Religion, irreligion, atheism, secularism and failure to communicate

[methodius]

There was a discussion on Christopher Hitchens on the journal of poliphilo , one of one of my LJ friends, the other day. Christopher Hitchens is one of the "new atheists", who, along with others like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, are the atheist equivalent of Christian Fundamentalists like Fred Phelps, a kind of atheist Taliban.

I followed it with only

Comments

[martiancyclist]

Hoxha was an interesting case, in that Albanian nationalism has been tied to militant secularism from the beginning. He was going only a little farther than King Zog was willing to go. Not that that invalidates your point; I've just been reading about Albanian history recently.

[djproject]

this "oxygen out of the room" idea is why i don't take dawkins, hitchens, harris seriously and particularly the idea of "no religion = no problems." and i really don't take it seriously when they - and dawkins in particular - start talking about evolution in a way that can be construed as a secularist dogma* and yet still religion for holding on "unverifiable ideas

[ibid]

I tend to blame human nature for all of the above things. One may remove the clothing of religion and put on the clothes of secularism but the human body remains the same. Intolerance will exist everywhere it may.

Human nature

[methodius]

Ibid, I agree.

There is a human tendency to blame them for all the evils in the world. Of course we would never do things like that, would we.

I've just been reading another blog post which blames it all on left-wing political ideology. Perhaps someone will do a scientific survey with statistical analysis to show which particular pattern of thought was dominent in the groups with the highest comparative body count, but I don't think that would help any more than diagrams with cross-sections of the human body help the sex novince.

Re: Human nature

[ibid]

I think the biggest problem of the human race is surely the fact that everyone loves to feel beleagured and that so little effort is made to develop empathy.

problem

[inkjet]

the problem is, most of the religion we see in the news, which is all the religion most atheists know, really is a problem. That's the hardest thing to keep in mind-- when they're talking about "religion", they're not _quite_ talking about the same thing as you're talking about!

better than trying to show how they're wrong, would be to show that there's something else called "religion", and it isn't what they are talking about.

and that will be a tough sell!