Splendour will do what Splendour does.

The case is weak to the point that it carries no weight. The claim that religion teaches to avoid questioning is false for broad ranges of religious traditions. It is true that American Evangelicalism has taken a number of anti-intellectual steps (see "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind") this is a historically recent trend and does not reflect larger historical considerations.

Moreover, you might be interested in this:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/rel...fp-shenhav.pdf

I think (hope?) most people understand that while intelligence correlates with atheism, it's not because religion makes one stupid or even that religious people are stupid. Rather that intelligent, educated people are less likely to be religious and I tend to presume it's because they think more logically and effectively.

Also I don't think atheism correlating with intelligence is a particularly compelling argument against religion. It's funny watching a certain kind of theist huff and puff when confronted with the fact though.

It is difficult to square this putative desire to restore balance with what you actually said. If you want to restore balance in the discourse you would do so by actually talking about these other sources of violence, not criticizing the New Atheists for focusing on religion.

That being said, I think there is a substantive disagreement here that is worth exploring. You say that the power of the nation-state (and specifically "Washington's petro-military empire") has perverted both religion and rationalism into violent paths. The New Atheists would disagree with this claim. They would say instead that while rationalist ideas have been perverted by the nation-state (most notably Marxist ideas) into irrational and violent forms, the violent religious ideas are not perversions of their religious traditions, but are actually just a valid as interpretations of those traditions as their less violent (but equally irrational) cousins.

Eh. I'm doubtful that your claim here about the New Atheists is correct. Generally speaking, people who criticize the New Atheists for having an unsophisticated view of theology or lacking nuance in their appreciation of history themselves demonstrate an unsophisticated and unnuanced view of the claims of the New Atheists. Maybe you are right, but I haven't seen this claim being made by most New Atheists (Sam Harris comes closest, and he is in my view the least impressive of the major thinkers of the New Atheists).

I would find this criticism more telling if you didn't so obviously use contempt as a rhetorical device against the so-called "militant atheists" yourself.

I tend to agree with the bolded view. Thus, I think that as non-religious people we should treat the religious with respect in political contexts. However, it should be pointed out that many religious traditions do not agree with this claim, and thus that these traditions are fundamentally opposed to the norms of democratic discourse. I think the religious basis for this political view should not be ignored.

I think they are using a tendentious definition of rational. They judge rationality by a desirable outcome, not the intellectual tradition the decisions came from.

The Neocons believe maintaining American hegemony requires tightening the hold on Middle East energy supplies, and a big war will demonstrate might. 9/11 provided an opportunity to frighten the public into invading Iraq. I would say that was coldly rational.

Stalin's seizure of Ukrainian grain stores involved massacres and starvation, but it was for the rational purpose of saving the Soviet state from looming disaster.

You've highlighted what I think is one of the major problems with the NA, the belief rationalism can be trusted to provide humane outcomes. The NA get around this by playing with definitions, by saying rationalism is only bad when perverted by power, and theism is good to the extent that it adopts rationalism.

Also, distinguishing rational from irrational factors in history quickly gets unmanageable. If you believe in magic, it is rational to not offend witches.

Now for the claim that violence is consistent with religion, not a distortion. Many theists simply disagree. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount goes against war and capitalism. Violence may flow naturally from religion as usually practiced, but not from correct interpretations of scripture. How does war follow naturally from the New Testament? Pacifism is not a "just as good" interpretation, it is the only correct one, which is a common position to take in theology.

As for the claim I've adopted tactics I criticize in others, well, logic dictated it.

That quote is just BS and it was Hitchens. Good people do evil things all of the time without religion. Probably one of the most obvious motivators on a group level of this throughout history is Nationalism. Which is what fueled Nazi Germany

Any in group/out group mentality is going to give you this result and is going to be used as a tool by people like Hitler. Religion is just one of the tools of which there are many.

It was Steven Weinburg, not Hitchens.

Hitchens did, on occasion, quote other people.

^ Legit

Splendour:

Any definition of "rational" is tendentious, so it is no surprise that the one used by New Atheists is as well. That being said, your summary here is pretty clearly inaccurate. These atheists explicitly say that while some religious traditions or people do good things, their beliefs are still irrational. Thus, they are not judging their rationality based on how desirable the outcome is.

I think here you are talking about "rational" as solely means-ends reasoning. This has little to do with the kind of rationality that the New Atheists, who pretty clearly have a more substantive view of rationality, are talking about with regards to religion.

This is a major issue in the discussion. New Atheists do tend to be fairly enthusiastic about science, to the point where they can minimize some of the potential dangers that come out of it. However, I think a better way of understanding this confidence in rationality is that it is not the claim that rationalism can be trusted to provide humane outcomes (clearly it has sometimes failed rather spectacularly at this), but rather that rationalism is our best hope for a humane outcome. While it is not perfect, it is at least better than the irrational means characteristic of religious approaches.

I think the point is that it is irrational for us today to believe in magic. Pointing out that if you accept an irrational starting belief some other unpleasant belief would rationally follow is after all a big part of the schtick of the New Atheists.

The fact that some theists disagree with the claim that violence is consistent with religion doesn't show that violence is not consistent with religion. Yes, obviously some religious traditions have largely eschewed violence. However, others have clearly not. This would seem to indicate (to me at least) that violence is clearly compatible with some forms of religion.

The crucial issue here, as I take it, is whether those religious traditions that promote or accept violent approaches to power are somehow perversions of religious modes of thinking or action. I would say not; violence has been associated with the entire history of religion and has been endorsed by many of history's most important religious figures. It seems to me artificial and ideologically motivated to declare the nonviolent versions of religion somehow more genuine than the violent ones.

