3 posts tagged “atheism”

I found this interesting article on National Review, and thought I'd share it.  I enjoy the fact that Islam is still being preserved from criticism, even much deserved criticism.  It seems that no progress has been made since the riots following the pope's call to reason at Regensburg. 
Threaten enough people and I guess you get your way.  Perhaps when Christians begin to cut off the heads of their detractors they will be afforded the same deference.  I doubt that very much, for it often seems that anti-Christian sentiment is the last acceptable bigotry.  Is it because we are "the Establishment" religion?  Perhaps so.  Europeans are increasingly godless and it has ever been the fashion of the American societal elite to ape Europe.   Give him enough time, and the common man begins to ape the ape in a bid for the appearance of sophistication. 
The other week I had the occasion to attempt a dialogue with another Voxer who had made it very clear that she didn't like my particular religion.  She trotted out the usual litany of abuses committed by my Church over the years, but focused primarily on the sexual abuse scandal among the clergy.  When I offered a counterpoint to her views, I was unfortunately met with "The Wall."  That is, the "this is my personal view and I don't want to be criticized for it" wall.  Now, I would hope that anyone who reads my piddling excuse for a blog would understand my frustration.  Anything I post in public I understand to be open to criticism.  Especially if I post something critical to another person's beliefs.  Sometimes, I border on the insulting.  I'd hate to be labeled a troll, but there is a point at which letting an accusation or a misconception stand is tantamount to agreement.  So it seems I am constantly stepping on the toes of liberals, atheists, global warming nuts and even Protestants.
It's all quite frustrating, because at the end of the day the Internet just isn't real.  The victories I might win are easily ignored.  The points I make are suspect because the conversation begins with me as an intruder on a particular person's public space (which makes no sense to me...the Internet is hardly private).  So what is the point of it all?
Well, I still believe that we can carry our principles with us even when we are completely anonymous.  I feel that the anonymity allows us to engage in debate devoid of the usual obfuscations of personal pride and ego.  Rhetorical tactics can still be used to great effect, but the debate can be essentially neutral without lacking substance.
What we say on the Internet actually is real and it matters.  I still believe that relativism is the thing that will doom us to half-witted expressions of banal tolerance for even the worst sorts of offenses.   And so I suppose I am going to continue feeling awkward and unpopular amongst my many anonymous Internet acquaintances.
Whose commentary, as always, I welcome.

The Evolution of Religious Bigotry

Courage without consequence.

By Jonah Goldberg

I just watched Fitna, a 17-minute film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. 

Released on the Internet last week, Fitna juxtaposes verses from the Koran with images from the world of jihad. Heads cut off, bodies blown apart, gays executed, toddlers taught to denounce Jews as “apes and pigs,” protesters holding up signs reading “God Bless Hitler” and “Freedom go to Hell” — these are among the powerful images from Fitna, Arabic for “strife” or “ordeal.”

Predictably, various Muslim governments have condemned the film. Half the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands. Egypt’s grand imam threatened “severe” consequences if the Dutch didn’t ban the film.

Meanwhile, European and U.N. leaders are going through the usual theatrical hand-wringing, heaping anger on Wilders for sowing “hatred.”

Me? I keep thinking about Jesus fish.

During a 1991 visit to Istanbul, a buddy and I found ourselves in a small restaurant, drinking, dancing, and singing with a bunch of middle-class Turkish businessmen, mostly shop owners. It was a hilariously joyful evening, even though they spoke little English and we spoke considerably less Turkish.

At the end of the night, after imbibing unquantifiable quantities of raki, an ouzo-like Turkish liqueur, one of the men gave me a worn-out business card. On the back, he’d scribbled an image. It was little more than a curlicue, but he seemed intent on showing it to me (and nobody else). It was, I realized, a Jesus fish.

It was an eye-opening moment for me, though obviously trivial compared with the experiences of others. Here in this cosmopolitan and self-styled European city, this fellow felt the need to surreptitiously clue me in that he was a Christian just like me (or so he thought).

Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXΘΥΣ, which means fish and also is an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren’t alone.

In America, these fish appear mostly on cars. Recently, however, it seems Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these, too. The fish is “updated” with little feet on the bottom, and “IXΘΥΣ” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.”

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

But it’s the false bravado of the Darwin fish that grates the most. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap, to show courage without consequence.

