, protest, sue, do whatever you can to restore them to their original positions or farther.
(2) Persuade every parent, current or prospective, that religious indoctrination is seriously harmful to the life and health of their children.
(3) Counter the religious indoctrination of children at home, school, church, and the media.
Mixing other objectives with these, especially socio-economic objectives, would at best be distracting.
Ah, yes, of course, I know who else burnt books, and it does send the wrong message. But I also know who put books on the index, and made reading books so indexed a mortal sin. I do take Hitchens’ point, too, about not desecrating things that others regard as holy, so what I say is guarded by qualification, but…..
… at the same time, when religionists, of whatever stripe, decide that their book or prophet or god or whatever is so sacrosanct that even nonbelievers have to respect it or them, and may not treat it or them in a way that would show lack of respect, like placing the Qu’ran on a shelf with other books, or placing it below another in a pile, or burning or destroying it as an act of contempt, and threaten to go on a rampage and treat human life as expendable and human dignity as of no account, then it’s time to demonstrate to them that they have to get used to the hustle and bustle of life in pluralistic societies. Don’t forget that people, basing themselves on this book, have killed others for writing books. So, this is a special kind of book, and it occupies a special kind of place in world society just now, and burning it might just make a statement. At lot of these same people burned The Satanic Verses, as an act of contempt, so we know what message burning a book sends to them. Of course, if they don’t want to belong to a pluralistic global world, then they should cut all the telephone wires, and destroy their satellite receivers, and close the borders, and pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Because they have no right to be treated with kid gloves, and until they learn this lesson — those who think we owe awed respect to their icons and idols — then they are a danger to us. And so teaching them this lesson is a matter of great importance.
And that, by the way, is why the refined and the elegant are so wrong about brash and strident atheism. It’s the only way to get the attention of believers. They’re not going to pay attention to refined discussion about belief and unbelief, but if you tell them, as Hawking recently did, that god is not necessary to explain why there is something rather than nothing — just that — their ears perk up and they’ll come out with extensive responses even before they’ve read the book. That tells you something about the religious mind. Until now that was a mantra: science can’t tell you why there is something rather than nothing. You have to go to religion to answer the Big Questions. Well, now it’s happened. Someone took them at their word, said the question is important, and gave them an answer, and it didn’t include god. And what do you know, the very next day there were statements from the Chief Rabbi and the Archbishop of Canterbury! It’s like magic. Burning certain books apparently has a similar effect.
Of course, I agree with Shaker that all the pedantic stuff about new and old atheism, strident atheism and academic atheism is a waste of time and energy, and if people didn’t continue to remind us that this is an issue for them, we’d probably be best to get on with some of the suggestions that Shaker makes. But they do, and so it seems important to say from time to time that there are good reasons to be blunt, brash, and even strident sometimes about belief, because that’s the only thing that got the pope to take it seriously. Do you really think that that would have happened, if it had not been for the “New Atheist” phenomenon? I doubt it. They don’t like being challenged, because they know, as well as anyone, that the ground they’re standing on isn’t very good for a battle. They were much better off when people treated them with respect, because if people do that, they’re not likely to be very vigorous in their criticism. I think Dawkins is right. We’ve got ’em rattled. Let’s not give up now.
@jay
I think Dirigible was being ironic. Though of course the tradition of book-burning goes back waaaay before the Nazis anyway. Actually, it’s been a favourite activity for many religions; with secular book-burnings (including the nazi burnings, if we accept those as secular) being a definite outlier.
I am uneasy with burning books, even the Koran, even to prove a point about the sacredness of objects (or the lack thereof.)
To me it is too bound up in censorship. Burning books is what theocracies do, it is what the Apartheid government did.
Though that said, my brother did smoke a Bible. Rizzlas aren’t free.
Eric:
Exactly. And, as we’ve pointed out so many times, the very definitions of words like “brash” and “strident” get modified when their referent is “atheist.” To people like Robinson, merely saying that you are an atheist is an extremist act, one which makes you one of those atheists. Meanwhile, people like Robinson are often not prepared to hurl the word “extremist” at a Muslim until he stones a woman for adultery. But, of course, atheist extremism is “just as bad” as religious extremism. Yeah, right.
dirigible:
I hate to spoil a joke by explaining it, but that phrase has a history, and it wasn’t coined by a Gnu Atheist. You can find out more by typing the first two words of the phrase into the B&W search engine at the top of the page.
