Review – Nathan Johnstone “The New Atheism: Myth and History”
Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion
Since 2015 I have been arguing on this blog that many anti-theistic and anti-religious activists often abuse and distort history while making their case against religion. Too many New Atheists use outdated, naive, over-simplified or simply plain wrong ideas about history in their arguments and claim to be “rational” while doing so. Now historian Nathan Johnstone has written an excellent monograph arguing precisely the same thing and drawing on a number of the same examples of New Atheist bad history.
Johnstone, a former history lecturer at Christ College Cambridge and the University of Portsmouth, begins his book by noting that while New Atheist polemicists bolster their case against the belief in God via a range of scientific and philosophical arguments, when they turn to making the case for the malevolence of religious belief, they rely heavily on history:
“[T]he focus of the God debate on scientific naturalism and justification for belief has overshadowed the fact that much of the New Atheist critique of religion is actually based in areas such as politics, sociology, …. cultural studies, education, criminology, literature and, of course, history” (p.3)
Johnstone notes that their emphasis on history in particular “is far from a secondary concern” for the New Atheists. Their objective is not to simply show that belief in God and the practice of religion is not well founded, irrational or even plain silly, but also to show that it is evil. For all their scientism, to do this they have to turn to history to show religious belief is not just malevolent now, but always has been.
Indeed, the general New Atheist view of religion is based on a framework that is “a literal battle of past and present” (p. 14). They see us in a historical context whereby we have escaped, or all but escaped, a horrible past but, as Hitchens puts it, “gnarled hands … reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjugation and abjection” (God is Not Great, p. 283). This perspective is founded on a broad and simplistic caricature of history:
New Atheists identify a counter tradition of virtuous scepticism that, originating in Antiquity, and barely surviving the Christian and Islamic supremacies, was ultimately to coalesce and flourish in the Enlightenment’s outright attack on superstition and in the unshackling of science. (p. 7)
Johnstone notes that the issue is not that no argument can be made that religion can and has been oppressive, violent and retardant or that an argument cannot be made that it is often or even necessarily so. The problem is that the New Atheists “are cavalier regarding the disciplines that seek to understand how these effects [of religion in history] occur” (p. 5). Far from seeking to understand history by putting aside their assumptions and presuppositions, they approach it with their conclusions already fixed in place and then cherry-pick the “evidence” they believe supports them. They are, as Johnstone puts it “hunter-gatherers” not “explorers”:
Their attitude is proprietorial, and the humanities are treated as a grab-bag from which to seize examples of the peculiar malefaction of believers.
(p. 7)
Counter-examples, context, an understanding of the complexity of the issues they touch on are either ignored, brushed aside or openly condemned as “revisionism” or even “apologism”. Most of this extended exercise in a priori motivated reasoning is predicated on an outdated pseudo historiography of value judgements and presentism, where anything in the past which seems (however superficially) to be like modern ideas is judged “good”, while anything that does not (or cannot be superficially painted as doing so) is condemned as “bad”. History, to them, is a long struggle of the things they deem “good” against the regression, retardation and suppression of religion. Anything that does not fit this caricature is ignored, dismissed or ruled out of court.
Of course, this is precisely the kind of motivated reasoning that the same polemicists rightly condemn in others – e.g. Creationists and conservative Christian apologists. When it comes to the sciences, they hold everyone to a high standard of evidentialism.
But respect for the importance of rationalism and empiricism cannot be demanded if we ourselves practice it only when it is convenient …. those who preach evidentalism, and presume superiority over others on that basis, forfeit the luxury of reading lightly.
(p. 6-7)
As Johnstone’s examples go on to show, the New Atheists he holds to account can barely even be accused of reading history lightly – many of them seem to have barely read any at all. Indeed, most of them work from popular cliches, non-specialist overviews and the occasional work of skewed polemic that fits their views, however dated, dusty, amateur or undistinguished. When you start with your conclusion, actual deep understanding really does not matter. Nuance and context just get in the way of the onrush of dogmatic conviction:
The New Atheism actively eschews “relativist” attempts to understand the development of fundamentalism and religious violence as manifesting in specific political climates, arguing that to do so distracts attention from the dominant role played by religion itself. Destructiveness is not one characteristic that might emerge under certain conditions; it is religion’s innate and unchanging nature; artificially contained at such times it is deprived of power.
(p. 15)
All of this is based on a series of unexamined assumptions and an understanding of the history of religion in society that is, at the very least, 70 years out of date. Modern historians rely on that very so-called “relativism” and contextualisation that New Atheists so vigorously reject for ideological reasons. The more we examine histories of religion using the tools of modern historiography, the less valid the New Atheists’ bedrock assumptions prove to be. But they do not care about this. They accept their assumptions with a dogmatism and deep faith that would put any Creationist to shame.
New Atheism’s Black Legends
New Atheist authors rarely even bother to argue any point of history in detail. To them, this is unnecessary – they need only gesture to the historical evidence that is in the common understanding of their readers. As Johnstone puts it, they “are not levelling an accusation so much as calling on their readers to remember a conviction” (p. 21). Since none of the leading New Atheists is trained in history and exhibit little to no genuine interest in it beyond utilising it for polemical purposes, they assume their popular understanding of it to be serviceable enough for their purposes and assume (probably correctly) that their readers will have the same understanding.
So on topics like the Witch Craze or the Inquisition they feel no need to actually make the case that these complex historical phenomena conform to and undergird their arguments, they just assume they do. After all, what could be more clearly evidence that religious irrationality leads to violence and murder than the Witch Craze: a religious frenzy in which many thousands died for a crime that did not and could not exist? Johnstone quotes several leading New Atheists as they drive home this point:
“To be accused of demonic possession or contact with the Evil One was to be convicted.” (Christopher Hitchens)
“In the 1400s the Inquisition changed its focus [from heresy] to witchcraft and thousands of women were tortured into confessing and then burned or hanged.” (Victor Stenger)
“Witch hysteria raged for three centuries with estimates of the number executed ranging from a hundred thousand to two million.” (Victor Stenger again)
These and other references to the Witch Craze sound as though they support the argument that unfettered religion leads to such atrocities without bothering to ensure that their details are correct. Except, in fact, they are not:
[The] anti-religionists seem unconcerned to check whether their understanding is accurate. Contra Hitchens, no-one was accused of being diabolically possessed for the simple reason that possession was not a crime but a diagnosis. And only in the ‘superhunts’ that for a few decades afflicted a handful of areas in the Holy Roman Empire, may something like the equation of suspicion with conviction have existed. Contra Stenger, the Inquisitions killed very few witches and no serious historian now believes the number of executions for witchcraft exceeded 50,000.
(p. 21)
Again, not only do these champions of checking your facts not bother to check their facts, but that nuance, contextualisation and so-called “relativism” that they tend to reject undermines their simplistic story. In his book The Meaning of Things (2001), A.C Grayling tries to use history to argue that religion is always potentially murderous while science must be “perverted” by “politics and politicians” to become destructive (Grayling, pp. 116-17). So he turns to the fate of Urbain Grandier, who was burned as a witch in 1634.
Grandier’s story has been popularised by the 1952 Aldous Huxley novel The Devils of Loudun and by the gloriously silly 1971 Ken Russell film The Devils. He was a smart and charismatic priest who was probably sexually promiscuous. He also had a penchant for annoying prominent people, and had written a critique of clerical celibacy and a satire of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of France. In 1630 a number of nuns of the local Ursuline convent began to exhibit hysterical behaviour and, when investigated, accused Grandier of sending a demon to possess them. But when these claims were investigated by the rather sceptical Bishop of Poitiers and the Archbishop of Bordeaux, they were found to be fanciful and dismissed.
However, further public defiance of Cardinal Richelieu by Grandier brought the claims back to attention in 1633. This time it was the Cardinal who ordered re-examination of the case and a bizarre show trial ensued, where the “demons” themselves gave evidence in court (via the “possessed” nuns), public exorcisms were performed, Grandier was tortured and a pact with Satan – written in backwards Latin and signed by the priest and, allegedly, several demons – was dramatically produced. On the strength of this circus, Grandier was convicted and burned.
For any modern, looked at from a safe distance, this is a deliciously bizarre and macabre story, complete with sex, demonism and death – thus all the attention from Dumas, Huxley and Russell. But as a proof of Grayling’s argument it fails totally. As Johnstone notes, “rather than an exposé of faith, Grayling has given us a story of political intrigue” (p. 22). Far from being met with bloodthirsty credulity, the original claims were sceptically examined and dismissed by the religious authorities. It was only when Richelieu saw the accusations as a way to take political revenge on a particularly “turbulent priest” that the affair turned deadly, and not even Grayling pretends that the cardinal was motivated by any genuine witch-hunting zeal. In fact, Grayling concludes “[to] read about the terrible fate of Urbain Grandier is to follow … a black story of intrigue, politics, malice, duplicity, credulity, suffering and madness”. The problem here is obvious – yes, this is indeed a story of politics and intrigue. So why does Grayling present it as evidence that religion is inherently violent while science requires, as he puts it, the external machinations of “intrigue, politics, malice [and] duplicity” to be so? Grayling seems oblivious to the fact that his own anecdote undermines his argument.
Johnstone observes wryly that “it is difficult not to suspect that for Grayling, any witchcraft narrative will do because he has predetermined, quite wrongly, that they will all speak to his conclusions” (p. 23). When subjected to just the slightest contextualised analysis, his story fails to deliver what he claims, but he is so convinced that it does he does not notice the failure.
Other New Atheist attempts to use the Witch Craze to bolster their arguments suffer from similar problems. Because the New Atheist approach to history is to cherry-pick at it for examples that fit their theses, they prefer easily digestible secondary sources and tend toward those which are generalist, written by non-historians and, usually, rather dated. After all, current scholarship by professional peer reviewed scholars working from primary documents tends not to give them the stuff they like. So when Sam Harris turns to the Witch Craze in his The End of Faith (2004), he draws mainly on Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) by the poet Charles Mackay and Religion and Science (1935) by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell, in turn, depends on William Lecky’s The Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (1878) and Andrew Dickson White’s notorious A History of the Warfare between Science and Theology (1897). Cutting edge, modern, objective scholarship of the topic this is not.
But these biased and dated books give Harris the kind of stuff he prefers. To make the New Atheists’ point, it is imperative that the Witch Craze be depicted as widespread, all pervasive and as deadly as possible. After all, if it was so common across all Christian Europe and led to large scale suffering and a massive death toll of obviously innocent people, this drives home the point that religion unfettered by reason and science is necessarily evil and genocidal. So New Atheists have joined neo-pagans, New Agers and some feminists in uncritically accepting the more fanciful estimates of the Witch Craze’s death toll. One figure still bandied about is the estimate by Gottfried Voigt (1740-1791), a German antiquarian who used a flawed methodology to arrive at the startlingly precise figure of 9,442,994 executions for witchcraft. Johnstone makes the dry observation that, based on modern techniques and over a century of exhaustive archival research, “[Voigt] was out by around 9,400,000” (p. 27).
But the New Atheists prefer sources that give very high estimates of the toll. One of Harris’ sources, Mackay, assures his reader that “thousands upon thousands” of victims were consigned to the flames and puts the rate of executions as high as “two per day”. His other main source, Russell, shakes his jowls over the “age of faith” in which he says “millions of unfortunate women [were] burnt as witches”. As already noted, Stenger settles on a wide range from 100,000 up to a whole two million victims, though on this he depends on James Haught’s lurid and amateurish Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness (1990) which in turn drew on secondary works, only one of which was published after 1973.
Harris, at least, has bothered to consult some modern scholarship and so notes the far more accurate estimate of “perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over three hundred years” (Harris, p. 87). This is taken from Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft
Of course, there is no denying that each of the 40-50,000 people executed underwent a terrible ordeal and clearly did die because of a delusion. But the problem with the much lower death toll is that it undermines the New Atheist argument that this phenomenon is clear evidence of what happens when religion is unrestricted in its power. If we accept an estimated population of Europe at around 100 million in 1600 and posit around 100,000 witch trials between 1560 and 1660, the likelihood of anyone having any direct knowledge of a trial, let alone falling victim to one, is minute. This is hardly indicative some wild craze seizing the whole of Christian Europe – it is more like evidence of a sporadic and fairly unusual phenomenon. Which leaves us with the question: if the source of the madness was late medieval and early modern religion generally, why was this phenomenon not far more common and widespread?
