Amazing!

[soul_harvester]

I'm no Patrick, but when I came across an article that makes sense in SMH, I felt moved to post about it here on my blag. If that weren't amazing enough in itself, it was penned by none other than Joe Hockey, someone I normally take a certain satisfaction from disagreeing with

Comments

[bastard_king]

It is, no doubt, a very lucid article. However, I think arguing for the "good parts" and the general subtlety of religious expression as a counterpoint to focusing on violent and prejudiced literalism is something any atheist who reads Dennett would be well versed in. It's also a moot point, and glosses over what both Dawkins and Hitchens actually say - which is that they have no problem at all getting along with milder types, love churches and traditions, and that they (Hitchens at least) believe belief will be with us forever no matter the advance of secularism. The dream is to eradicate all religion, but the realistic goal is to domesticate it, as we have Anglicanism

[soul_harvester]

Though Hitchens is motivated more out of neo-conservative racism than anti-theism, the other Amazing Atheists are very cavalier in their dismissal of "domesticated religion"...if they allow for it at all, which Dawkins doesn't at the very least, with his pointing the finger at moderates for doing nothing helpful in addition to sheltering and giving credence to the beliefs of extremists.

As a biologist, I can see why Dawkins spends so much time on the idiotic beliefs of the science-denying creationist movement, but their existence only stands to demonstrate that some people need a childish, idiotic filter through which they can be taught moral values. I could spout John Stuart Mill and John Locke to these remtards all day, the very founders of the liberal tradition Americans love so much, and they'd just look at me irritably.

Tell them a magical man in the sky said it, though, and suddenly they develop family values? I don't know what to think.

[bastard_king]

I completely disagree. It's Sam Harris that most forcefully makes the point about moderates "providing cover" for fundamentalists, which Dawkins has agreed with, but he has frequently made common cause with the Anglican Archbishop of England, who supports evolution, advocated Bible study (as Hitchens does), protecting churches for their architecture, and "grand old England" type Christian traditions. At the end of the day, Dawkins is a sentimental old man brought up in boarding schools and taught at Oxford, and he is thoroughly steeped and self-admittedly fond of of domesticated Christianity - Christianity which has simply faded into the completely benign, cultural traditions of his country.

[sweet_sweetback]

Harris is full of shit. His view is no better than the conservative caricature that ordinary, decent progressivism in the '60s and '70s was interchangeable with Baader-Meinhof and Weather Underground terrorism - or, worse, with Stalinism and Maoism. It's a brush that is still used to tar social democrats and democratic socialists now, decades later.

[bastard_king]

Again, I disagree. Pluralism and tolerance must be measured with the ability to recognise an enemy.
When Ayatollah Khomeini offered over a million dollars to anyone who would MURDER Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing The Satanic Verses, the response of (too) many western liberal intellectuals was essentially "serves you right, for angering the beast" They utterly capitulated any defense of free expression in the name of cultural sensitivity for utterly backwards behaviour. You know the story. I don't think it's caricature to say there is such a thing as being too liberal, about being too tolerant, that we may leave ourselves open to exploitation and coercion, and compromising our ideals to placate violent conquerers that have zero interest in reciprocating our kindness.
It's a fine line to tread to steer clear of both xenophobia and neo-conservatism, but we're playing out an extraordinarily large experiment in game theory every time progressives butt up against fundamentalists.

[soul_harvester]

I think you're painting a false dichotomy. Being every bit a frustrated, progressive atheistic pacifist as yourself, I've got no time for taking a limp-wristed response to any threat of violence, particularly in response to the exercise of free speech. I certainly don't begrudge Sam Harris his firm response to such extremism either.

But by writing entire best-selling books on the subject of how revolting extremists are, and how dangerous religion is, they're making a pretty clear statement. Any nods towards the acceptability of "tamed" religion are drowned out in the frenzy of lucid, eloquent fear-mongering (frequently warranted though it may be) that religion is the cause of all our ills up to climate change.

[bastard_king]

But you saw how Hitchens faltered at that talk in Sydney, when it came to dicsussing those completely benign spiritual traditions in Bali. He couldn't link it back to his thesis, that religion poisons everything. It's clear that's there's a breakdown in the definition of terms at some point - religion can only define so many different forms of spiritual expression. I think they would argue they'd like to see all religions regressed to benign mysticism if they couldn't be done away with entirely, and to non-evangelism, most of all.
I doubt this would satisfy Harris, who argues on a whole different scale, against unreason itself, but that's another post. :P

[soul_harvester]

I'd say the definitional confusion, rather than simply being present in the writings of these authors, is actually fostered by them. "Benign mysticism" is very plausibly what religion actually is, traditionally, and these more extreme variants you see now and then (the Crusades are a popular historical example) are a result of something else...like cultural conflicts, or more traditional causes of warfare like resource scarcity.

