Missionary Position is from before he became a right winger. He later comes to see the American empire as a bastion against Islamist violence, not part of the problem, even though he knew better. Taking American power out of the equation is a major part of his whole transformation.

The difference between he and Hedges would start with the distinction between an honest reporter and a publicity seeking opportunist who writes for shock value.

I haven't even skimmed it.

Right, so it's not that Hitchens ignored the political and social contexts it's that he drew different conclusions. This seems to be far less of an issue of New Atheism and a right wing/ left wing complaint. And he had a sense of bravado. One shouldn't have too much of that.

By background, Hitchens did know a great deal more about history and society than the other New Atheists, even when he was tarding it up.

I don't think it is fair to say that he just became a right winger. At the very least, he was his own mind with views that, while they did change, were his own and only coincidentally overlapped with some typical spectrum. For instance, it wasn't just that he stopped thinking the American empire was bad. In his justification for Iraq (see a bloggingheads between him and bob), bob pointed out the history of US causing problems in Iraq. Hitchens said he was painfully aware of US corroboration with Iraq in the Iran Iraq war, of the genocide against the Kurds, of the botched first war, of the horrors of oil for food. However, he concluded, that only increases our moral obligation to do right given the extensive failures of the past. He didn't just become an American military apologist, he vigorously opposed some actions and supported others depending on his calculus of their benefit. Now I think his calculus was off, but the point is it isn't the stereotype you cast.

Your problem in this thread is that you are clearly a pacifist anti-US military guy. That is fine. Perhaps we should call you a "militant anti-imperialist". But because these people are increasing their emphasis on a factor that is different from your own, you seem to lose all subtlety in understanding the subtlety of their positions.

You're being awfully generous to ol' Hitch. His talking heads performances were more extreme than his written work. To reinvent himself in the US market, he had to attack his old left wing pals. I saw him a couple times reciting Bush II talking points in absolutely obsequious fashion. He was capable of nuance and sometimes chose to wield it, but he was often just craven. He was a provocateur and anyone who does not see that in his atheist act is missing his essence.

The Onion nailed him, even before his rightward stagger:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/chr...m-trailer,165/

Loved his criticism of the arresting officers: "effete liberal apologists for the atrocities of late-stage capitalism."

Do you get all your news from the onion or only when you are trying to defend yourself from claims of unfair criticism that lacks subtlety and nuance?

You talk as if:

A. anyone had proved the NA claim that rationalism is inherently more humane than theism.

B. anyone had found a NA who communicated the historical context of a violent religious group (beyond arguable outlier Hitchens).

You realize you have yet to actualy give a specific example or quote of anything in this thread yet, but are just throwing out wild assertions about their lack of context and nuance and the like? I asked for explicit examples from kraus and you didn't give any. I read two of Dawkings books and I didn't see any big mention of historical events lacking in context. And lol at Hitchens being an outlier...he is front center man. Give examples then we can talk about them, until then your generalizations seem utterly meaningless.

Okay, Uke, I offer Sam Harris, The End of Faith. Harris is a great example of how rationalism does not protect you from militarist enchantment. He favors a wall of force to protect us from a new Islamic caliphate. (Yes, you heard that right, he joins Michelle Bachman in warning of the caliphate.) He is a true believer of the propaganda of empire. But I dare say it's not the neuron-scientist's kids who will do the fighting.

There's a stunning evisceration of Harris by Jackson Lears who does it so much better than I. http://www.thenation.com/article/160...arris?page=0,1 I know Jackson and will give you 20:1 he's an atheist.

Here goes. I was about to reread Harris's whole chapter on Islam until I got to this early paragraph (109):
There you have it. An open claim that religious violence, especially Islamic, arises from sheer irrationality and needs no historical factors beyond what you glance at and then "place them safely on the shelf." There's more, "We are at war with Islam." (109) This chapter is breathlessly stupid, it goes on and on sounding like Michelle Bachman. "It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been 'hijacked' by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran." Except, of course, for all the parts of the Koran that say nice things, because like the Bible, you can find anything in it.

In the above section where Harris tries to prove he knows something about the Middle East -- Israel, dictatorships, poverty -- he misses the major historical factors. They being, the arbitrary borders left by colonialism, and the outside powers competing for control of energy. He's saying, hey, I know the history, but you don't need it because ISLAM. But he doesn't know the history.