This problem is made more stark by the fact that instances of witch hunting were not uniform across Europe or across the time period of 1500 to 1700. On the contrary, Johnstone notes the trials and executions clump together in certain locations and periods:
The overwhelming majority of executions took place within the Holy Roman Empire. …. Of the 30,000-35,000 executions believed to have taken place between 1560 and 1660, 25,000-30,000 were inflicted [in the Empire], and only two major witch-hunting centres – Scotland and Denmark – lay outside is jurisdiction.
(p. 29-30)
France and the Empire had comparable populations, yet the latter had executed c. 30,000 “witches” by 1650, while the former had killed 500. And the executions are not spread evenly across the patchwork of 300 states that made up the Empire in this period – a handful of Imperial territories saw the “superhunts” that account for most of the Empire’s much larger death toll.
This means the New Atheists’ glib but simplistic picture of unfettered religion gone mad not only needs to account for why the executions were so sporadic, but also why they are concentrated in some places and times and not others. Actual historians have begun to do this using the very tools that the New Atheists so dislike: objective and dispassionate analysis, contextualisation and an examination of what local and particular factors (politics, economics, climate) meant the Craze flared in one place but not other or raged in one valley but left the next untouched – see Ronald Hutton’s excellent recent work The Witch: A History of Fear
Appropriating Atoms
As already noted, the New Atheist conception of history is based on an assumed narrative of two opposing views of the world: religiously based credulousness and naturalistic rationalism. Anyone who can be seen as or is depicted as championing the latter is held up as a hero of the story and as an ancestor of modern anti-religious secularists. Anything else, especially anything or anyone who opposed or differed from the narrative’s heroes, is depicted as the villains of the story and the historical precursors of modern fundamentalists, theocrats and and other “faithheads” (as Dawkins sometimes calls religious believers).
This is a neat story and it is a consistent framework into which pretty much any historical element can be jammed, with the application of sufficient rhetorical brute force. Johnstone notes that where a person fits into this tale is determined by a simple formula: the heroes are the ones who question and doubt while the villains are the ones who believe or impose belief. He notes that Hitchens draws on historian Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book Doubt: A History (2003), but that he uses it only as a mine from which to pick out various historical doubters and hold them up as champions and heroes in the New Atheist narrative. Hecht’s actual thesis, however, is that both doubt and belief are driven by the same “great schism” between human experience of “reason and plans, love and purpose” and the realisation that the universe seems quite empty of these qualities. A secular person may well have strong sympathy with the doubters’ response to this realisation – the striving to work out what this inhuman universe means for us. I certainly do and so, clearly, does Hecht herself and, I gather, Johnstone. But as an actual historian, Hecht is objective and clear-eyed enough to see both this response and its religious alternatives come from the same place and pays the non-secular processes of thought due respect as a valid and very human response. Hitchens and his cohorts do not.
One of the oddities of this rigid historical narrative is the way the New Atheists have to work so hard to make everyone and everything fit into it. This is achieved by a rigorous, steel-edged presentism, whereby often remote and disparate people and phenomena are either marshalled into the ranks of “Doubt” or consigned to the wickedness of “Belief”. Johnstone stresses in this “the role of hindsight in creating an impression of a constant philosophical rectitude”:
Those naturalistic aspects of historical rationalism and proto-science that appear most familiar to us are represented as fundamental and defining. Their similarities to modern scientific understandings are taken always to be prescient rather than coincidental.
(p. 123)
So we end up with an image of the Greeks and Romans as wise and rational, the medieval period as the epitome of a “dark age” mired in superstition and the “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” as stages in a long Whiggish struggle toward the sunlit uplands of modern secularism, constantly threatened by Hitchens’ “gnarled hands” of religious belief that want to drag us backwards.
This is a fairy story – a fantasy pseudo history that requires careful shaping of the historical elements out of which it is constructed to get the pieces to fit just so. This is why Giordano Bruno gets painted as a scientist or at least a rational free thinker, rather than as a mystic, magician and eccentric pantheist who waved aside empirical science as the work of mere “geometers”. It is also why Hypatia of Alexandria’s study of mathematics and astronomy gets emphasised, while the fact that it was a ancillary adjunct to her highly mystical and fundamentally theistic neo-Platonist cosmology is ignored. That way she too can be painted as a rationalist scientist, or even as an atheist, who was murdered by dirty, ignorant monks who hated her learning, when she was nothing of the sort and her murder was purely political. Similarly, the complex tangle that is the Galileo Affair gets reduced to a cartoonish caricature where Galileo is the defiant champion of a proven scientific consensus on heliocentrism and the Church opposes him out of pure wilful ignorance; refusing even to look through his telescope. New Atheists can only make history conform to their agenda by warping it.
The elements in history which look, superficially, a little like something we moderns recognise as scientific – parts of Bruno’s mystical cosmology, say, or Hypatia’s mathematical treatises and astronomical commentaries – are taken as sufficient to ram these figures and their ideas into the side of “Good” and to appropriate them for the simplistic narrative of “Thinkers” versus “Believers” in a centuries long conflict. As Johnstone details, the way some New Atheists depict atomism is illustrative.
In the fifth century BC, Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera argued for a universe made up of combinations of fundamental particles called “atoms” – literally “uncuttables”. These tiny particles and their aggregates account for all matter, these Greek philosophers argued, and everything can be accounted by reference to them. This certainly looks like what modern science has confirmed about the foundations of the universe and various New Atheist luminaries are thus suitably impressed:
Hitchens writes of ‘the mighty Democritus’ and of ‘the brilliant atomist school’; Victor Stenger of ‘the brilliant intuition’ and ‘the remarkable feat of human perception’; whilst for Michael Onfray the atomist revelation was ‘a stroke that never ceases to amaze’.
p. 127
The thing that enthrals these writers is not just the connection between ancient atomism and modern science, but the contrast between this “brilliant intuition” and religious thinking. Faced with an unknown and mysterious cosmos, theists imagined anthropomorphic gods and weird mysticism, while these clear-eyed rationalists intuited material systems based on logic. Given that it was the latter which came to be confirmed by science, what better evidence can there be of the superiority of rational doubt over superstitious mysticism? And given that the Church and other religions have historically rejected atomism, even persecuting its proponents as heretics, what better evidence of the historical wickedness of religion?
This last point is argued with particular enthusiasm by several New Atheist writers. For Hitchens, Christian thinkers rejected atomism because they knew it “offered a far better explanation of the world than did religion” (Hitchens, p. 259). For Onfray, their rejection was simply because “the Church has always been wrong about everything: faced with an epistemological truth, it automatically persecutes the discoverer” (Onfray, In Defence of Atheism, p. 88). So atomism presents us, they argue, with a key historical example of rationalists arriving at a logical “epistemological truth”, religion rejecting it and persecuting the rationalists who keep this precious idea alive, only for it to be triumphantly validated by empirical science in the modern era. This is a neat little story, but it is a fairy tale.
This is because while ancient atomism bears some superficial resemblance to modern scientific ideas, this resemblance blurs considerably on closer examination. For the Greek atomists, the colour white is produced by smooth “shining” atoms, while black is the result of rough atoms that “cast shadows”. Very small, fine “soul atoms” produce sensation and consciousness and the loss of them causes death, while breathing ingests them and so maintains life. It is very hard for a modern to find anything recognisable in these odd ideas. As Johnstone comments:
Those parts of ancient atomism that appear familiar to us are celebrated as prescient fundamentals. The remainder are relegated to the status of the status of the theory’s disposable ephemera …. When an ancient philosophy is described only in terms of what it got right, it will appear to have been uncommonly right. And when that philosophy is taken to exemplify a certain perennial mindset, that mindset will appear uncommonly insightful.
p. 133
Just as they cherry pick historical anecdotes that seem to fit their theses, these New Atheists select the aspects of ancient atomism that look superficially most scientific and pretend the rest – spiky atoms that cause the taste of bitter foods, for example – somehow are not important. Johnstone quotes the scientist (and atheist) Peter Atkins’ rather shrewd observation:
‘The Greeks thought a great deal about matter and proposed so many different hypotheses about its nature that at least one of them was likely to be right.’
p. 136
Very true, especially if its “rightness” is enhanced by emphasising the elements that actually are right (more or less) while ignoring all the many parts that are wrong. The fact is that the atomists’ ideas were no more scientific or even logical than Miletus and Thales’ conception that everything was actually made of water, Anaximander’s ultimate creative principle of apeiron, Anaximenes’ idea that air was the fundamental element of all things, Heraclitus’ belief that fire was the creative basis of the cosmos, or Empedocles’ combination of the elements (fire, water, air and earth) that came to dominate Aristotelian and therefore medieval and early modern cosmology. To hold up atomism, shorn of its weirder aspects, and claim it represents an “epistemological truth” that was somehow different to all these other Greek speculations is, as Johnstone notes, merely “an illusion of hindsight” – a contrived exercise in ideologically-motivated presentism that ignores context, and shrugs off relevant but inconvenient details. Which is pretty much a summary of the whole New Atheist approach to history.
The Historical Innocence of Atheism
Christian apologists and other critics of atheism often try to turn the historical tables on atheists by noting that, in the twentieth century in particular, atheism proved itself as bloodstained as any religion. Notorious conservative commentator and apologist Dinesh D’Souza is typical:
Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.
(“Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history”, The Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2006)
This is typically overblown rhetoric and tries to attribute atrocities that had many intersecting motivations to “atheism” and to lump the distinctly non-atheist regime of the Nazis in with the atheistic ideology of Marxist regimes. But there is a kernel of a genuine issue here for the New Atheists: if atheism can be as capable of inspiring mass murder as any other idea, then their claim that religious ideas are uniquely or particularly malevolent loses its force. Johnstone notes their various lines of defence against this problem. Dawkins tries to brush the issue aside, arguing “individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism” (The God Delusion, p. 315). In a similar line of argument, Keith Parsons notes that atheism is, by its nature, not an ideology but the absence of one, saying “atheism …. just does not have sufficient content to constitute a worldview” (“Atheism – Twilight or Dawn” in R.B. Stewart, ed., The Future of Atheism, 2008, p. 55). Sam Harris tries the tack of arguing that atheism at its essence an antidote to dogma, prejudice and absolutism so any atheists who indulge in these things are, ipso facto, no longer acting as atheists. So he claims the regimes people like D’Souza use to attack atheism are ones that became “cultic and delusional” and so effectively religions by another name (see The End of Faith, p. 79, 231). Hitchens makes this argument at greatest length in Chapter 17 of God is Not Great:
Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture . . . none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms.
(p. 84)
None of these arguments work particularly well. Harris’ argument is little more than an example of the No True Scotsman Fallacy by trying to redefine “true” atheists as ones who do not do murderous things in the name of atheism. This is not convincing when Christians try to do the same thing to brush aside the Inquisition or the Crusades, so it is equally ineffective when the boot is on the other foot. Hitchens, in typical style, uses many eloquent words to try to redefine Soviet Marxist Leninism as a religion and so dodge the implications of its murders, but this is just smoke and mirrors. Whatever outward trappings and superficial similarities Stalin’s ideology may have with some forms of religion, it was inherently atheistic and, at several key points, overtly and murderously anti-religious. The argument that atheism per se is not an ideology so cannot be blamed for anything done by an actual ideology is cute, but disingenous. As Johnstone notes:
But politically, sociologically, culturally, even biologically, atheism is no longer an answer but a question. If there is no God, why has mankind been so disposed to believe in one? …. How far are we obligated to reshape our cultures in line with scientific naturalism, and is continued supernaturalism now a barrier to human well-being?
(p.179)
To pretend that Soviet Marxist Leninism having atheism as a core tenet did not mean that it therefore proposed answers to this and related questions is being wilfully blind. And to pretend that, especially at certain points, it did not decide to enforce that tenet and its attendant ideological answers to these questions by force is being wilfully ignorant of history.
Of course, D’Souza and his ilk are trying to argue that there is something inherently immoral in an ideology that had no room for God. This is simply an extension of the apologist argument from morality, that assumes no true ethical system is possible unless it is based on objective absolutes mandated by a divine power – which is a dubious proposition, as any undergraduate moral philosophy student could explain to D’Souza (not that he would listen). But while it is hard to blame the totality of Soviet Marxist Leninism’s millions of murders on the supposed inherent wickedness of Godlessness, it is impossible for the New Atheists to dodge the fact that at least some of this murderous oppression was based on atheism as a central idea in the ideology.