I feel about book burning the way George Carlin feels about the n-word. Context. There is context in which I can accept it. But most book burning is done by people who are intolerant bigots who want to oppress ideas they disagree with and move towards an overall more intolerant society. Whether it’s the catholic church burning books by Galileo Galilei or the Nazis burning books they consider “degraded”. The US has a still recent history of one christian sect burning bible versions of other christian sects.
The merit of all of this is zero. None of this warrants my endorsement.
But yes, the notion that some books are “holy” needs to be critiqued. And this is a context in which I can accept books being intentionally disrespected. It’s not about denying the content of the book or spreading bigotry, but question the sanctimonious status of the book indeed.
That’s why it’s so horrible that Alex Stewart may lose his job while Terry Jones was rewarded by a platform and the microphones of the word press under his nose. Completely wrong.
Sadly most people do not engage with context and nuance, so burning books is burning books, and they are judged by loose association of the deed. My take is that there are better ways to critique the “holy” status.
For example I think the idea of creating a “Jeffersonian” qur’an would be brilliant. Just cut out all the parts that are undesired or superficial, and create a nice and slim volume/cheat-sheet.
Burning books is a stupid thing to do but it should totally be legal. It’s stupid because the message is unclear and can easily, and possibly correctly, be read as too extreme. If I burn a Bible my action is wide open to the message: “I hate this book and all it stands for.” Well, what does it stand for? That, in turn, is wide open to the interpretation “I hate, among other things, actual Christians.” That’s never a message that I’d be encouraging or supporting.
If someone does actually want to express such feelings in an in-your-face way, I don’t think the law should stop it. But I’d like to see people be clearer and more discerning about what messages they send. I support PZ over the cracker incident a couple of years back, but if someone outside of the context PZ was operating in just randomly crucified a consecrated wafer to express hatred of all it stands for, whatever that is, I’d make the same point: it’s a stupid way to express whatever it is you want to express – though again it should not be illegal. There are many different contexts, of course: political contexts, artistic contexts, and so on. I’d have something more complicated to say if the context demanded it. But just going around burning the Koran or the Bible to express your hatred of whatever it is you think they stand for is a pretty dumb idea.
Shaker, I doubt if anyone here would disagree with what you have said. But the problem is, if you follow your list to the letter, someone will immediately shout “New Atheist!” (or perhaps “New Athiest!”). An angry mob will soon gather, complete with torches and pitchforks, and begin piling kindling beneath your feet.
I used to feel this way, but I’ve changed my mind (to some extent). Frankly, I think all of us give way too much symbolic weight to book-burning. It’s an outmoded form of protest because its emotional content is divorced from the historical reason for the emotional content. That is to say, burning books in the pre-digital, pre-global era really was, to greater or lesser degrees, an effective way of stamping out knowledge, or at least of preventing access to it for a great many people.
That isn’t the case any more. You can burn books to your heart’s content, but you cannot destroy the actual text. It lives on so many servers and so many individual computers that it is, in fact, impossible to destroy a book today. To do so, you’d have to find some means to scrub every server and every individual computer, a task that’s impossible in practice.
Book burning conveys contempt-and provokes disgust-precisely because it used to be an effective means of destroying knowledge, of disappearing it. But it’s not any longer. I think those of us on the “right” (yes, I know) side of these contemporary political debates just end up looking sniffy and silly when we say things like “Oh, I despise book burning – it’s just so terribly awful!” It’s like we have an emotional hangover about it. It’s not worth getting worked up about, because the act has lost the power it used to have that made the act so repugnant in the first place. Being righteously offended by it (and performing that indignant offendedness in public) strikes me as silly and misplaced; it’s almost as if we’re fetishing the symbolism rather than the reality.
If a means were found to effectively destroy texts in the digital age-say by some ingenious and nefarious computer virus-then that would be an appropriate candidate for Extreme Outrage. But burning a paper book?
I don’t mean to sound dismissive, especially toward people who share my sensibilities, but I do mean to ask them to consider whether it’s worth the effort to get up in high dudgeon over this, or if it’s actually just a little bit silly. :)
Yes, Russell, just burning a Qu’ran or a Bible is a stupid thing to do, but in the context where people are being threatened with bodily harm for doing so, and where the President of the United States actually pleaded with someone not to do it because it would endanger American troops (and this is a religion we are talking about here, all spirituality and compassion), and where a proposal was made to send US Marshalls to arrest the man, and where, no matter how stupid a thing to do, 6 stupid men were arrested in Britain for burning a Qu’ran… well, I think there’s probably context enough to make the message clear. As PZ said yesterday, he had a copy of the Qu’ran, by today he wouldn’t have one any longer. I think that’s fairly said, and the message is clear.