Harris also claims Islam is special because of the suicide bombers. But a Leninist group, The Tamil Tigers, made extensive use of suicide. So did Japan WWII. Research on the Islamic suicide bombers themselves reveals that the families get paid off and there are many other contingent, non-Islamic factors in these guys decisions. There's also the problem that the Prophet forbade suicide. They get around that by defining the suicides as deaths in battle -- a rather rational rhetorical device. But the point is, Islam can just as easily be used against suicide bombing. Its use is therefore contingent, not Islamic.

What does Richard Dawkins, the nuanced guy, say about Harris? "The End of Faith is a genuinely frightening book....Read Sam Harris and wake up." (back cover)

In a second edition, Harris addresses the people who say that many of the big crimes were not by religious movements (Stalinism, the Neocons). He responds these movements "were not especially rational." As demonstrated earlier in thread, this is not logically sound since he is arguing from definition. That's really all you need to know about Harris. He doesn't have to provide an historical account because the terms he uses dictate that violence is religious, not rational.

Okay uke, I walked to the damn library to get the book. Now let's see you provide one example of a New Atheist providing a rounded account of any violent religious movement.

The Hitchens outlier remark -- I was acknowledging the Hitch is capable of describing historical context, not that he is distant from the New Atheists. His born again writing on Islam actually has many similarities to Harris in being slipshod spew, but powered more by publicity-seeking than ideology.

Final question. Does any of the New Atheists besides Hitchens know enough to be embarrassed by Harris? Have they distanced themselves from him?

Did somebody ever say that embracing rationalism necessarily leads to anti-US military beliefs like the ones you have?

Wat. You realize your quote doesn't indicate this at all right?


The bolded seems to be broadly correct. All the various other social, economic, and geopolitical factors that people might commonly identify as being problems in the middle east don't get you to suicide bombing. You also need the religious indoctrination. Or some other similar indoctrination as occured in the japanese kamikaze bombers. I don't see what is contentious here or how this quote implies any of the other nonsense you have tried to justify.

Remember you started this thread by pretended this was related to a background in hard science.

Now you're just twisting. People claim rationalism is less conducive to violence. I point out it isn't, even among the apostle of empiricist peace, Sam Harris.

The "We are at war with Islam" one does. And if you read him or the Nation article you'll find lots evidence.

That's what you say, not what he said. He insists "Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself" (131). He wrote a whole chapter about Islam, therefore had room to show he understands history. He doesn't, he privileges religion as especially dangerous, even though actors use empiricism to arrive at similar atrocities.

Here's another jaw dropper from Harris. "The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today." The breezy breadth of his generalizations about Islam are something only a non-specialist would attempt. Note also, he assumes that any Muslim country more violent than Israel is so because of Islam. SOP. He pays lip service to complexity in one spot, then leaves it out every time he gets his rant on.

Nothing has undermined the observation that all the discussed atheists but one are from the hard sciences. Harris's chapter on Islam is one howler after another. It isn't his specialty, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

The ball is in your court. Show us a New Atheist besides Hitchens with a balanced understanding of an episode of violence.

I suppose I invited this nonsense when I asked you to provide quotes. I had hoped to get the conversation out of the muck of generalizations and onion links it was in. But I didn't mean it to become you challenging me to defend the absolute worst quotes ever said by the absolute worst atheist you can find. So let's back up and remember the framing:

You made in your OP the claim that something about "militant" atheists (by which it seems to now mean the half dozen famous new atheists) were connected in some meaningful way to their background in hard sciences. Now I am in such a hard science and I am trying to understand it. And no, this is NOT the appropriate metric to demonstrate your claim: "Show us a New Atheist besides Hitchens with a balanced understanding of an episode of violence."

Now do you or do you not have a single explanation for why or how sciences leads to this militant atheism outside of the fact that perhaps 2 of the 4 of the so called horsemen have this background?

BTW, remember what I said about islam and new atheists before:

What a breath of fresh air this thread is, where we've
got an atheist calling a whole chapter in Sam Harris' book
"breathlessly stupid."