Marxism grew out of a radical tradition in Europe that had always been inclined toward atheistic materialism. Lenin and Trotsky were atheists and enshrined atheism in the ideology of the new Soviet state, but thinking on how this should be practically applied in a political program differed among the early ideologues and Soviet policy towards religions shifted and changed over time. Some Communist thinkers believed that religion would inevitably wither naturally in the face of the inexorable historical process that was Dialectical Materialism, and so the congregations of churches and mosques should be left to dwindle as the benefits of Marxism become clear. Others thought this process needed a helping hand from the state in the form of propaganda, legal restrictions, financial constraints and, eventually (because the expected dwindling did not seem to be happening) via persecutions.
In two periods in particular – initially during the Civil War and then with more organised intensity from 1922-1941 – the Soviet regime confiscated and destroyed churches and other places of worship, seized money and valuables for the state and harassed, arrested, imprisoned, exiled, tortured and killed thousands of clergy and other believers purely because of their opposition to Soviet anti-religious policies. Religious festivals were banned and private observance of them brought official scrutiny and possible persecution. Outspoken critics of atheist ideology were targeted, usually on trumped up charges of “counter-revolutionary activity”, and were imprisoned, sent to gulags, executed or simply disappeared. The Soyuz voinstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov or “League of the Militant Godless” was established as an official arm of the Communist Party in 1925 and by 1941 it had 3.5 million members, 95,000 offices. It published a national newspaper, a monthly magazine and hundreds of books and pamphlets, as well as lecturing in schools and at Komsomol youth meetings. Its members also took part in tearing down religious icons, smashing church bells and exposing religious opponents of the regimes policies to the authorities.
Stalin reigned in the anti-religious campaign in 1941, when he realised firstly that it was not working and secondly that religion could be harnessed in the existential struggle that was the war with Nazi Germany. New Atheists like Hitchens like to skip over the inconvenient pre-War campaigns to impose atheism by force and highlight Stalin’s wartime co-opting of the Orthodox Church as “proof” that the Soviet regime was not actually anti-religious at all – yet another example of convenient New Atheist cherry picking history to make it fit their ideas. Johnstone makes it clear that this gambit and all the others used by the New Atheists fail to avoid the key problem: when an ideology that was based on atheism arose it not only proved as murderous as any religious regime, but actually did persecute and murder in the name of state-mandated atheism. Around the time Johnstone’s book was released, Wesleyan University historian Victoria Smolkin brought out A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism
As with the failure to show that the Witch Craze was purely religious in motivation and so different to non-religious ideological persecutions, the attempts to claim that the persecution of religions by the Soviets and other Communist regime had nothing much to do with atheism relies on some weak rhetorical gambits. The historical fact is that an ideology that had atheism at its core showed that it could be as murderous as any religious fanaticism.
Atheism and Anti-Religion
Atheism, per se, is not an ideology, but simply a position on the question of the existence of God or gods. Johnstone notes that we atheists have a wide variety of responses to religion, ranging from an accepting acknowledgement of it as a valid human response to the search for meaning to outright militant anti-religious zealotry of the kind manifested in the Soviet Union. But the more anti-religious end of this spectrum has both problems and dangers. Atheist philosopher Julian Baggini does not indulge in the semantic and rhetorical fiddling noted above and has stated clearly “what happened in Soviet Russia is one of the reasons why I personally dislike militant atheism” (quoted by Johnstone, p. 263). Of course, none of the New Atheists are advocating believers be sent to gulags or shot, but many of them make statements which indicate a disturbing combination of intolerance and overly dogmatic certitude.
Most New Atheist objectives are nebulous, fairly inchoate and, thus, seem generally benign. Atheists, they argue, should encourage rationality, foster science education and resist religious egregious intrusions into politics and education. But some of their language and lines of argument go further. Atheists must “destroy” faith, says Harris. The “enemy” of religion must be “cleared” from our collective minds, says Hitchens. Onfray looks forward to the dawn of a atheistic “new order”. And Peter Boghossian proposes how an army of trained “street epistemologists” must go forth to actively “intervene” with believers in everyday situations. Stenger waxes apocalyptic, warning this must happen “if humanity is to survive”. And Boghossian declares stridently that “atheists have a right and duty to attempt to de-faith others unsolicited.”
Grayling says that secularism should be welcomed by the religious, because it guarantees their freedom of worship. But Grayling’s secularism is simply there to give religion room to fail and die:
Grayling’s clear expectation is that, deprived of its financial power and cultural privileges, religion will simply become the reserve of the few most irrational …. It is difficult to read Grayling’s ideas without being reminded of the aspirations of the Bolsheviks.
(p. 266)
Of course, Grayling is no totalitarian and stresses that he will “fight hard to protect the right of the benighted to the stupidest beliefs”. But once your tolerance gains this level of reluctance, the temptation to be less tolerant grows. Boghossian’s street preachers are told they have the right, or even the obligation, to “intervene” with believers in the most mundane of circumstances: after overhearing a conversation in a coffee shop, for example, or taking a friend’s child to choir practice. And where does tolerance end if you can characterise religious belief as “an unclassified mental illness” (Boghossian) or religious education as actual “child abuse” (Dawkins; Grayling)?
The New Atheist distortion of history – both the history of religion and the history of anti-religious unbelief – warps the ideology of militant secularism. Johnstone concludes:
It is only by recognising the absolutist potential of certain forms of atheism that those who would wish to can work towards maximising its progressiveness. The past does indeed show us what atheism can be. Is is lesson worth learning and applying to ourselves.
(p. 279)
This is precisely what I have been arguing on this blog and elsewhere for around 15 years – if we are going to try to use history, we have to get it right and be honest about what it does and does not tell us. Johnstone is not the first to note the many problems with New Atheist history and historiography. The theologian David Bentley Hart skewers some of the more silly examples in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
109 thoughts on “Review – Nathan Johnstone “The New Atheism: Myth and History””
RE : Grandier ( Witches of Loudon)
the local context is quite interesting. Grandier was , I think( sorry, away from my French bookshelf at the moment) a vicar / canon appointed to Loudon by the religious regional authority centred in Chinon. His dislike and criticism of Cardinal Richelieu was particularly provocative, as Chinon would have been the controlling centre for the redeveloped ‘ town’ of Richelieu, the Cardinal’s enormous and expensive vanity project built on his family seat. ( aka hamlet). Loudon would have been the nearest market town (and far more important historically). So Grandier’s opposition and criticism would have been particularly resented by Richelieu. This particular witch hunt really was a local dispute more than a national hysteria.
The contemporary French sources also remark that Grandier was locally very unpopular in Chinon and Loudon for his relationships with married women and widows, and for ‘debauching virgins’.
As soon as Grandier was disposed of, the whole process was shut down. There was a small local attempt to keep the kettle boiling with fresh examples of ‘possession ‘, but the Archbishop shut them down instantly, declaring them to be ‘hysteria’. ( which of course means ‘ heightened emotional states linked to the womb’).
PS Oddly there is a tiny ruelle, around the back of St Estephe in Chinon, named after Urbain Grandier. I believe this was renamed from its earlier designation during the anti-clerical surge in the 1920’s.
Love this book.
“A.C Grayling tries to use history to argue that religion is always potentially murderous.”
Well, yes, that’s because religion is practiced by humans and humans belong to possibly the most murderous species ever. This is a typical case of mixing up correlation and causation. All power to the bonobos!
“what happens when religion is unrestricted in its power”
The peak of Witch Hystery overlaps with Renaissance and Reformation – the time these same New Atheists like to hail as the beginning of the triumph of rationalism over religion. During the Middle Ages (those dark times according to New Atheists), when christianity was supposed to have unrestricted power, the RCC overall opposed witch hunts.
“only two major witch-hunting centres – Scotland and Denmark – lay outside is jurisdiction”
No Geneve when Jean Calvin was in charge? This is relevant, because one prominent calvinist country, the Dutch Republic saw hardly any witch hunts. It thus confirms the conclusion.
Possibly I’ve written it before. These critics fail to grab the opportunity that’s right before their rational noses. Wherever and whenever such craze struck religion failed to protect the victims. This applies to many, if not most political views (I maintain that all organized religion is politics, hence Cardinal Richelieu’s behaviour does put the RCC in a bad light). Grayling and co fail to drive their point home, because they think religion is something special.
One of the first groups to stop the witchhunting craze was the Spanish inquisition ( unexpectedly, as was their wont )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_witch_trials
Some of the people most actively working against witchhunting today are christian missionaries ( though some of them seem keen to replace it with hunting homosexuals ). Witchhunting existed long before Christ, & was initially seen as one of the pagan practices that were to be abolished by Him – hence the RCC opposition, as you pointed out.
This, in some ways, make the period christian authority did actively support witchhunting all the more deplorable. They ought to have known better.
“atomists’ ideas were no more scientific or even logical”
Their analysis of a knife cutting through an apple was quite neat though. But if you admire this, like I do, you have to admire Augustinus’ of Hippo’s analysis of time even more. Confessions, Book 11 is more relevant to modern physics than anything the atomists wrote. Douze points pour le christianisme.
Oh – and the first ones to systematically record observations were Babylonian astronomers. They did so because they wanted to learn the will of their gods. As New Atheists never mention these facts my conclusion is that their criticism is nothing but propaganda.
“it was inherently atheistic and, at several key points, overtly and murderously anti-religious.”
This is not too convincing either. Many religions were at least at times overtly and murderously anti-all-other-religions as well. The point is the same here as I made above. Just like christianity failed at protecting victims of witch hunts atheism failed when believers (and other atheists – we should not forget that mensheviks and anarchists were the first victims of the Bolshevist regime) were prosecuted. And I’m not only talking about the unbelieving helpmates of Lenin and Stalin. I am especially thinking of the many admirers in Western-Europe during the 1920’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. George Orwell was an exception in the free world, not the rule.
The lesson should be that we should be scared of every single absolutist worldview, whether religious or not. Especially Harris (but he’s far from the only one) propagates the idea that religion is inherently violent (yeah, Franciscus of Assisi) while atheism is inherently peaceful. This is a form of cultural essentialism. It worries me a lot, because it’s a crucial step in dehumanizing other people and hence a necessary condition for atrocities like pogroms, witch hunts, the Gulag and the Killing Fields (good luck framing Pol Pot and Ieng Sary as religious) . As such Harris and co are obstacles on the road to a stable, peaceful, tolerant society, exactly because they take over features they criticize when believers have them. As always scepticism is worth nothing if not applied to yourself.
“This is not too convincing either.”
What? What exactly are you not “convinced” about?
“Many religions were at least at times overtly and murderously anti-all-other-religions as well.”
The difference, of course, is that Soviet militant atheism went murderously anti- one religion further.
How exactly does that make a difference for the victims?
I’ll look into reading this book! I loved reading Borden Painter’s book “The New Atheism Denial of History”, extremely informative! As someone who has studied religious policy, repression and persecution under the totalitarian regimes from 1789-present. And is currently conducting research about the mass executions of Buddhist Lamas in communist Mongolia under the Choibalsan tyranny in the 1930s, I most appreciated Painter’s tackling of the bad history many New Atheists spout about the violent anti-religion campaigns…
‘But once your tolerance gains this level of reluctance, the temptation to be less tolerant grows. Boghossian’s street preachers are told they have the right, or even the obligation, to “intervene” with believers in the most mundane of circumstances: after overhearing a conversation in a coffee shop, for example, or taking a friend’s child to choir practice. And where does tolerance end if you can characterise religious belief as “an unclassified mental illness” (Boghossian) or religious education as actual “child abuse” (Dawkins; Grayling)?’
I’m not gonna dispute the author’s argument concerning the new atheists; I’m much more interested with the author’s conclusions in terms of what atheists should or should not do. The implication of yours and the author’s words seems to me to be that atheists proselytising is inherently bad because they don’t just ‘not believe’, but rather wish religion to disappear, and that in turn means that intolerance, gulags and untold horrors are beyond the corner.
Personally I disagree that the only moral or ‘good’ position regarding religion is leaving it unchallenged. Religions *do* proselytise, religions *do* very often depict atheists, or members of other religions, as worse than what atheists at times depict religious people to be. Most of all, religions continously and viciously fight cultural and political and legal battles to control societies and push for their ‘values’. Doesn’t, then, believing that atheists don’t have the ‘right and duty’ to intervene with believers leave us with a big handicap compared to religious people, who have a tradition and practice of militant proselytism which dates back millennia?