But that’s not what I wanted to say. I noticed that the first chapter of AC Grayling’s To Set Prometheus Free is now available over at RD.net, and I wanted to suggest, for stridency and dismissiveness, and for a fairly decisive kind of atheist argumentation, that those who haven’t read it should. I merely quote as a taster, the following:
It doesn’t get much plainer than this. The whole book is worth the toll. The limpid, elegant prose, the clear thought, the decisive judgement. As I say, AC Grayling goes about his craft, and no one seems to notice how blunt spoken he is, how strident the thought is, however elegantly expressed.
I think if lots of people in the UK (especially) went out and burned the Koran today as an “I’m Spartacus” gesture, that would make a lot of sense. The context would certainly make the message of free speech advocacy clear. Btw, I expanded my thoughts above over at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, but that was before reading Eric’s comments.
Eric, I’ve just ordered a copy of To Set Prometheus Free on your recommendation.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Jim Nugent and Ben Hunt, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: I’m losing count http://dlvr.it/5pq40 […]
Humanity is very much like the prisoners in Beethoven’s Fidelio, joyous in entering the light but blinded by it at the same time. I see the ancient religious books (Bible, Koran etc) as first feeble steps taken towards a rational understanding of the world. Feeble, because they have been so easily demolished by rational critique. But their emotional power has been something else again.
Nobody on the allied side was particularly grieved when copies of Mien Kampf were burned at the end of WW2. But the burning of the last copy on Earth would in my view be an intellectual disaster.
‘I will burn your book if you dare to burn mine’ is a race to the bottom. Moreover, in this game of iconoclasm and attepted censorship, there is room for an ever-expanding number of players. Who can we burn next? Marx perhaps?
So sorry, Eric. I am totally against all publicity stunts that involve book burning, no matter how well motivated. However I do think Hitch’s idea of a Jeffersonian Koran to be a good one. It could be extended perhaps to include a Jeffersonian Bhagavad Gita and a Jeffersonian Avesta. For those interested.
As the ability of a religious text to generate a mass following is roughly proportional to the time it has been around, I don’t see much need for a Jeffersonian Mein Kampf (though its printing costs would be pretty low) or a Jeffersonian Dianetics.
What appalled me was the sheer intellectual slovenliness of both Caspar and Vernon: Caspar in his wishy-washy neither-this-nor-that points-on-both-sides but the New Atheists are horrid approach; Vernon in his unabashed horrid-New-Atheists approach, which he sought to temper by throwing a sop to the horrids at the end, in his suggestion that it might have been an idea to actually have a New Atheist there. Caspar thinks Eagleton has a serious point and praises the ‘wittiness’ of the title of McGrath’s unctuous and pitiful book (and subsequently tries to pretend that he was being sarcastic – a pretty poor attempt at being sarcastic, surely); Vernon thinks Robinson’s ‘quip’ about fine-tuning and the New Atheists was ‘great’. Neither man seemｓ remarkable for his honesty, integrity, intelligence or sense of humour.
That said, I do think it would be a good idea to get away from doing what in fact Caspar says he is not doing even as he does it: casting this debate as solely between a few well-known ‘New Atheists’ and such as Robinson, Armstrong and tired conservative apologists like Scruton, whose feeling for religion is merely aesthetic. The work on the cognitive roots of religion by Boyer, Atran, Guthrie and others needs to be brought much more into the public eye, as does the writing of one-time Christians like John Loftus, who has just edited a good collection of essays, many of which are by ex-Christians, ‘The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails.’ The debate has been getting tedious – one hears the same arguments (with which I mostly agree) over and over again; Caspar’s right in a way, but he doesn’t see clearly what the problem is and merely exacerbates it.
The most amusing response to Vernon’s negative puffery in The Groan comes in the comments below it. Tall about a readership raspberry!
What Mark Vernon (a former priest) and Caspar Melville have in common is, ‘turn thy cheek’ and, ‘love thy enemy’ and they still remain thoroughly Christian, without the god bit. So they still retain their ‘bad conscience’.
Responding to those who have disagreed with what I’ve said about burning books, all I can say, I guess, is that I agree — well, largely, anyway. I don’t want there to be a rash of book burning, and I didn’t burn my own copy of the Qu’ran, though I seldom bother to read it now. (It’s Pickthall’s translation, and it took me awhile to find it.)