Whatever the faults of Fitna, it ain’t no Darwin fish.

Wilders’ film could easily get him killed. It picks up the work of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a jihadi for criticizing Islam.

Fitna is provocative, but it has good reason to provoke. A cancer of violence, bigotry, and cruelty is metastasizing within the Islamic world.

It’s fine for Muslim moderates to say they aren’t part of the cancer; and that some have, in response to the film, is a positive sign. But more often, diagnosing or even observing this cancer — in film, book or cartoon — is dubbed “intolerant,” while calls for violence, censorship, and even murder are treated as understandable, if regrettable, expressions of anger.

It’s not that secular progressives support Muslim religious fanatics, it’s that they reserve their passion and scorn for religious Christians who are neither fanatical nor violent.

The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

So, here's an article on Atheism for my friendly Vox Atheist people.  And the ones I've pissed off too.

Christmas Atheists
God and men.

By Michael Novak

Over the last two weeks, leading American atheists have registered complaints about all the attention given to Christmas in the United States. These atheists have issued three challenges. First, they insist that being atheist does not mean being immoral. Second, they want other people to see that atheists are law-abiding, compassionate, and generous to others—that one does not have to be Christian or to feel “the Christmas spirit” to care for the poor and the needy. Third, they insist that monotheists have a harder time being tolerant of others than atheists do. Atheists, they think, are more humble, tolerant, and sweet-tempered; since monotheists think that they “have” the truth, and know God’s will, they are more stiff-minded.

In my own experience, though, many different belief systems are found among people who call themselves atheists. Here is just a small collection:

One. Those rationalists who believe in science, rationality, and truth, and who abhor relativism and nihilism, and who have very firm moral principles grounded in reason itself — but who see no evidence for the existence of God, neither for the theism of the ancient Greeks and Romans nor the personal God of Judaism and Christianity. They might wish that they could believe in God, but their intellectual conscience will not allow them to.

Two. Those relativists and nihilists who do believe, as Nietzsche warned, that the “death of God” has also meant the death of trust in reason and science and objective rules of morality. Such atheists, therefore, may for arbitrary reasons choose to live for their own pleasure, or for the joy of exercising brute power and will. This is the kind of moral nihilism that communist and fascist regimes depended upon, to justify the brutal use of power. It appears, also, to be the kind of atheism that Ayn Rand commended.

Three. Those who do not believe in the personal God who heeds prayers, and is concerned about the moral lives of individual human beings — the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Instead, some who call themselves atheists actually do recognize a principle of intelligent order and even awe-inspiring beauty in the natural world. They also believe in a kind of primordial energy or dynamic power, which pushes along, for example, evolution and the potentiality of human progress. They are at about the same stage in thinking about morality and metaphysics as the ancient Greeks.

Four. The “Methodist atheists” — those who maintain all the qualities of niceness and good moral habits and gentle feelings associated with the followers of Wesley down the generations, but do so without believing in God. In other words, they remain indebted to inherited Christian moral sentiments, even while they seldom or never darken church doors. They have come to think that believing in God is a little like believing in Santa Claus. They have outgrown the metaphysics, but not the ethics.

Five. The merely practical atheists — that is, those who by habit remain members of a religious faith, and who share a certain pietas regarding their family gods, and continue going to church according to the old routines, but whose daily behavior and speech show that they actually live as if God does not exist. Their religiousness is formal, routine, empty — or very nearly so. Indignantly, they may insist that they are not atheists, a term they probably associate with #2 above.

Six. Those like Friedrich von Hayek, who wished he could be religious but confessed that he seemed to have no “ear” for it, just as some people have no ear for music. He felt he was an atheist by defect.

Some years ago I read a book on atheism, by a devout atheist (if that is the right word), who had found to his surprise that a large majority of those Americans who call themselves atheists actually believe in some more-than-human power, force, intelligence in all things. This is a position not altogether unlike the ancients (and the moderns) described in #3 above. The ancients did not call such persons atheists, but held them to be theists, albeit under a vague and unclear sort of deity, but intelligent and powerful and drawing all things toward the good.

Richard Rorty, acclaimed at his recent death as America’s most famous public philosopher, sometimes called himself “a nihilist with a smile.” That is, he had rejected classical rationalism, such as that described in #1 above. He recognized that our minds do aspire to rationality. Yet we find that the world of our experience, when looked at “all the way down,” is undeniably chaotic, sometimes cruel, and most of all meaningless. The world has no rational foundations. It just is. A bit of a “tale told by an idiot.”