And concerning the goals:
‘Grayling’s clear expectation is that, deprived of its financial power and cultural privileges, religion will simply become the reserve of the few most irrational …. It is difficult to read Grayling’s ideas without being reminded of the aspirations of the Bolsheviks’
What’s wrong in that? most religious people *do* certainly hope that, one day, atheism disappears and everyone can be ‘saved’. If that’s wrong of atheists, what about them?
I think it’s perfectly possible to desire, as I do, that religion is one day going to be extinct without having to be suspected of bolshevik intolerance or on a slippery slope towards gulags. In the same way christians, who would certainly wish for christianity to be universal and to trump any ‘falsehood’, don’t have to be considerered the same of the inquisition just because of this.
It’s the clear moral positions taken by the author which seem to make this book, while useful (although I don’t believe too much: new atheism is on decline by years, and we are witnessing a rebirth of religious intolerance even within the west; the obsessive focus on new atheists seem to be like kicking a dead horse), also a clearly partisan pamphlet.
Johsntone doesn’t say that. He simply notes, correctly, that the evidence of atheism’s recent history shows that there is a danger of dogmatically militant anti-theism leading to that kind of thing. And the first step in recognising this and guarding against it is to recognise that history, not deny it.
The problem with your comments above and with the New Atheist response to “religions” generally is that they are based on sweeping and simplistic generalisations about what religions do. For example:
Some traditions within some religions do this. Others fight for human rights, social justice and against poverty and environmental degradation. You can’t lump all “religions” together as fighting vicious “cultural and political and legal battles to control societies” and thus conclude atheists have a responsibility to counter “religions”. Plenty of ideologies, religious or otherwise, try to impose themselves on others, restrict the rights of others or threaten pluralist and liberal values. People who want to uphold those values certainly do have a right and responsiblity to protect them. But pretending that “religions” are uniform in threatening them or even more likely to do so is simplistic nonsense. That’s the problem with New Atheism’s incoherent activist agenda and the pseudo history it uses to prop it up.
Hitchslap is gone;
Behold the new O’Neillslap !!!
You should gather all your blogs into a Book; Christians (and not only) will buy it as one buys fresh bread on a Sunday morning !
(some Eastern European saying…:D…)
Honestly Tim O’Neill: think about it !
You will hit gold , big !
“The Five Great Myth –
a honest look…whatever…(?)”
have it translated in Russian as well, and you are set…
God Bless You / Live Long and Prosper
😀
Jacopo, the US is the most religious nation founded by anglo-saxons. Even here, the race most likely to identify as religious, Christian, protestant, and Muslim are black people. They are also the least likely to identify as atheist or conservative. Along similar lines, one of the most universally admired movements in favor of pluralism and the promise of liberal democracy was the Civil Rights movement in America during 50’s and 60’s. The Black Church played an enormous role in that movement. Painting Christians, atheists, Muslims, or frankly any belief system that encompasses a lot of people in different cultures, countries, and epochs with such a broad brush is going to lead to inaccurate views.
1) I have no interest in defending new atheists’ ‘bad history’, which makes, if anything, the anti-religious message less effective. What I’m disputing here is the author’s (and your) implication that *militant* anti religious activity is dangerous per se, or necessarily based on bad history. Personally, I have nothing but contempt for Christianity in most of its forms, and I have a strong antipathy even for the ‘better’ ones. That doesn’t mean I have to base my understanding of these phenomena on a twisted interpretation of history. I state it again: militant secularism can be perfectly well historically educated, respectful of others’ rights. The acknowledgment of this is what is missing from the article above.
2) sure, there are some christian groups (even some muslim ones) which reject the oppressive worldview we usually associate with these religions. The thing is, however, that even in the privileged anglo-saxon background of yours, these are a minority. It’s not as if on 100 religious groups worldwide there is an even representation of progressive and reactionary attitudes and philosophies. The main christian organization worldwide, the catholic church (which so many of your followers hold in such a high esteem because its not creationist) is overwhelmingly and outspokenly homophobic and holds other regressive attitudes even in progressive countries. There is Statistical evidence which proves that religious people even in developed countries tend to be more conservative than otherwise. In the rest of the world, Abrhamic religions in particular are bastions of repressive social norms.
Sure, the Catholics for example have a history of charity activity and helping who is in need. But at what price? the poisoned gift that comes with it is political and cultural allegiance to the religious message. There are certainly exceptions. But if you think that they are so many that any ‘general’ argument defending the decreased role of religion within society as a good thing must be flawed, then I believe you are fooling yourself. In general, I think that you are certainly underrating the dangers. The fact that you ridicule and quickly dismiss the notion of religious education as a form of child abuse, for example, proves that you could certainly read more about the subject.
3) Again concerning the overall goals of atheism. You seem to assume that proselytism against religion is inherently bad because it ignores the nuances of religion. I disagree with that point because I still think that, even after acknowledging that religious organisations and beliefs are diverse, they still represent an overall negative influence, and that a strong religious component in society, however diverse that is, will also mean that its most regressive parts could and will be a danger for everyone else. But regardless by my opinion on the subject, I wonder how can you sustain that Christianity and Islam (to name two), which are two proselytism based cults are not ‘bad’ because of said proselytism, while atheistic proselytism is bad *per se*. Or you aren’t saying that at all, and agree that aggressive atheist proselytism can be good if it doesn’t exmploy trite ‘bad history’ tropes? furthermore, if you disagree with new atheist proselytism because you don’t agree with its premises, do you also condemn christian and muslim proselytism because you are an atheist?
I don’t say or imply that and neither does Johnstone. “Can be potentially dangerous” does not equal “is dangerous per se”. In fact, it’s not even close.
So? Religion does not have an monopoly on conservatism, not all conservatives are religious and not all religious people or even all religious traditions are conservative. If your beef is with conservatism, then there’s your target – conservatism. Conflating that with “religion” is simplistic nonsense.
Bollocks. “Religion” is too broad and diverse for that kind of dimwitted generalisation.
What Boghossian describes as his army of street epistemologists is flat out harassment. Intervening and forcing yourself into random conversations on the street, subjecting religious people to “proselystic” targeting every time they utter their beliefs in a public setting, and the overall cultural message that you can’t practice your religion peacefully without dealing with some lousy street “epistemologist” is plainly oppressive. And analogizing this to religious proselytism is ridiculous. In our society, religious people don’t perpetually subject themselves into every conceivable conversation where something not equivocal to their beliefs is expressed. This is a hilarious false analogy fallacy.
That’s just plainly, outright false. I hold to no denomination of Christianity – I’ve never met an actually oppressive Christian in my life – and I know plenty of Christians (both liberal and conservative). If what you mean by “oppressive” is “respectfully disagrees with X lifestyle” (which seems to be your spat with the Roman Catholic Church), then this is truly a baseless concern.
I’m conservative myself. Got a problem with that?
Good Lord, this is certainly an amazing scare tactic. Spooky – “political and cultural allegiance” that seems to have done than most other groups at promoting global human rights, contributing to charitable causes, spreading education throughout the world (the current rise of universities in Africa is largely being fueled by the rapid rise of Christian universities, for example) – such scary allegiance.
Read what, precisely? Do you have any peer-reviewed evidence that shows the general direction of sociology leans towards the claim that religious education is harmful to children? Of course not, this is just reactionary fantasy.
1) if it’s not dangerous per se, do you agree that anti-religious militant proselytism can be perfectly informed on a historical level, respectful of everyone’s rights, and morally justified?
2) You can ignore the obvious and self evident correlations (the great majority of christian churches worldwide are reactionary, and that’s a fact) because of a few token exceptions. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to.
But that wasn’t my first point, I never presumed to convince you that religion is an overall negative influence (negative is relative anyway; you have nothing to lose from religious influence in society, unlike me, and rightfully give far less fucks than I do), my point was that if Christians and Muslims have the right to proselytise against atheism, why shouldn’t atheists against religion? if it’s just because you disagree with the premise of atheist proselytisim, and if you are an atheist you also disagree with the religious people’s premises, then do you condemn both in the same way?
3) Conservatism:
If, and it is a fact, there is a correlation between religion (especially Abrhamic ones) and conservatism, then how is a decreased influence of religion a bad thing if my goal is to counter conservatism? if attacking religion is a useful tool to counter conservatism, and the great majority of churches worldwide are indeed conservative, why should a few token exceptions prevent us from fighting a cultural battle which we deem absolutely necessary?
Apart from that, your ‘religion is diverse’ argument simply doesn’t apply to plenty of countries. I know that anglo-saxons are used to a society where religion seems all tame and nice, and the only bad guys are screaming maniacs from the southern US who shake snakes and read the bible literally. But anyone from a Catholic country can tell you that the Vatican is far more insidious in its apparently saner, reasonable influence. They don’t claim the earth is 6000 years old, but they will sabotage abortion rights, will prevent you from researching steam-cells, they will lobby to foster homophobia and make gay rights illegal, they will ban euthanasia.
Even if the problem was ‘conservatism’ rather than religion, the two don’t exist in a vacuum, and in countries such as mine, there is no difference between ‘the (Catholic) Church’ and ‘religion’. The average joe wouldn’t even understand the difference if he was explained it. Good luck fighting ‘conservatism’ but not religion, when the main champion of conservatism is the one religious institution existing in the country. The difference is academic, and that’s it.
Sure. And I’ve never said or implied otherwise. I have no interest in it, largely because I find most militant proselytism is ineffective and kind of irritating to most people, but if that’s what you want to do, go preach away. Just spare us any pseudo historical or pseudo philosophical bullshit.
They are not “a few token exceptions”. Even in the US, where political conservatism and evangelical Christianity are particularly entwined, there is a strong socially progressive Christian movement. They are just less noisy. In other countries, e.g. mine, the connection between Christianity and reactionary politics is even less pronounced. And you don’t just keep conflating “religion” with “conservative Christians”, you also keep conflating it with Christianity. Met many politically reactionary Buddhists lately?
See above. I’ve never said they shouldn’t. Nor does Johnstone say so.
Firstly, you’re vastly overstating that correlation. Secondly, if your target is reactionary conservatism then to smear all “religion” in attacking that target is misguided and smacks of mere bigotry. Which isn’t very rational.
And the Catholic Church is another example of how Christianity can and does encompasses a wide range of political views. I know – I grew up in that Church, remember.
No “luck” is required – just reason. I was chatting to two very nice Franciscan nuns at a climate change rally a few months ago. They seem to have no problem separating their “religion” from reactionary politics, even if you can’t manage it.
Given Tim’s complaint about “New Atheists” (whatever that means) not applying context to examples of religious persecution, it seems somewhat hypocritical to list a number of partial quotations of alleged intolerant statements from Harris, Dawkins etc.
It would be good to have given full quotes, or at least links to the full statements, so that the reader can judge how fair Tim’s characterisation of their sentiments is, and how recent/relevant the quote is.
The Dawkins quote about child abuse is notably misleading; it implies that he thinks teaching any religious values to children is abuse. However, it could actually be regarding a specific Catholic doctrine, about sinners going to hell. Or alternatively, it may refer to forcing religious labels on children without their consent, depending on which quote he meant. There are several that could fit the bill, including one about faith schools which offer only religious education. Either way, presenting it as a blanket statement – “Any religious education is child abuse” is pretty disingenuous and ignoring the context.
““New Atheists” (whatever that means)”
I make it perfectly clear what “that means” in my FAQ. You’re welcome.
Where do I do this? Or rather, where does Johnstone do this?
Wherever I quote any of the New Atheists I either give the citation from their works or the citation of where Johnstone does so. That’s how quoting and citation works in a peer-reviewed work like Johnstone’s. You seem to be implying that I (or Johnstone) are misrepresenting what these writers are saying. What is that based on? Examples please.
Johnstone goes over those quotes in detail and analyses them in context. He then notes that after several of these writers make claims that some forms, many forms or even all forms of religious education is “child abuse”, the alternatives that the New Atheists suggest are rather flaccid – so is it really “abuse” or is this just inflammatory rhetoric? He then argues that if it really is, as they claim, “child abuse” then they should be proposing the kind of measures we take in cases of actual child abuse, and shows how, when applied in the cases the New Atheists use as their examples, these measures would strike even most atheists as totalitarian. So why use that rhetoric? You can find his analysis on pp. 272-274. It is not misrepresenting anything and simply shows that this language is either exaggerated or inflammatory or – if taken to its logical conclusion – is apparently calling for oppressive interventions in people’s lives.