The Qu’ran may have merit, purely aural, when read in Arabic. I don’t know, though I’m told it can reduce grown men to tears. But as an intellectual product it is rebarbative, both in thought and expression. And as a spiritual document it is simply nugatory.
My only reason for mentioning it was simply the response of Muslims to the burning of this ridiculous book. It is outrageous that a group of people should threaten violence just because someone exercises a freedom that harms no one, and I do think it is important to make it clear to Muslims that they should not expect respect for their silly religion. They are entitled to lapse into mindless awe every time they hear the name ‘Mohammed’, but they shouldn’t expect anyone else to think that he was much else than a cut throat and a minor brigand with a gift for syncretism — if the Qu’ran is his recitation — which I understand is now questioned — he may only have been a cut throat and minor brigand, and the Qu’ran a retrospective creation to justify the widespread brigandage that Mohammed’s band of brothers set loose from Arabia.
It’s difficult enough for ordinary people to arouse Muslim ire, and there are enough people around who are sufficiently frustrated by the fact that publishers and public figures in the West have capitulated to Muslim threats of violence, to make doing something, almost anything, to get the question of our lost freedoms onto the agenda — and burning a book, or a pile of them, might have achieved that — an attractive proposition.
I was struck by something in yesterday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Written by Karl Doehring, the Director of the Maz Plank Institute for Public and International Law at the University of Heidelberg, and speaking of the teaching of Islam in schools and universities, he said, amongst other things:
Now, my German’s pretty rudimentary still, but I would translate this as: “An imam, who teaches about human dignity according to Islam, is necessarily in conflict with our constitution.” If this is true, and I suspect that it is, then we need to make clear how contrary to the freedoms that we enjoy the teachings of Islam really are, and we need somehow to stand up boldly to the idiocies that are currently restricting the freedoms that are foundational for democracy. And, in this connexion, Mark Vernon and Caspar Melville, who think that the “New Atheism” is over the top in its stridency and boring in its repetitiveness, and who think that religion is the lapdog Christianity with which they are familiar, haven’t seen anything yet. Because, until the point is made, this is going to have to be repeated again and again, and clearly with greater stridency. Because these freedoms are clearly too important to be defeated by a crowd of unruly and credulous fanatics protesting Western freedoms in some dusty Pakistani city.
People ought not to burn books, if only because it contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. If you must destroy them, at least recycle …
Make origami out of holy books day would be creative at least.
Caspar Melville has received a good grilling (but not a head-kicking by any angry strident atheists!) on his blog, and so I wonder if he’s going to remain like a limp Anglican (or agnostic), or become even more stridently atheistic? And the same applies to Mark Vernon. This is a good test to see whether journalists grow bored of contrariness, grow some, and stand for something.
Ok hang on – about Caspar – most unfair about the honesty and integrity (and for that matter the intelligence and sense of humour). He’s asked me to write a reply for the NH. I call that honesty and integrity (and at least sense of humour!).
Re:Book Burning, I don’t like it, mostly due to what the trope represents. Usually it’s censorship, and NOT opposing censorship. There has to be a better way to get the message across.
Ideally, I’d be an in the middle type person. I’m not a burn all the churches type person. I think they provide an important community structure (even if that structure could be improved by removing “God”). I actually agree with the core point I think, Atheistics (That is, arguments about the existence/non-existence of God) is a boring, frustrating, and by and large pointless exercise. That said, the gnu Atheists also bring up a plethora of social and cultural issues and viewpoints that are interesting, informative, useful, and by and large true.
That, I think is what pisses them off.
Ok, Ophelia, sorry… But Caspar’s waffling did come across as appallingly evasive.
A bit late to the party, I knew I’d heard the name Marilynne Robinson in the context of “atheist-bashing” before somewhere, and just I found the reference in an article by Earl Doherty, here:
http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/AORComment17.htm
Doherty is dissecting an awfully bad review by Robinson of Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’, and Doherty’s piece begins thus:
“The first sign that there is an a priori prejudice involved is the title: ‘Hysterical Scientism: The Ecstacy of Richard Dawkins.’ This is not a review, properly speaking. It is a smug and pretentious defamation of science and scientists, and Richard Dawkins in particular.”
[…] meme that the “New Inquisition”** keeps peddling. You can read the goodness here, here, here, here, here and here. Quite a lot to summarise really, but all worth […]