...but that's another post.

[sweet_sweetback]

Um, have you been reading Jonah Goldberg? :P

[bastard_king]

No! Come on man, this is serious business! Unregulated systems allow cheaters to prosper. It holds for the free market, and it applies to liberalism. I honestly don't see how it's neo-conservative looniness to say that the fundamental assertion of human rights should take precedence over accepting all cultures, ideas and beliefs - such that groups which are antagonistic to pluralism (and indeed, human rights) should be kept from exploiting our openness

[sweet_sweetback]

Sorry, that was a joke. I just couldn't understand what you were saying! To me, it sounded almost like you felt progressive thought was a natural ally of Islamic intolerance (the Liberal Fascism line). Or something. But no, it's not neo-conservative looniness to think those things (I, too, think them). Anyway, I apologise again for my previous comment and hereby retract it - nobody deserves that, even in jest.

What I was saying originally was that to think any religious view ('benign mysticism', say) somehow enables religious extremism is like thinking any meliorative liberal policy leads to gulags. The latter isn't true, and I don't think the former is either.

[bastard_king]

But the argument isn't that benign mysticism enables it or fosters it (otherwise domesticating beliefs wouldn't be an acceptable endgame, which I think it would be).
The basic argument of Sam Harris in the End of Faith (and I would add Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate) is that undisciplined liberal tolerance for all beliefs provides cover for extreme forms of belief and benign forms alike, AND undermines respect for empiricism and science while it's at it - it's just another "narrative". The argument is not that ancestor worship or feast days inevitably mutate into suicide bombings - it's entirely about how we organise ourselves to accomodate diverse beliefs, and the unfortunate left-wing intellectuals produced by todays social science curricula, who can only gibber about moral relativism and social constructs, which a) leaves many logically unable to condemn true barbarism when they see it, and b) leaves liberalism a vulnerable target for scorn by social conservatives who point to these dizzy freaking art majors and say "look at how

[soul_harvester]

I don't want to interrupt here, but messages like "for good men to do evil things, it takes religion" and "if someone can make you believe the absurd, they can make you do the atrocious" can be (mis)construed as being along the lines of ancestor worship being the first step on a slippery slope to suicide bombings. This is the kind of alarmism I'm referring to elsewhere.

...I just want to make it clear that I'm not a fucking moral relativist.

[bastard_king]

WELL, I guess.. maybe.. if left alone, maybe not suicide bombings, but witch hunts and accusations of penis theft.
I guess I should add a bunch of conditionals. I think that if you kept a bunch of diverse religious traditions operating in the same space, and bar them from discriminating against each other, preclude them from interfering with the state, teach kids about all of them, and ratchet them all down to basically being quaint, dumb lil' absurdities like believing in ghost channeling or tarot cards, or praying towards Mecca, or eating cookies that represent their personal Saviour, and otherwise leaving everyone else alone, THEN I think that would be a satisfactory endgame, because I think it would lead to them all evaporating peacefully.

Obviously that's a lot of conditionals.. :P

[soul_harvester]

I'm starting to lean towards a far more broad definition of religion than what is currently used, I'm finding. "Taking it back," as it were. Rather than thinking of religion in terms of dogma, I try to think of it in terms of emotional response, transcendental feelings, awe, feelings of...I dunno, spiritual oneness or some crap.

Because I have these feelings, but I don't get them in churches or anything like that...I get them from cosmology, I get them from a crowd chanting in unison, I get them from really badass video game characters. The feelings don't seem so different to me from those described by religious traditionalists, except perhaps I don't take them nearly so seriously...but the same could be said of just about anything in my day-to-day life.

I'm not willing to surrender these sensations to being indicative of whacky, dead-worshiping, science-denying dogmatic mysticality. The kind of religion that demands belief, or worse worship, in the obviously false is not the definition of how religion "should" be, it's just how one

[bastard_king]

I don't know why you would try and apply the word religion to basically any and all transcendental or spiritual experiences, when there are other words available (like.. those). Religion specifically involves organised systems of belief