Just read your faq. Your definition of New Atheist basically boils down to “any Atheist who criticises any aspect of religion ever”. Was hoping for a more specific definition but oh well.
The quotes you do not source are in the Atheism and Anti-Religion section. Harris wants to “destroy” religion (in what context? Literally or figuratively?), Hitchens thinks religion is an “enemy” that needs to be “cleansed” (again, literally or is this just an analogy? What is the context here?). Without at least a full sentence and reference, it is just scaremongering and taking specific words out of context.
As for the Dawkins quote, it is your blog and not Johnstone’s. I expect you to source the statement directly. As for “if he really believes it is child abuse, why doesn’t he do something about it?” (paraphrasing, of course) – this is pretty logically in coherent. He has repeatedly spoken against faith schools in the UK, but has no power to actually change it as both major parties (for different reasons/religions) do not want to rock the boat by abolishing them. As an aside, refusing to allow your children to take part in LGBT acceptance lessons, as we’ve seen recently in Birmingham, is tantamount to child abuse in my eyes, especially as statistically, some of these children will themselves be LGBT. When dawkins criticises religious indoctrination as child abuse, he does so in regards to specific demonstrably harmful doctrines eg the doctrine of Hell and shaming and frightening children in that way, not in broad and general terms as you suggest.
Given how misleading your characterisation of Dawkins views on religious education is, you will have to forgive me for being sceptical that your unsourced single word “quotes” from Harris, Hitchens et al are fairly characterising their sentiments either.
More than happy to read well sourced, specific claims about how certain celebrity atheists use bad, poorly sourced history to support anti-religious arguments and perpetuate this bad information. Just not interested in a vague, mostly unsourced and demonstrably misleading rant about an imagined “New Atheist” ideology at the end that dismisses anyone who criticises any religious behaviour as an extreme anti-theist. But it’s your blog, I’ll read and enjoy the rigorous evidence based stuff and skip the bits when you get political in future.
Since when does “atheist who criticises any aspect of religion ever” mean the same as “anti-theistic atheist activist”?
Perhaps I’m misreading Tim, but his argument wasn’t “What’s Dawkins going to do about it?” It was “What should the punishment be for people who abuse children in such a fashion?” Those are fundamentally different questions. If Dawkins and pals do genuinely believe that those behaviors qualify as child abuse, they should advocate that we punish those behaviors as harshly as we do other forms of child abuse. If Dawkins and pals don’t believe there should be legal ramifications, it’s ridiculous to call that behavior child abuse, because child abuse is a heinous crime. If they do genuinely advocate that we punish them the same we do other child abusers, well, now we understand why Tim said it’s “calling for oppressive interventions in people’s lives.” Believing that a parent should have their child taken away-the normal procedure in child abuse cases-for teaching them that hell exists is absurd and quite authoritarian. On a personal note, I was frightened by the concept of hell as a child, but the fear I felt is not even remotely comparable to the fear a child who grows up in a truly abusive home experiences.
So, Me, what do you believe should be the punishment for parents who abuse children by teaching them about the conception of hell? How about parents who abuse children by teaching them not to accept LGBT?
You got a “more specific definition”. You just don’t have very good reading comprehension skills. As “FrankB” has already pointed out to you, there is a big difference between an “anti-theistic atheist activist” and “any atheist who criticises any aspect of religion ever”. I often criticise many aspects of religions. But I am not an “anti-theistic atheist activist”. So you’re not off to a flying start.
I know which quotes you’re referring to thanks. Johnstone gives citations for each of them. So your problem would be … ?
I’m reviewing Johnstone’ book and referring to quotes he uses. He cites all of them. So your problem would be … ? This pettifogging snivelling is getting tedious.
It’s only “incoherent” because your”paraphrasing” totally distorts what Johnstone has said. As “Saint Kyrillos” has already explained to you. The issue is not whether Dawkins has spoken against faith schools etc. The issue is whether these responses are commensurate with the overblown rhetoric. If Dawkins really saw religious teaching of children as the equivalent for child abuse then his actions should fit that rather extreme characterisation. But they don’t.
And I’m just not interested in your clumsy and stupid misreadings of things caused by a combination of your poor comprehension skills and your bad faith attempts at mischaracterising of what both Johnstone and I are saying. Go away.
To Jimmy:
1) First of all, contradicting people in public spaces doesn’t equal to harassment. Second, perhaps you have the privilege of not living in a country where religious people proselytise in an aggressive way. I didn’t have such luck. The Catholic Church in my country has a pervasive, invasive influence in people’s everyday life. Our *national* public tv is flooded with Catholic Church propaganda. Apart from countless personal interactions (since we are talking about anecdotal evidence, for what’s it’s worth), Priests knock my door yearly asking whether they can ‘bless my apartment’, for one. Nor they are the only ones. As I travelled abroad I’ve seen all sorts of preachers screaming in the streets, threatening hell for who disagrees, Jeowah’s witnesses at every fuckin’ corner. Mormons stopping me in the street to ask if I wanted to know about their religion.
2) again, your anecdotal evidence doesn’t match mine. But it doesn’t matter. Your ‘respectfully disagree’ is indeed homophobic and aggressive to me, especially when it means that people like you oppose my civil rights (like the Catholic Church does in my country). The same goes with abortion, eutnanasia, stem cells research, anti-homophobia laws, and gay marriage. If you just ‘disagree with me’ you are a bigot, but if you hamper my rights because of religious belief then yes, in my book you are oppressive. In yours, certainly not so. So what?
3) I wouldn’t have a problem with you being a conservative, or believing whathever in whathever delusional anthropomorphic deity you prefer if that did not harm me. But it does. That’s the problem.
4) Yes, it’s truly a scary allegiance. Catholic missionaires teach how to read and write… and also that condoms are dangerous, with the obvious harmful effects in Africa. They teach their nice cute prayers, and also that homosexuality is a sin and a ‘disordered tendency’ and that the world is menaced by ‘gender ideology’. Which in turn has nice cute consequences in the notoriously tolerance cultural climate of the countries the missionaries visit. Yeah, they can keep their posioned charity, which costs more than it gives. And that’s for the Catholics; other brands of missionaries and Christian lobbies do actively encourage homosexuality being punished with death in Africa. I’m sure they wouldn’t qualify as ‘oppressive christians’ in your book, either.
5) the only reactionary here is you. Even not including the grotesque american tradition of homeschooling, how can a gay youth not being emotionally scarred by being taught, as most christian schools do, that homosexuality is evil?
Jacopo, if you’re gay, your general hostility towards religion is understandable. All I can say as someone on the Christian left is that you may be burning bridges with potential allies by speaking in such generalities. I’d like to offer a study posted by the glorious Hergrim over at r/badhistory as evidence that progressive religious folk can play a positive role affirming the dignity of our homosexual brothers and sisters; the study found “…the harmful effects of discrimination among sexual minority youth affiliated with denominations that endorsed same-sex marriage were significantly less than those among peers who affiliated with denominations opposing same-sex marriage, as well as those among peers who identified as secular. In contrast, religious affiliation with gay-affirming denominations did not moderate the discrimination-depression relationship among heterosexual participants…”:
https://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4507415
1) This is a joke, right? Or perhaps you’re truly unwilling to understand what Boghossian wants – no, he doesn’t want random guys kindly knocking on your door to take two minutes of your day, or just place ads on TV. No, he wants street epistemologists you perpetually investigate and confront anyone on the street who they have the slightest suspicion of holding to any religious affiliation. No, this is not similar to anything you describe. Yes, this is uncontroversial bigotry.
2) “again, your anecdotal evidence doesn’t match mine. ”
I’d like to hope you’re joking there.
“Tour ‘respectfully disagree’ is indeed homophobic and aggressive to me”
Respectful disagreement is not aggressive nor homophobic. Since I see so many people play fast and loose with words like “homophobic/transphobic/racist/sexist/” etc, I’ve developed a precise definition of homophobia that unequivocally distinguishes people who are actually problematic from those who aren’t: homophobia can be defined as those who actively, through intentional physical or psychological means, oppressive people for their non-hetero sexuality.
And no, respectful disagreement does not mean opposing ones civil rights. As for the term aggressive, you might want to quickly check what it means.
“If you just ‘disagree with me’ you are a bigot”
Nope. Bigotry means intolerance – and I can perfectly tolerate people I disagree with. You can’t, it sadly seems. I’m far more tolerant than you are.
3) Please stop victimizing yourself.
4) This is just a brimming load of assertion without evidence nonsense. I understand, by “allegiance” you mean global promotion of human rights, international expansion of education and medical assistance (especially in Africa), billions of dollars in charity, etc, etc, etc. The thing is, that’s actually a good thing, not a bad thing.
5) “the only reactionary here is you.”
I hope this is a joke. Sorry, you’re the reactionary.
“how can a gay youth not being emotionally scarred by being taught as most christian schools do, that homosexuality is evil?”
In the same way that most sexual addicts aren’t scarred by Christianity’s teachings against promiscuity. The problem is when someone tries forcing something on another, not teaching them it.
Post a link to your Reddit so I can more fully break your arguments down there. If you don’t have one, make one.
Here’s a fact I know you’ll hate: Harvard was originally established as a missionary school.
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~gsascf/shield-and-veritas-history/
Want to start thanking Christianity for its progress now, or should I turn this up a notch?
To Tim:
1) FI can’t help noticing that the article, and the words by both the author and you frame atheist proselytism as not just uneffective and irritating, but also as something sketchy and potentially very dangerous. A sentence like:
Grayling’s clear expectation is that, deprived of its financial power and cultural privileges, religion will simply become the reserve of the few most irrational …. It is difficult to read Grayling’s ideas without being reminded of the aspirations of the Bolsheviks.
Makes it hard not to beliefe that Johnstone considers people who wish for a religion-less world as little more than fanatics on a slippery slope towards authoritarianism.The same can be said about your comment on ‘stree epistemologians’. C’mon, it’s not an approving mention you make of them; and I’m positive I’d never hear you talking with the same tone about christian missionaires. By all means, it seems to me you are more disturbed by atheist proselytism than the religious one.
2) America is becoming more progressive, and so many christians go along with the change. Churches even. I stand by my point that they are a minority though. How many Christian churches in the US support abortion? and in Australia? You know as well as I do that ‘christians’ as a political and cultural force have been against gay marriage in the last row in Australia, I think you even mentioned it on twitter saying that it was ‘a pity’. It doesn’t require them to be a monolith; trends can be recognised, generalisations can be made. After all I’m not calling for christians being sent to conversion therapy, just saying that we should be able to debate them whenever possible underlining not just their conservative agenda but also the flaws in their worldview.
And yes, I *am* talking of Christianity, especially. And of Islam. But we both know that the New Atheists rarely have a beef with Buddhism or the followers of Shinto, or with Wiccans. Their problem, and mine, is essentially with Abrhamic religions.
3) And if you know the Catholic Church, you’ll know that while it’s an organisation based on consensus, and there are various factions within it, it doesn’t evenly represent both progressive or reactionary views. It’s overwhelmingly reactionary, and it lobbies against all these ethical issues I mentioned before. It’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Yeah, I could count on ‘progressive’ Catholics taking over during the next 1500 years and making the vatican embrace anti-homophobia UN legislation. However, that will help me very little when facing the cultural battle the Church forces on me in my own country. Progressive catholics, even in the progressive countries, simply do not sway the Church’s policies, even under this infamous ‘liberal pope’, which compares trans people to the atomic bomb, calls homosexuality disordered and staunchly opposes gay marriage as a ploy of Satan’s. If you know them you know it.
4) lucky you, then. I’d be interested in talking with said nuns, and asking them what they think about their institution’s stance about abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia. Once again: the world isn’t the anglosphere, and reactionaries can be perfectly fine with public healthcare and environmentalism, but be reactionaries nonetheless. Even if you met two truly enlightened nuns, however, the fact that they have their own liberal opinions but still live within and support an institution which speaks with one voice when political choices are made what makes of them?
All he (and I) say is that history shows that such a slope exists and that history should not be denied. The rest is in your imagination.
Yes, some of the moderate and progressive Christianity can be explained that way. It still means your conflation of “religion” with “reactionary conservatism” is unwarranted and simplistic. And it ignores the fact that, historically, the influence sometimes went in the other direction. Quakers and other Non-conformists were advocating the abolition of slavery long before secular philosophers took up the cause. And the religious origins of the Civil Rights movement has already been noted. Again, your grasp of things is too simplistic.