On the other hand, in his ethical commitments Rorty never could shake the Christian dreams of his forebears. Not so long before his death he spoke of his hazy vision of the future and his sense of the holy. “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that someday my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” Thus, Rorty is a prime example of #4 above; except that his utopia is a bit rosier than the evidence for Original Sin will allow most Christians to indulge in.

In any case, there seems to be a high proportion of atheists today whose lives are as nice and moral as Hallmark greeting cards. Some of them may dislike Christianity intensely. As the world goes, however, the ethical practices of a certain number of them — all the way up the scale from mere sentiments, to effective personal help to the poor, and to heroic self-sacrifice — are more in tune with Jewish/Christian ethics than with any other on this planet.

Thus, in answering the challenges put to Jews and Christians by atheists this season, we may concede that nonbelievers may well find in the law “written in their hearts” and recognizable by reason alone a quite decent moral code, and in ancient and modern moralists among pagans some good guidance for living rather good moral lives. Not, for the most part, saints, just good people; though among them, for sure, are some “secular saints,” of the kind observed by Albert Camus in his novel The Plague.

We may concede, even, that some atheists live better moral lives than some of those who attend Christian churches. Some of the latter may live “as if there is no God” to a greater degree than some atheists.

The only kind of atheist whose morals all of us have a right to suspect are those in #2 above: the nihilists. These are people who, as Samuel Adams wryly noted, have no first principles to prevent them from betraying their spouse — or their country. Whatever they need to do is their first principle. These are the ones of whom Dostoevsky wrote: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” G. K. Chesterton is often quoted as saying of such persons: “Those who say they do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe anything.” They seem especially prone to the latest cultural hoaxes, such as imminent global freezing (“nuclear winter”) or imminent global warming.

As for the charge that those who believe in one God, the Creator who fashioned the laws of nature (“the laws of nature and nature’s God”), find it more difficult than the atheist to be tolerant, three replies are available. The first is this: Have you ever measured on the Hatred Scale the way in which atheists speak disdainfully of “deluded” Christians and Jews? Tolerance? Many do not grant even the basic respect due all intelligent and responsible human individuals — the respect of dealing with an intellectual equal.

Second, the two regimes in our time that tried totally to control thought and conscience, and were the most intolerant in history, called themselves — and were — atheist regimes.

Third, those humans who can see that some things belong to Caesar, and some to God, have an iron-sided reason to resist the tyranny of the State, on one hand, and to resist the overweening ambitions of any priestly caste, on the other. Also, seeing clearly the infinity of God’s wisdom and the puniness of their own, Jews and Christians have every reason to be humble of mind, and respectful of the truth in the mind of others, since all humans are made in the image of God, each a partial refraction of his infinite wisdom. As Reinhold Niebuhr counseled Christians: Recall that in your own truth there is always some error, and in the errors of your current opponents, some truth. Each believing Jew and Christian has solid religious grounds for being respectful of the truths uttered by others, and humble about the degree of knowledge each of them has so far attained. No one of us “has” the truth. All of us, with very limited minds indeed, are held accountable under its infinite light.

The Christmas season is a good time, then, for atheists and believers alike to meditate upon their own limitations, and to listen more respectfully to one another; each has something to learn from the other. It is a suitable time for this, because the greeting of Christmas peace was intended for all who faithfully seek the good, as best their conscience shows it to them.

Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis: Peace on earth to all humans of good will!

— Michael Novak’s new book, tentatively entitled No One Sees God, will be published by Doubleday in 2008.

So here's an article.  Notice the difference in eyebrow shapes.  Methinks Christopher Hitchens waxes.

I think Christopher is right about Iraq, but Peter is right about Christopher and most of what he's writing about.  And Peter seems to have a consistent opposition to violence even if he does fail to realize that our Muslim enemies care little for his views.  That's where Christopher scores points about faith...radical Islam is a faith that needs to stop existing.  But remove the Christian sensibilities from C. Hitchens' worldview and it becomes difficult to rationalize being a good person for its own sake.  P. Hitchens and C. Hitchens should write themselves a book together in which they argue bitterly...I would read it.

Also, the article is a good example of how the terms "left" and "right" mean different things across the pond.