Greg R

I’m here to understand, not to argue. If I wanted that, I’d hang out at uncommon descent and rightly call them a bunch of lying, ignorant jerks. But that doesn’t actually accomplish anything. And this is one of the few blogs relating to religion one way or another that doesn’t have an air of smugness about it. (Both the believers and the non-believers excell at this.)

That’s quite an image, greg! Maybe Michael can get the folks that made up an illustration caricaturing him leading his flock of “goats” to make up this illustration.

I never bothered to read the “new atheists” because they fail at logic. It takes me about five milliseconds to recognize someone who claims to be logical and can’t put together a logical argument. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are definitely this type. Reasonable, maybe, but not logical. Big difference. Especially if you want to be all black and white about things; only logic will cut it.

Russell, for instance, in Why I Am Not a Christian, “argues” against the Soviet counter-example that religion is a necessary ingredient in ideological oppression that the Soviet state was essentially religious in nature by virtue of being oppressive. That’s basically what he said. This is so circular that you’d have to be an idiot not to see it. And he designed a logical system that makes faith a priori impossible, even though it’s perfectly clear that unjustified (unverifiable) belief is logically neutral and in the world of logic, all maneuverings are either circular or ungrounded anyway. His rooting of logic in empiricism is simply a category mistake… logic is just a semiotic system and it can’t have any logical connection to anything… except logic. It’s a free-floating system of analysis, that’s it. The man wasn’t stupid, so why would he make these mistakes, I wonder?

Hume is awesome. There’s an atheist who had his game figured out.

Religion has enjoyed an unassailable status in culture for far too long. I just think these materialists (save Hume) are going about it the wrong way, and making errors and violences in the names of the airtight authorities of science and logic the same way we Christians have always proposed errors and violences in the name of the airtight authority of God. These are examples of projects that attempt a basically systematic and comprehensive understanding of reality. They embrace the Enlightenment and humanist projects. I do not; these projects have proved catastrophic failures (more on that in the following paragraph).

I think the best analyses of how power functions through language and ideology has to be found in the poststructuralists and the continental philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida… that crowd. These people are as stridently against the things Dawkins and company are, but they make a lot more sense and are more to the point and are a lot more fair. Read or reread them. They’ll take some getting used to, but are worth it. Again, I haven’t read a lot of Dawkins et al, but frankly, I don’t think I need to. The man is intelligent and articulate, but can’t argue. Read Nietzsche if you have to, but drink deep or taste not of that Pierian Spring because he has this tendency to seem much less difficult than he is. Read Klossowski’s book on Nietzsche.

There’s my atheist thought in a nutshell. I used to be one so I know what I’m talking about. And I thought all these forms and derivations of logical positivism / scientific materialism and Richard Dawkins were silly when I was an atheist. But anyway, there’s my stance. Not sayin’ it’s right or wrong, but I’ve thought it out and it’s my stance.

As to the ideals of atheism, I go by what I see many of the new crop of atheist bloggers setting out. And yes, they do invoke the notion of world peace and universal harmony as one beneficial effect of spreading atheism, which they seem to imagine as the best/only means of inculcating critical thinking, appreciation of logical reasoning, respect for the sciences and balanced behaviour.

There have been and will doubtless continue to be many and varied philosophical systems with those same goals. I rather fear that in your thought experiment of a world where a few hundred years had been spent presenting human rights and dignity as the prime goals, it would not look that much unlike our own. At least since the Enlightenment (going on for two hundred years by now), the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity have been held as the aims, and we’re as far or as near to them as ever we were.

An oath to the law above all – tildeb, you do not know how that appeals to me, how deeply that resonates with my inner Saruman

And when laws are passed by the secular government, binding on all citizens, and some citizens dare to break their oaths because they think those laws are unjust? Who decides which laws are just and which are not? We have had laws where it was legal to own slaves, or take the property and even lives of a designated group. Are we bound by our oath in those instances, or a higher law?

The implication that a religious view automatically implies denial of human dignity is one that I find offensive (tough for me if it’s true, no doubt you retort). But I’ll bat it back at you – what do we do with the concept of “living non-persons”? Entities recognised as life, even as human life, but not in possession of human rights because not recognised as persons under the law?

Does personhood, from which all of our rights flow, inhere in us as part of our humanity, and is therefore irrevocable and innate and inalienable, or is it something that is conferred and can therefore be revoked by society at large?

Which is the background for the ‘continual troubling’ above. How do I keep from becoming (almost literally) holier than thou relative to a good number of my brothers and sisters? How can I best begin to broach some of these opinions with those would currently consider them anathema? Should I be so presumptuous as to try to ‘educate’ my brothers and sisters? Am I being presumptuous in thinking that I might negatively affect their faith? Lots of other ankle-biters, but I hink you get the drift….