I know the politics of my own country well enough to know that is yet another gross over-simplification. Conservative churches led the anti-gay marriage lobby. Progressive churches were prominent in the pro campaign. Yet you only noticed the former. We can see a pattern to your selective blindness, yet again.
We discussed gay marriage and they were for it. And they attended those rallies too. Maybe if you took your prejudiced blinkers off and actually did talk to more of these people you may be surprised. You may even learn something.
And now you’re repeated the same arguments about three times. Unless you have something new to say that addresses my article directly I think we’ve got the message and heard enough from you.
Just to make it clear, I never claimed that christians are necessarily against economic or racial justice. They have a mixed record on both. I clearly mentioned ethical issues.
Cordiali saluti.
No. And no-one said or implied you did. It was your other claims that were the problem.
“Peter Boghossian proposes how an army of trained “street epistemologists” must go forth to actively “intervene” with believers in everyday situations. ”
So they will be like a bunch of street preachers for atheism. And properly trained on what is good beliefs and what is bad beliefs. Oh the irony.
“atheists have a right and duty to attempt to de-faith others unsolicited.”
Part of being an atheist last time I looked was not having metaphysical duties and obligations. You know why we get to sleep in guilt free on Sundays.
I have been a nonbeliever/atheist/skeptic for over twenty years and live in the heart of the Bible belt.
Guess what?? In my chosen professions none of the Christians I met gave a crap that I was not Christian. The absolute worst experience I ever had was being invited to church and being prayed for. *Shudders* I survived.
I have successfully taught history and science for awhile without being pestered by these ” dangerous zealots” that the new atheist constantly harp about. Me thinks the new atheist are exaggerating just a bit.
I guess I am that somewhat rare bird of a conservative nonbeliever. Abortion. Have you ever heard of birth control? It’s not that expensive. If used correctly it is 99 percent effective. However if pregnancy occurs…. I got my girlfriend pregnant because we were being stupid ( yes I said it) and not using birth control . I quickly married her to get her on my insurance and now am the proud father of a six year old. Still married too. It’s called personal responsibility.
Gay marriage. I don’t give a crap. I think gays should enjoy the stress of marriage as much as straights . However if you are a gay couple who wants a custom made wedding cake and the religious baker turns you down simply go to another bakery. You know one that won’t spit in your cake. I remember awhile back I went to get a haircut and the Black barber pretty much indicated he didn’t cut White hair. Guess what?? I went down the street to another barber. I survived my encounter with prejudice.
Transgender and transexual. Any demographic that has around a forty percent suicide rate is a demographic with a lot of problems to put it bluntly. No amount of normalizing them will change this. I treat them nice and civilly mind you but in the end they have issues.
Student debt. Pay your debt, you agreed to the loan after all. Or do what I did. I joined the army after I graduated high school as when I was in High School my then lazy ass didn’t make good enough grades to get scholarships. By serving in the army I got my undergrad and masters for free!! I also saved enough money to straight buy it for cash. Lastly I earned a retirement at the age of 38. That combined with the teachers retirement I will earn and social security will be nice.
Even if you have that debt you can get a lot of it cancelled by joining the military. Joining Peace Corp. Teach for America. Etc. They help too. You took the debt; your problem deal with it as you see fit. However it is not the tax payers problem.
I do support universal health care unlike most of conservatives however I want a system that does highly encourage people to live healthy lifestyles.
I could go on and on but the point is obvious; I am a conservative leaning atheist who has no problems with the religious or even their monuments. It simply doesn’t bother me.
I find myself in frequent agreement with them on many issues of politics. I completely agree with them that many ( though not all) progressives are simply immature adults who want far too many handouts for simply existing.
With that said of course I think like all articles by Tim this article was another home run. I especially liked his flaying alive of the idiotic notion that atheists have never committed genocide in the name of atheism. He cited examples from the Soviet Union. You could also discuss the Khmer Rouge of the Spanish Civil War.
To Kris: apart from the unsolicited story of your life, I find your idea of a ‘genocide’ being commited by either the Soviets or the Spanish republicans in the name of atheism quite contradictory of your alleged interest in getting history right. A few thousands deaths if we sum both countries, not more. Hardly a ‘genocide’. The Khmer rouge persecution of buddhists was greater in numbers (around 25.000) and some thousands muslims were targeted as both a religious and an ethnic minority. It gained the name ‘genocide’ according to the UN because it also targeted Muslim ethnic minorities which were especially targeted as such.
I thought everyone was allowed to tell their personal narrative Jacobi and my personal narrative explained my life as a conservative leaning atheist …… Oh silly me I forgot the rule; you are only allowed to tell your personal narrative when it agrees with progressive ideology…..
Killing a few thousand or twenty five thousand people simply for being religious is not genocide. Gotcha Thanks for clearing this up. And thanks for the laughter for making such an absurd comment.
So what is the magic number for when mass murxder becomes genocide? Care to enlighten us.
1) if it’s not dangerous per se, do you agree that anti-religious militant proselytism can be perfectly informed on a historical level, respectful of everyone’s rights, and morally justified?
I disagree that militant proselytism can be respectful of anyone’s right. the concept of “militant” and “respectful of rights” are too divergent.
In the example being discussed, interrupting a conversation to proselytize is disrespectful, period.
To Kris:
Genocide is a word with a meaning. It isn’t just about how many people died, sorry.
One Brow:
I talked of being respectul of people’s *rights* not of being respectful per se. If I interrupt you during a conversation might be not that polite, but It’s certainly not a violation of any rights of yours. Nobody has a right not to be interrupted.
Here is the very first definition of genocide from google.
noun
the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.
“a campaign of genocide”
synonyms: racial killing, massacre, wholesale slaughter, mass slaughter, wholesale killing, indiscriminate killing; mass murder, mass homicide, mass destruction, annihilation, extermination, elimination, liquidation, eradication, decimation, butchery, bloodbath, bloodletting; pogrom, ethnic cleansing, holocaust, Shoah; literaryslaying; rarebattue, hecatomb
“the killing of Native Americans was the biggest genocide in world history”
Notice the very first sentence phrase- “the deliberate killing of a large group of people”
So unless you are prepared to argue thousands or twenty five thousand is not a large amount of people then yeah genocide is the right word. If you are still not happy with that feel free to use any of the synonyms from the dictionary.
Your attempted quibble is ashes and have a lovely rest of your day.
In all fairness, 90% of the Native Americans that died were due to disease
I didn’t write the definition from google I just quoted it.
Re: disease and natives.
Biosaber, good point. It is true that sometimes “genocide” is an overused term and politicizes popular history. But the use of the term in Native American contexts has a basis in fact. It might not have been the biggest in world history, but it was an important event nonetheless.
Virgin soil epidemics do not absolve US State and Federal governments of charges of genocide, particularly during and after the US Civil War.
For example, tens of thousands of Native Americans were systematically slaughtered in late 19th century Northern California and Oregon. There were several consecutive decades after 1849 when weekend recreational human-hunting was commonplace, and entire indigenous villages were routinely slaughtered in clearing land for cattle grazing. The CA state government paid bounties to these independent contractors, and the US Congress later reimbursed the state for this campaign. Also, in Colorado, the peaceful Cheyenne killed by state militia at Sand Creek had their skin made into leather souvenirs. Many of these events occurred after the Emancipation Proclamation and were concurrent with rise of steam railways and the rise of America as a global industrial power.
I wish people would not exaggerate the demographic scale of the Native American genocides, because if anything, that dilutes the meaning of the word and fails to explain HOW the term precisely applies to the specific context.
The population density of Native California was low to begin with (before the overwhelming numbers of immigrants arrived), so a genocide there was completed with only a relatively modest demographic impact on the state as a whole.
This discussion is getting rather off topic for the article above. Please keep things relevant to the topic of Johnstone’s book.
To Jimmy:
1) aw, the horror! it seems to me that perhaps it’s you who shouldn’t victimise yourself too much. God forbid that you might be interrupted during a conversation in the street, that would be such a terrible act of oppression.
2) Precisely. Religious people opposing my civil rights because of their religion are being oppressive, I already said it. Concerning your definition of homophobia, go and find someone who gives a shit about it. I certainly don’t.
3) Again, the one who started whining because he doesn’t like my opinions here is you. You are a bigot, you are a homophobe, and you are a whiner. Anything else you want to hear?
4) I already mentioned what I mean by ‘allegiance’. The fact that you completely ignored it shows how much you care. So much for the high christian morals of yours.
5) Considering that the level of the conversation is a ‘no u’, I’ll refrain from continuing that. The fact that you talk of sex addicts as if they were a comparable situation of growing up youths who are gay and live in a context which is homophobic frames you for the despicable little ignoramus that you are. I won’t obey your weird command to make a reddit account (!?) but I’m glad you posted that on here, for you are truly a shining example of christian virtue and tolerance.
Looks like the argument is collapsing, at last.
1) “God forbid that you might be interrupted during a conversation in the street, that would be such a terrible act of oppression.”
Right, it’s oppressive if I’m perpetually targeted, my entire life on the street, unsolicited, for any public expressions of religious observance. That’s pretty clear. The same way that if a Muslim was targeted outside and repeatedly questioned in terms of faith any time they revealed their beliefs, it would be oppressive. It creates a true culture of stigmatization and sends the message that expression of religion outside the home and church is not acceptable.
2) “Precisely. Religious people opposing my civil rights because of their religion are being oppressive, I already said it.”
Respectful disagreement is not opposition to civil rights.
“Concerning your definition of homophobia, go and find someone who gives a shit about it. I certainly don’t.”
Perhaps this is supposed to pass off as a counter-argument or something.
3) “You are a bigot, you are a homophobe, and you are a whiner. Anything else you want to hear?”
LOL!
4) ” I already mentioned what I mean by ‘allegiance’. The fact that you completely ignored it shows how much you care. So much for the high christian morals of yours.”
Wait, the fact that I dismissed your arrogant attacks on things even like religious charity as forms of poison proves my Christian morals are fake? This is new. In any case, what you mean by “religious allegiance” is typically a lot of benign, if not positive things for the world. There’s the bad, but focusing on the bad alone is useless.
5) “The fact that you talk of sex addicts as if they were a comparable situation of growing up youths who are gay and live in a context which is homophobic frames you for the despicable little ignoramus that you are.”
In other words, the argument collapses – what I wrote is exactly correct. The problem is not the religious teaching itself (“X lifestyle is sinful”), since sex addicts don’t seem to be scarred, but when the teaching is actually shoved down ones throat. It’s amazing how you entirely agree with me on this point but are intent on framing it in a way so that my fake Christian virtue can be totally exposed to all on-viewers. Foiled again!
Until recently, from what I’ve seen, scholars looking into the “witch craze” haven’t properly taken into account the Reformation. It’s noticeable that the places where the witch trials were severest were also those most wracked by the Reformation.
The lack of interest paid to this fact is like how little interest has been paid, until recently, to male victims in the witch trials. A full third of those hanged at Salem were men. Likewise, generally between 20-25% of those condemned in Europe were men. Obviously, that means there was a huge focus on women, but it does mean that the notion it was nothing but a femicide is… suspect.
The one thing that bothers me a little here, though, is the idea that the totalitarian regimes had nothing to do with religion. Not denying the massacres carried out in the name of atheism, of course, but surely Hitlerism and Stalinism were essentially religious in character, with the leaders as the deities? The number of people who committed suicide as the Reich fell, the extent of the mourning for Stalin — or, for that matter, the fact that North Korea’s official head of state is officially a dead man — aren’t those basically religion?
“Recently”? That’s been a major focus on the topic for almost a century.
That is stretching the meaning of “religious” well past breaking point. “Having some of the same trappings and expressions as religions” does not mean “religious”. Especially in the case of Stalinism, which was overtly anti-religious.
No.
The use of the term religion with regard to totalitarian regimes I’m not sure is that unbelievable. Emilio Gentile and George Mosse among others spoke of Italian fascism as a ‘civil religion’and mussolini himself referred to his own regime that way. It wasn’t just about trappings, they really thought they were creating a religious cult. Of course it depends by one defines religion. I tend to associate belief in a deity with it. Problem is, many people, including some totalitarian, didn’t.
Look up the word “simile”.
Or something supernatural or transcendental. Which kind of rules out these non-religious ideologies.
Jacopo says:
I talked of being respectul of people’s *rights* not of being respectful per se. If I interrupt you during a conversation might be not that polite, but It’s certainly not a violation of any rights of yours. Nobody has a right not to be interrupted.