As for Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount--this is an example of a mistake that I think some New Atheists (most explicitly Sam Harris, but also some on this forum) do make. They think that you can just read the beliefs or essential features of a particular religion off the statements made in the holy books of those religions. Thus, Harris claims that religious liberals are somehow being inconsistent with their own religion by not accepting the violent claims of their scriptures at face value. You are here doing the same, only in reverse--claiming that because some passages in the Bible are pacifistic that those who accept the Bible as their holy book are being inconsistent or somehow untrue to their religion by not themselves being pacifistic.

Be a man. Admit when you are wrong and don't use this kind of juvenile sophistry to defend yourself.

There was a period of time when certain posters kept putting up that graph over and over again.

The paper I linked to suggests that it's not intelligence and education per se, but that there's a tie to the particular ways that one thinks (intuitive vs. reflective). I think their position gives an appealing dichotomy since both intuitive and reflective thinking have value.

I was referring to this part of your post:

The examples I gave of Stalin and the Neocons were of rational actions, which the NA want to dissociate from by claiming it is state perversion of logic. It's in evaluating rationalists that the NA want to go by outcome.

I agree. My point is that the NA are playing a similar game of definitions.

I think the points you raise help show the NA are making some basic errors, not just balancing discussion by reminding us of the irrationality of religion. They think religion is fundamentally more susceptible to violence, which leads them to overemphasize it as a factor and down play historical contingency and the state. One of many things some people take away from this is that they can trash "southern redneck" religion and blame it for militarism and not do the hard thinking about institutions. Do not some 2+2 do that, and feel the NA back them up? Shrewder atheists don't go there, but that's still a result of NA theiophobia (if that's a word).

I guess you are going to have to tell me what you mean by "rational" here, because I don't regard Stalin's murder of the Ukrainians as a rational action. Nor do I think of the Soviet system in general to have been a particularly rational system--although this was not very obvious initially.

Here is where we might agree. I think some of the New Atheists are ambiguous in how they talk about rationality. Sometimes they use rationality to mean a fairly substantive view of how to understand the world--i.e. an acceptance of the primacy of science and empirical methods of understanding the world. On this account I think their claim that religion is fundamentally irrational is largely correct--an acceptance of alternative ways of knowing is a characteristic of almost all religious traditions.

However, sometimes the New Atheists mean something else by the irrationality of religion. Sometimes they mean that accepting religion requires you to accept some form of faith understood as an acceptance without reason as the basis for belief. This is in my view wrong as a universal description of religion. In my experience most religious people regard their religious beliefs as being justifiable on rational grounds. Thus, this form of faith actually plays a much smaller role than it is given credit for by some of the New Atheists.

I actually think the New Atheists are right to focus on religion as one of the causes of violence between states or peoples. I haven't seen any evidence here that they overemphasize it as a factor or downplay historical contingency or the role of the state in promoting violence. I think the points I've raised have more to do with criticizing the understanding of religion that some of them hold as being too narrow, not with whether some forms of religion are irrational or promote violence.

And yes, if someone reads Dawkins, et. al and comes away thinking that religion is the cause of all the world's violence, then that thinking should be criticized. However, I am not going to blame Dawkins for this unless I think he has encouraged this way of thinking himself--something that I don't think is the case.

Sure if they’re writing history or citing violence amongst, or coming out of, third-world populations. My point being there’s no “religious violence” to speak of ‘in’ modern Western civilizations.

Well I think it is worth talking about people who blow up abortion clinics and the like but yes, violence in general is way down in the first world.

Yeah, I agree that the U.S. and Western Europe are mostly tolerant pluralist democracies and currently have a relatively low level of religiously motivated violence, at least internally.

The book of revelations.


I wonder do you consider Christians militant if they have the same type of views as militant atheists? Meaning they follow Jesus' teachings of the Great Commission and try to convert and tell all others their views are false, sinful and harmful. Because if so there are a lot of militant Christians i would not consider as such. If not it seems unfair.

Lol "militant atheists" only see one cause to the world's problems, but there is only one kind of Christian; a pacifist apparently. Everyone else got it wrong. Thanks Bill.

Of course.

It doesn't follow that denouncing NA, and liking the small number of Christian pacifists, means I give a pass to all the toxic critters out there. I live in an area full of crusader types and know them well. Chris Hedges' Christian Fascists is very convincing, BTW.

By that loldefinition you are also an militant atheist, albeit a different kind to that described in your OP.

I guess I'm also a militant Spurs fan

I wouldn't agree but as long as it goes both ways, alright.

New Testament "militant" Christianity:

A militant atheist who keeps context in the foreground -- is that supposed to be bad?

I just mentioned Hedges' Christian Fascists which is a savage attack on dominionists, but is quite different from the NA approach. The NA's who want to attack religious militarism should look to Hedges on how to do it right.

He carefully shows how the dominion movement is tied in with the interests of the wealthy, he pays attention to context, and points out that the dominionists ignore the radical messages of the gospel and distort it to justify privilege. And he does it without turning it all into a face off between the rational and the irrational.

If the NA don't absorb how "rational" views become supports for militarism, they'll keep getting fooled again.

Not sure how Hedges' book would be any different than what Hitchen's would have wrote. That religionists particularly fundamentalists want and are connected to power was a particular theme of Hitchens. See The Missionary Position. He didn't just say Catholism is evil, the end.

Just going to say that I don't think Hedges' book (which I admittedly only skimmed) on the New Atheists was either very good or very fair. I agree with some of his criticisms of the political views of Harris and especially Hitchens, but I didn't think the connections he tried to draw between these views and their atheism, or New Atheism more generally, was at all convincing.