Perhaps these is hope for this forum after all.

Just waiting for you to do the same thing with the Bible.

The analogy would be raking other religious people over the coals. There's plenty of them I would be willing to do. But BH hasn't said atheism is stupid, just some atheists. Edit: and then only in certain areas.

Wasn't making a direct analogy, but sure.

I don't know of anything about the hard science approach that would make someone bad at history. Gould was very good at it. I've wrote at least twice that the issue is that history is not the specialty of the New Atheists. It's purely a matter of time -- where have they been directing their thinking and research? Pointing out their background is an aside. That four of the five top NA figures have a science background doesn't prove anything -- it's a reflection of where they've put in the work.

They are used to crunching data on biology, not history. They are drawing vague generalizations way beyond their knowledge, as is embarrassingly apparent with Harris.

Certainly Harris thinks his scientific background makes him especially clear eyed in looking at history. But he's spouting highly ideological talking points. He doesn't see how much assumptions and ideology affect the perception of truth. But plenty of hard science people can make the transition, they understand they're dealing with lots of uncertainty and not examining mechanical biological processes. Years ago I heard Chomsky claim that hard science people are often better at examining society because they don't have years of indoctrination in the political science or history departments. You would probably do a better job than Harris on the Middle East, yet he's a guru on the social impact of religion.

Harris is a ******ed git. Has been and will be. His latest "We should screen Muslims" was pretty much panned by everyone, including atheists, imaginary militant or otherwise.

lol, stop tarding up RGT, Bill Haywood, come back to politics.

Great, so it seems you have utterly no basis to associate the background in hard sciences with "militant atheism". In fact it seems like you are now arguing the hard science background HELPS.

If you had wanted to make a thread about the hyperbolic Islamophobia of same Harris then great, make that thread and you would have had more success having people agree with you.

Let's move on because I am bored and have an unrelated question that is perhaps more interesting. There is a short YouTube clip from Hitchens on Chomsky where he essentially says that Chomsky's myopic criticism of US military power was used to apologize away Islamic jihad and the like and that chomksy was vastly overvaluing this single factor. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjpDpL2KlLw (the second half, the first half is old). Ironically, this is more or less the same criticism I and you as well seem to be leveling on Hitchens and Harris et al. Namely, that there myopic focus on religion is blinding them to other factors that play such as that of the Great Game Petro Empire as you like to call it. Personally, I find both critiques of Islam and of the US military to be broadly correct and that they both play out as relevant factors, amongst many others, in the middle east and Asia. And I find the myopic nature of both Hitchens and Chomsky to be somewhat tiring. Now I have gotten the impression that you are pretty far in a chomksy-esque camp, always, returning to the comments about empire. So where do you stand on this?

+1

And very much this. So far all you've really conveyed is an insistence that we stop listening to Sam Harris' monocausal crap and instead listen to Bill Haywood's monocausal crap.

The point I got out of the clip was that Hitchens says that Chomsky sees Jihadists as a function of American policy and downplays their wickedness.

It's terrifically hard to evaluate that without looking at some specific Chomsky passages, but why should that stop anyone at 2+2.

Chomsky would say something like that it's perfectly obvious that the nature of Jihadists has to be taken into account, and then add something stinging like its an utter fabrication on Hitchen's part to say he thinks otherwise. Then he'd probably say something along the lines of yes, al Qaida is bad, but the U.S. is the big boy on the block with far more power to set the scene in the Mideast, the American capacity for wholesale violence is far greater than the retail terrorists, and for a variety of reasons, it is appropriate to focus much more on the US.

But there would be no theoretical reason why more emphasis could not be given to the agency of terrorists. This is unlike the New Atheists, who insist that religious thinking is inherently more susceptible to bamboozlement by militarists than empiricism is, and therefore should be focused on almost exclusively.

So far I've been guessing what he'd say. I have heard him say, when challenged why he focuses overwhelmingly on Washington's sins, that it's because he's an American. That's the country he is trying to influence. The implication would be that if he were living in Gaza, then the minds a person has a chance to influence in a positive way would be the Gazans, and what would be needed there would be confrontation of Islamicism.