Interrupting conversations is a sign of marginalization. It’s a way of treating people as being less worthy and less valuable. It’s experienced by most of the traditional oppressed groups in society (women, blacks, the disabled, etc.). When atheists (or anyone else) interrupt a conversation in this fashion, they tell theists they are not worth listening to and don’t understand what is most pressing to them at the moment.
Even if such behavior does not violate a particular right, it is tied into a willingness to violate rights. That’s what marginalization does.
However, this may be getting too far off topic, so I will drop the conversation here.
With the Witch Trials another thing to consider was many of those people executed for witchcraft truly thought they were engaging in witchcraft. Even now days you can still meet people who think they have the ability to engage in magic. What was different about this period was that the legal and academic community on the whole agreed with them in regards to their ability to engage in magic.
C.S. Lewis made a good point in this regard. He said that moderns congratulate themselves on being more morally advanced than their forebears, who burned witches. But, he noted, people stopped burning witches only because they stopped *believing* in them. It was a change in knowledge, not moral values. If we still believed that certain people were making our children ill, killing our crops, causing miscarriages, and committing murders via black magic, we would be prosecuting them today.
We didn’t change. Our knowledge did.
When you do your entry on dogmatic Atheism and communism, are you gonna touch on China, N. Korea, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia, as well as dispelling the myth that their dictators are of any divine significance, or just Soviet Russia and Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism?
That article will be about the New Atheist attempts to dismiss the Soviet persecution of religion in the name of state atheism. I stick to subjects I’ve researched and avoid those I have insufficient knowledge of.
Tim — great post. I am in whole-hearted agreement with the preponderance of your work.
I have one minor hair to split. I think your invocation of Buddhism as a counterpoint to conflating religiosity and conservatism is context-dependent, and you didn’t acknowledge this.
Buddhists are a left-leaning religious minority only in the West, where many European-descendant people have converted since the late 20th century, and where the tenets of Eastern religion have been seen as a counterpoint to a perceived rigidity of Western monotheistic dogma.
In Asia, and PARTICULARLY south/southeast Asia, there is indeed a strongly reactionary and nativist Buddhist right wing.
In Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, you will often meet politically reactionary Buddhists and they are just as central to state-level politics as are the religious conservatives in the U.S.
This does not detract from your overall point.
Given it was a passing comment, no.
I’m well aware of that. And there is also a humanitarian, universalist, compassionate and politically liberal wing. Which kind of reinforces my point.
Certainly it would reinforce your point. I agree with your assessment in general. There is also a Christian left in the heart of the US Bible belt. My point is that your suggestion that reactionary nationalist Buddhism is a rarity presumes a particular geographic and cultural context. Buddhism is not an exceptional case, especially when it is an ethnic majority faith aligned with nationalist interests.
I got your point the first time, thanks. Read the context of what I said. I addressed my question about Buddhists to someone who lives in the west, not Myanmar or Thailand.
Fair point.
Quite-I have a Bhuddist friend who is also interested in his religions history, & who gets fairly annoyed when people assume Bhuddist pacificsm, for example.
As for left-leaning being the same as pacifist, that is hardly accurate. Would agree that nativist Bhuddism counts as reactionary, also from a Western perspective ( & somewhat odd for a missionary faith founded by other “natives” than themselves ); they are, in part, a reaction to Moslem radical internationalism, one very much affected by Marxist revolutionary practice. But we are getting away from the main issue.
One Brow:
I do attempt (and often manage) to ‘convert’ religious people. I also don’t interrupt anybody when they speak because it seems rude and frankly unpleasant. That has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I mentioned militant atheists who are respectful of everyone’s rights, not who are perfectly polite.
To Jimmy:
1) And you christians send a lot of messages (in the streets or in tv, or in the radio or on the internet) about what should and should not be acceptable out of home. Didn’t see you whining about that. It’s called culture wars. If it’s ‘oppression’, then it’s oppression from all sides.
2) Again: it’s two different things. As I said: your ‘respectful disagreement’ (which becomes oppression whenever its about you whiners) is one thing; opposition to my civil rights is another. You are pretty dense.
And me not giving a shit about your notions of what’s homophobia and what’s not is not a counter argument for the simple reason that there is no argument to be countered. Your inane bullshit doesn’t deserve to be dignified by one.
3) I know, truth hurts.
4) Your morals aren’t ‘fake’. They are repugnant and beastly, but not ‘fake’. Plenty of good christians like you embrace them, so they are absolutely real. You don’t give a shit about all the crimes of your fellow christians; and that’s why you didn’t even acknowledge them. That’s it. And I don’t ‘only focus on the bad’. I simply mentioned that in my book the bad outweights the good. You don’t like that, and here you are, whining. According to your own definition of what’s marginalisation, you are oppressing me right now.
5) That’s not so. Kids growing up dealing with homosexual feelings and having to deal with institutionalised homophobia at school are simply not comparable with ‘sex addicts’ who happen to know that christians disagree with them. Gay youth should grow up in an affirming environment, not one where the ‘educators’ present homosexuality as evil, ‘shoving down their throat or not’. The fact that you compare the two things proves two things: the first is that you don’t know anything about these things; the second is that you are a donkey, and an ignorant one at that.
“the second is that you are a donkey, and an ignorant one at that.”
I think that is the end of this discussion.
Saint Kirillos:
I don’t think that it’s good to discard affirming Christian groups, especially because people who grow up in these toxic Christian environments often cannot just ‘let go’ and that’s better than nothing. But I can easily talk for my own country: ‘affirming’ Christian groups or factions within our Catholic Church (the only religious group of any relevancy) are so tiny, timid, scattered and irrelevant that they could as well not exist.
I would certainly be less prone to endorse militant atheist proselytism in a place like, say, Iceland, than in my country. But then, the great majority of the world isn’t like Iceland, not at all. And if Iceland is as it is its also because it’s very irreligious. As a guy on the Christian left, don’t you *see* the correlation between high religious rates and social conservatism in western countries? don’t you think you aren’t dealing with the cause of the problem but just with the simptoms?
Or perhaps you’re guilty of the correleation is causality fallacy. Or perhaps you deliberately “forget” to consider the option that social conservatism may raise high religious rates; let alone that there may be a third factor in play causing both.
Not to mention that Czechia is one of the most non-religious countries in Europe – and also one of the most xenophobic ones. Thanks for confirming what I wrote above – discussions like this never lead anywhere except stupidities. From both sides. New Atheism – or “militant atheist proselytism” usually is as bigot as the conservative christians you dislike so much.
For one who likes to talk about stupidity, you sure don’t know what correlation means, do you? Nor you are an expert on geography, if you think that ‘czechia’ is a western country.
Why the stipulation of nations being “western” or not?
Frank’s example of the Czech republic is excellent: It’s highly developed, well educated, has a good economy, is not religious…
…and yet sadly has a lot of xenophobia and bigotry.
Perhaps religion’s not so much an ultimate cause but more of a convenient means to an end?
Because Eastern European countries went through a radically different XX century, living for decades under a regime which meant both that they missed our civil rights revolutions of the 1960s onwards and that their religiosity was repressed by the state, rather than fading away because of social and cultural developments of other sorts. It’s just too different as a context for comparing it to western countries.
Jacopo, the starkly different history of Eastern Europe DOES factor into the “Czech exception” we are discussing, but NOT in the way you suggest. It demonstrates that political conservatism and religiosity are NOT fundamentally linked. Nor are they linked IN THE WEST, when you look past the last few decades.
The most authentically evangelical living former US president (Carter) is also the most politically progressive living former US president, with a foreign policy STILL far left of Obama’s. He was elected in ’76. Reagan (by comparison) was positively irreligious, the lapsed member of a mainline Protestant sect (Disciples of Christ) which is a left-leaning Campellite denomination.
As folks have previously alluded in this thread, our Western civil rights movement has from the time of its roots in nineteenth century abolitionist radicalism, been the crowning glory of the Western Christian left. The emergence of political Christianity in right wing politics of the West began (in earnest) in the late 1970s, and became entrenched during the Reagan Revolution.
William Jennings Bryan, famous anti-evolutionist politician, was the leader of the LEFT wing of the democratic party in circa 1900. He is commonly claimed as a “social conservative” by modern would-be moral-majority theocrats, but that is revisionism. Political Christians in the 19th century were NOT right-wingers.
Religiosity and political valence are NOT linked except via historical circumstance.
Religiosity has NOT faded away in the wake of incessant secularization (the “social and cultural developments” you mention), as predicted by mid-20th century social theorists. Global trends since the late-70s have proved that wrong.
Center-left mainline denominations are suffering demographic erosion as nationalist political Christianity blossoms, but right-leaning sects are not the only ones inherently capable of success. Change the setting, change the game.
BTW Nationalism too was a mostly leftist movement once, before the 20th century.
Or better example would be modern atheist China very atheistic but very socially conservative country they only started letting people gay people have sex in 2009 and they also considered transgenders and to be a mental disorder there genocide Muslims
Jacopo, I agree that we should combat harmful beliefs, religious or secular. My disagreement with militant proselytizing is tactical; much like evangelical street preachers trying to pick up converts, for every soul you get, you’re gonna turn off ten people who consider the behavior obnoxious. When people feel attacked, they aren’t prone to change their minds or consider that they’re wrong; they get defensive and fire back. When peoples differing viewpoints are treated with legitimacy and understanding, they tend to be more receptive and willing to change their minds. The exchanges here can serve as anecdotal evidence; I suspect your response to me is less hostile than your responses to Frank and Jimmy because you perceive my tone as being less confrontational.
We all have our limits, of course-I’m white and have difficulty treating white supremacist views with legitimacy and understanding, so it’s understandable that a sexual minority would feel even more hostile towards religious factions that oppose them. Yet that could just as easily indicate we’re not the right people to go out and change the minds of these groups.
Religion could be a root cause for conservative beliefs. It can also be a root cause for progressive beliefs. Religious beliefs aren’t fixed, they’re fluid and they’ve been used to support almost any issue, right or left. Minimizing the progressive elements while harping on the conservative ones is a source of disagreement between us. The religious left may be practically irrelevant in Italy, but they aren’t in the United States, where religiosity and conservatism are more entangled than the rest of the Anglosphere. You would find far more support for laws combating discrimination in a black church than you would at a libertarian conference in the US. That would hold true for a number of left wing political positions.
I have no problem with being smart and not telling people I want to convert that they are utter morons, I think we agree here. I can mostly talk about my own country, and here you simply don’t have the idyllic ‘oh, some churches are pro, some are against’. The Catholic Church is monolithic on the subject, and ruthless in forcing its point of view on everyone else. A decline of religion would absolutely mean a weakening of the bigotry the Church sustains with all its strenght. If I were in iceland, I would probably still find Christianity a ridiculous mummery, but I wouldn’t feel any need to go and challenge people believing in it. I don’t challenge people who do astrology, after all.
Yes, religion is a complex phenomenon, and progressive churches exist. But these churches developed essentially when societies had become progressive at large, and hence were forced to adapt. The Catholic Church is big and strong enough to be able to fight its cruel rear-guard battle against lgbt rights in the west (while celebrating discrimination elsewhere), but many other churches changed with their times. But when did they change? how many of these churches *helped* or led the change, rather than following when the culture war had been won by others while they were still being against change? One can draw a paralellism with the Catholic Church and liberalism. Today they accept it and they praise themselves for their tolerance; but for a long time they opposed it. They were a force which harmed change, slowed it down. I think it’s a question worth answering.
My comment above addresses some of these points, but I don’t think you can reasonably suggest that progressive religions are merely the products of progressive societies. That is a chicken and egg problem which (I suspect) you are linking to modern social trends.
Other historical eras do not support the notion of default religious-political conservatism. Many historical political conflicts between the pious and the impious do not neatly conform to any left-right dichotomy, and these examples do not come from one particular society. Piety and religiosity have vastly different political implications in different historical and geographic settings.
I already made it clear what is my beef with the Church(es). I never said that all religions at all times have been ‘conservatives’. Conservatism is a broad concept anyway.
Quite a few Icelanders believe in fairies. As in the supernatural beings, that is 😉
This is a good post, and pretty much one that all ‘Western Atheists’ should read.
I may add my own thought : most of the atheistic critique of religion mainly preassume ‘modern’ concept of social structure, e.g : liberalism, social equality, individualism, and such.
While in the other hand, almost all religious beliefs are not fulfillment of self, but devotion to the in-group identity, hence why Romans disliked superstitions since they could ‘anger the Roman gods’. But this does not have to be religious in nature.
For example, in relatively secular reign of Soeharto in 60-90’s Indonesia, despite surpression of Islamic Conservatism (Polygamy, Multiple Childs, Headscarfs, LGBT rights, et al), Soeharto remained socially conservative on his whole reign, keeping his anti-Chinese prejudice and racism based on secularistic propaganda that according to some scholars came from his days when Japan conquered Southeast Asia, and was obsessed with keeping public and social orders through millitary.
Some people like Lee Kuan Yew also have this kind of attitude. Despite being an agnostic, he deeply believes in some ‘social hierarchy’ dan ‘race segregation’ like that he quipped once that Mainland Chinese are lazy, unrefined, and dirty and Malays are more suitable for public services rather than go in business like Overseas Chinese or ‘pendatang’.
This is, i think, the core problem with New Atheists and religious Westerners in understanding religion. Modern Western Atheism came from Enlightenment thought and over the years molded with contemporary ethics (Cultural Individualism, humanism, etc).
And so while Western Atheists complained that some theology like Calvinism is self-depreciating, people in my culture actually finds it useful and even desireable to further deepen our identities in Christ.
Whether this social structure is good or not, that’s up for the ethicist to debate, but the irony is while some like Dawkins ranted that God is the most ‘unpleasant character’, people in my country would dismiss him as a conceited fool in a mere seconds for not ‘honoring the divinely inspired hierarchy and social structure.’
^ Also to add for above, hence there is some different worldviews on persecuting LGBTs, rejection of feminism, and socially deviant behavior (drug legalization, abortion, prostitution, sexual liberation, alcoholism, etc.).
People in the group-oriented society tended to not break the status quo and have lower individualistic traits. For example while it would be abhorrent in the West, some people in Indonesia would be willing to come out as ‘self-hating gays’ or stay silent in the status quo. In fact, they would even see this as a responsibility to maintain societal order. In the West, people focus on how ‘unique’ an individual are and how society should give more room to individuals. In this society an outspoken LGBT would be seen as a criminal to disrupt social harmony.
So even IF the New Atheists’ was right about religion’s ‘crimes’, that still remains one open question : What standard of morality they stood upon?
I also find it very interesting how my posts which are perceived as rude towards christians are downvoted to death or not posted at all, whereas this guy who advocates not even subtly for state homophobia and religious persecution of minorities is not just not banned, but not even downvoted. Makes one wonder about the kind of people who post on here 😉
You have to work pretty hard to actually get banned around here. A few of your comments which have actually been abusive went to the trash. They were ones where you went out of your way to insult people. I’m afraid I don’t subscribe to the “I’m offended so you must be silenced” school of thought, so posts that merely express opinions you or I happen to disagree with and don’t like but aren’t actually abusive get posted. Even if I happen to disagree with them. As for who upvotes or downvotes what, perhaps you need to ask yourself why even people who share many of your views are finding you hard to like. I know I certainly am.
But do you think that the bulk of your fans being reactionaries who have a problem with who dislikes christianity but not with who supports theocracy and persecution of minorities is a possibility? I mean, what does downvoting or not that guy’s nice posts have to do with *me*? Can’t they dislike me for the horrible, abusive person I am (although let’s be frank; I am still quite sweet compared to your posting style) and still also downvote Yoshua?
I always found the ‘you can cheer for the Holocaust but since you it politely and without personal insults it’s not abusive’ idea pretty silly, but hey, your home your rules. Enjoy your fanbase 😉
Is someone here doing the equivalent of “cheering for the Holocaust”? I must have missed that comment. And no, I’m not interested in censoring people who express ideas I disagree with simply because they express those ideas. If you find those ideas so objectionable that you are offended by people simply expressing them then you have a very viable option – leave. No-one is forcing you to post here. You can go whenever you like.
Yeah, defending persecution of minorities within the context of a theocratic government because of ‘morals’ and ‘social cohesion’ is equivalent to cheering for the Holocaust in my book. (I’m sure you disagree: for regardless how many words you use to empahise how not-a-sjw and how you don’t ban ideas, you WOULD ban someone cheering for Auschwitz).
And I am not offended at all, and don’t see any reason to go anywhere. I’m just taking the liberty to underline how your fanbase is overwhelmingly disturbed by my ideas (even when not expressed in the harsh way you love to use when roused) but have no issue whatsoever with Yoshua’s. I find it interesting, and find even more interesting the fact that you either don’t realise that, or don’t consider it as a problem. Which is your prerogative, of course.
No, I wouldn’t. I would publish their comment and then rip it to pieces. Not that anything anyone has said here is remotely like cheering for Auschwitz. And I’m all for social justice thanks, I just find it disturbing how often some proponents of it seem to think it means silencing people they disagree with. Now please get back on topic.
Out of curiosity: why you would ‘rip to pieces’ a post cheering for the Holocaust (as if you can rip to pieces someone’s personal preferences) but not one like Yoshua’s? you sure were disturbed by my bigotry against progressive Christians but didn’t see fit to reply to Yoshua advocating for persecution of minorities.
This is the last time I’m going to indulge this weird off-topic stuff.
If they were giving some reason to cheer the Holocaust, which is most likely, those would be pretty easy to take apart.
Because all he did was observe that New Atheist condemnations are based on western ethical norms that are, literally, very foreign to the collectivist cultures of Asia. He did not say those collectivist cultures morality was superior, in fact he clearly stated “whether this social structure is good or not, that’s up for the ethicist to debate”. He was just noting that Dawkins etc work from some highly Eurocentric assumptions. How the hell you can twist that into the equivalent of “cheering the Holocaust” I have no idea. You need to read more carefully.
I was not “disturbed” in the slightest. I simply disagreed with you. Perhaps you need to stop being so emotional and assuming everyone else is as emotional as you.
He did nothing of the sort, so stop being so absurd.
That’s what my experience with village-Mythicists on Bob Seidensticker’s blog and that equally-sad Vridar (except people here are actually sensible). You’ll get over it.
Btw when’s the coming theocracy gonna arrive and who’s gonna run it?
Also, if we want to be honest, my first post was perfectly polite and certainly not abusive of anyone. Still got downvoted to death. They don’t like the ideas, not the tone, and I think you make a little effort you might still realise that.
What exactly are you proposing I do about people downvoting your comments? Ban them? Scold them? Send them to sit in the corner for being mean? As it happens, I can’t see who upvotes or downvotes others, so I couldn’t do anything about it even if I wanted to. Perhaps you need to stop being so sensitive. Or if you can’t, perhaps you need to go to a “safe space” where opposing ideas can’t offend you.
The only ones who are offended here are your fanboys, because I dared talking of Christianity without feigning any simpathy. Again, I don’t expect you to do anything at all about the downvotes, but perhaps asking yourself a couple of questions. I wonder: how many are here because of ‘historical accuracy’ (incidentally, the reason *I* am here for, you believe it or not) and how many simply because they want ammunition in their conservative christian debate against atheists? (I know what you are going to say: you don’t care, you make the blog for countering lies, no matter what, you also opposed apologists two or three times etc.; and it’s fine, to each his own priorities 😉 )
Rather more than two or three times. But yes, I can’t help who comes here and why. I have no control over that at all. I just present history and debunk pseudo history. That’s it. I’ve also re-read the comments you’ve objected to and there is nothing in them that needs to be censored, let alone banned. So either get back on topic or go away.
Jacopo
Your views are being down voted because they are two dimensional and poorly argued for reasons that have been explained to you numerous times. If I was you I would be far more concerned with the fact no one, including fellow atheists found you to be convincing.
My very first discussion with you started off with you rudely challenging me on why I discussed why in fact I am a conservative leaning atheist and then you tried to engage in a petty semantic battle with me over the meaning of the word genocide. When I finally showed that I used it correctly you didn’t apologize, admit error or anything.
Fine you are gay. I utterly do not care. I accept you. However no one is obligated to accept you. They simply have to tolerate you as far as the law requires. They are doing that. If them not accepting you hurts your feelings too bad. I wish my sister in law accepted my atheism but she doesn’t. However she tolerates me as far as the law requires. See how this works.
I could go on and on but I find it pointless to discuss issues with an immature individual who has no emotional self control and a tremendous need to be a victim.
Jacopo, I’ll reply to your other response to me when I have more time, but figured I should bring this up in the hopes that this will bring the tension down a couple notches in this comment section. You had mentioned in a previous thread that English isn’t your primary language. I do think you’re taking some (but not all) of the people disagreeing with you more personally than they intend it, and at times misreading what Tim is saying in the article. I do wonder if some context is getting lost in the translation from English to Italian. Please don’t take this as an attack or an insult-your written English is superior to many of my fellow Americans who speak no language but English, and vastly superior to my Italian.
I’ve allowed a couple more off-topic comments here through to publication so that everyone can feel they have had their say. But any further discussion that is not directly relevant to my article above will go to the trash. And further whining at me about which comments did or didn’t get published may attract harsher action. You’ve all been warned. Now, get back on topic.
Peter Boghossian has gone full circle and turned New Atheism into a religion with it’s own Great Commission, it would seem. Is he going to send street epistemologists to North Sentinel Island, I wonder?
“Johnstone notes that the issue is not that no argument can be made that religion can and has been oppressive, violent and retardant or that an argument cannot be made that it is often or even necessarily so.”
So, an argument can be made. Please suggest some reliable sources.
Any newspaper on the Troubles in Northern Ireland / The Troubles, perhaps? Or on the fate of the Rohingya in Myanmar? On ISIS?
Any professional textbook on the history of the Morisco’s in Spain and Portugal? On the attitude of the Russian orthodox church at the end of the 19th Century? On semi-clandestine catholic churches in the Dutch Republic?
Perhaps I get your question wrong, but it seems to me that the choice is wide. Anyhow, the two points are that no matter the perspective, the facts make clear that
1. Hitchens was dead wrong with his “religion poisons everything” (just google Titus Brandsma) and
2. atheists are capable of “poisoning everything” as well, given the Gulag and the Killing Fields.
It’s not difficult, really. Accepting or abandoning a belief system doesn’t make anyone automatically a better or worse person.
Or the attitude of the Russian orthodox church under Soviet Communism, with which it collaberated extensively. Or the attitude of the Russian orthodox church under Putin, now. All of which is due to it being a state church, that has happened to be under some unfortunate governments ( including one that actively tried to kill its members )
Hello Mr. O’Neill, I greatly enjoy reading your blog, and I have a question for you.
“This is simply an extension of the apologist argument from morality, that assumes no true ethical system is possible unless it is based on objective absolutes mandated by a divine power – which is a dubious proposition, as any undergraduate moral philosophy student could explain to D’Souza (not that he would listen).”
How would you answer this argument? https://youtu.be/yrcQ_PTkVD4
(5mins long)
Thank you in advance 🙂
That’s an argument so stupid it’s barely worth addressing. Why is murder wrong? Okay – imagine a society where anyone could murder anyone else with impunity, with no consequences or censure. It takes less than a second to realise that no such society has ever existed because any such society would not be a society at all – it would be chaos. That’s why all societies regard murder as wrong. That conservatives like Dennis Prager (the fat bloated clown in that video) make such sophomoric videos speaks volumes about how dumbed-down the right wing has become in the age of Trump. A child could refute that stupid argument.
Of course one could then argue and ask why is societal chaos wrong; but if you find someone sincerely asking that question of you you know who not to go anywhere alone with.
Exactly. Which is something else that is disturbing about Prager’s argument. He’s effectively saying that the only thing that’s keeping him from killing people is the belief that there is a Big Daddy in the sky watching him who will punish him if he does so. If true, that makes Dennis Prager a dangerous psychopath. But I don’t think that is actually the only thing keeping him from slaughtering people – which means his argument is garbage.
I am from the American South and we do say on occasions but for the law and Jesus that someone would need killing. Now I tend not to be particularly homicidal toward my fellow creature but these idiots who think it is funny to act like they are purposely spreading COVID 19 are alive now only cause of the law and Jesus.
“no true ethical system”
No True Ethical System Fallacy.
“based on objective absolutes”
Issued by a subject called God, YHWH, Allah or whatever.
Sure.
“The theologian David Bentley Hart skewers some of the more silly
examples in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its
Fashionable Enemies (Yale: 2009)”
Any other thoughts on Hart’s book?
Obviously I disagree with his theological arguments in it.
Obviously:)
But is it generally solid history-wise?
Yes.