Chomsky has always been sharp tongued about most anything. I remember in the '80s various Stalinist sects would get upset with him for calling the USSR and Cuba police state dungeons. He's always hated Leninists and giving a pass to Islamicism is also totally against his character.

Here's a non-US target he went after. A publisher in Turkey printed a translation of one of his books where he made reference to the Armenian genocide, which is illegal to do there. The publisher was on trial for treason or something ghastly. Chomsky flew into Turkey, showed up at the trial and asked to be added to the indictment. All charges were dropped. Class act.

BTW, in the Youtube display another clip came up where he calls Harris and Hitchens "religious fanatics" because they worship the religion of the state, the most dangerous one of all. Sloppy use of the term "religion" I should think, but he has a point. Damn he's getting old, and even more crotchedy.

Oh wait, I'm supposed to say where I stand on this. Since the Vietnam era, when Chomsky's political views were established, there's been a significant change in the historical profession. Much more emphasis is given to local factors and the agency (as opposed to mere victimhood) of Third World actors. That is a change for the better. I've also always had difficulty with some of Chomsky's word choices. He'll be relentlessly empirical one moment, then rattle off something like Harris/Hitchens being religious fanatics. It can be jarring. I'm left wondering if that's supposed to be taken as fact, or a denunciation appropriate to the villains, or what.

The single most important and ever-present theme in the Noamster's political writing is that the intellectual class perverts the portrait of reality as a service to power. I consider that a towering contribution. And unchallengeable. Above my computer is a Killdozer album cover entitled "Intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite." He signed it for me.

Wait. You made a generalization (New Atheists are bad at historical nuance). You posited a cause for that generalization (New Atheists are bad at historical nuance because of their background in the hard sciences). We have shown that the example you gave for your generalization (the article in Salon) didn't actually do what you claimed. You have now provided another example: some of Sam Harris's statements in The End of Faith (which I have no problem admitting are stupid and ignorant). However, that single example is not sufficient to show that your generalization is correct.

As for your causal claim, I pointed out that the most fervent supporter of the Iraq War was the one least associated with science, whereas Dawkins, the most prominent scientist of the bunch, was very publicly opposed to the war. So I'm not seeing much support for your causal claim either...

I clarified several times that I did not mean causal. Sorry if it was not clear enough the first time. What I wrote:

The word "appreciation" does not suggest a causal mechanism, though it all could have been clearer.

Re: sample size. The top five writers in question pretty much define the movement's views. Until that changes, describing their views describes the New Atheist trend, and people who don't share their key beliefs are not NA.

For me, a key distinguishing mark is their misguided belief that deity-free rationalism is less likely to get suckered into organized violence. Hitch&Harris themselves show the contrary, for they sanction luring kids into the Marines and cheerfully write about wiping the spit off the Pied Piper's whistle for him.

Yes, I've been lumping these guys and providing details of only a couple. That gives you an opportunity to prove me wrong. Assemble some quotes. Show they recognize that atheists are just as susceptible to militarist ideas. Or, join 'em and prove theists buy it more. We'll dual with or examples.

Dawkins opposed the war -- well that speaks well of him. But do you dispute that the main message of the NA is that theism is extra irrational and doubly prone to following the bloody shirt?

For the record, I'm not a fan of the "religion poisons everything" argument either (and that's an exact quote from Hitchens). It's not true, and it's not really the point of critiques of religion (which have more to do with the implausibility of and lack of evidence for religious claims).

The reality is, if you go to the soup kitchens on Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles, most of them are operated by religious people who are doing their best to follow what they perceive to be Jesus' example and teachings. And those people are just as much a part of religion's track record as the Crusades are.

Religion's just a social institution, and like any other social institution, it can be wielded for good or for ill. That's not the problem with religion.

(Indeed, one of the big problems with religion is NOT that people are so devout that they do evil things (the Hitchens thesis) but rather that people are actually very selective and ignore whatever teachings ask them to make a sacrifice or adhere to rules they don't want to adhere to. Compare, for instance, the record of American Mormons (who tend to be very devout) with respect to charitable acts that help the poor with the record of American self-identified Christians on the same issue. In some ways, a world in which people actually believed in the religious doctrines they pretend to believe in would be a much kinder, more just world. And that fact alone refutes "religion poisons everything".)