If they don’t believe in gods and angels, what is the justification of the ‘secular’ Crusaders like Harris and Hitchens who line up behind the War Party?
“I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”
Lt. Gen. William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin, speaking about battle with a Muslim warlord
Hedges has said many times that he does not believe any of the kooky things the Bible claims like Moses parting the Red Sea, talking snakes, whales vomiting men they’ve swallowed and the like. DJ Grothie was ill-prepared for this interview and it showed. He thought because Hedges is a lefty that it was going to be a cakewalk. Grothie and the new atheists, as Hedges was quick to point out, know nothing about the Middle East except the Western propaganda they’ve heard in the mainstream media. They lump all Muslims into the same category much like whites lumping blacks into the same category vis a vis the Black Monolith. Every human on this planet deserves to be individuated and not stereotyped. This leads to exactly what happened during slavery and exactly what is happening in Iraq and about to happen in Iran. Notice how we never attack Europe for their oil. It’s always a group of nonwhites.
Atheism is very much akin to fundamentalist Christianity because they both claim to know what is unknowable for humans at this stage of evolution. In fact we may never get there because there is no guarantee that evolution will take us to higher levels of existence. Sometimes species remain where they are and sometimes they regress. Either way humans are ill-equipped to speculate on any afterlife other than conjecture that one of human consciousness is not likely. Even Dawkins himself has said that he isn’t 100% atheist. Any reasonable man has to leave room for what humans lack in intellect. Dennett is pretty much the same but Hitchens and Harris are not out and out racists against all non-whites. When you say Islam is a religion of hatred you are saying that Arabs are a race of terrorists. It’s sleight of hand with the words. European johnny-come-lately Jews are the ones that are not a race. Judaism is a religion and nothing else. They just converted recently. The originals Jews come from Africa. Read “We the black Jews” by Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan for the historical truth instead of lies spread by ahistorical, revisionist education. I am an agnostic and will remain so because it is the only logical position for a man to take. We don’t know....plain and simple. Dogmatic, theistic gods are all false. We all share the same reality and that dictates that the laws of physics are not violated for some and enforced for others.
Whil I do not see the point in practicing any religion it makes even less sense to practice a religion in which you disagree with the majority of the dogmatic text. Practicing the moral aspects of Christianity in daily life require no adherence to Christianity at all so I believe that Hedges is wasting his time there. Religion obviously helps people deal with their fears and insecurities about our purpose and ultimate destiny in the universe. There is nothing wrong with that but religious people take it a step further. They develop an “my way or the highway” mentality that pits them against people of other faiths and those of no faith like myself. It is typical human groupthink behavior but it doesn’t make it right. Many religious people allow politicians, who are representatives of the elite and their corporations, to use religion to divide us which keeps us from recognizing them for what they are and unifying against them. They are strict Malthusians who want to exterminate most of humanity so that this way of life can be prolonged long enough to find other inhabitable planets. These people think they are God so they require no religion. They worship Lucifer which is basically every baser human instinct, not some red devil with a tail and a pitchfork. Their plan is almost complete and still the world, including and especially America, is asleep at the wheel. I pity future generations because they have no future except suffering and misery.
My problem is where Dawkins et al. tell us that science can answer the question to a high degree of certainty: it simply can’t.
But Dawkins doesn’t say that. A high degree of probability yes, but certainty, no.
Much of your case seems to depend on overstating what Dawkins says. You really should read The God Delusion if you want to make your case - because he doesn’t say what you claim he says. You’re fighting a straw man.
You mentioned in an earlier post that what bugs you is dishonesty. This is exactly what bugs me about Dawkins. I have a great deal of respect for him—right up to the point where he (IMHO) goes off the rails and says that science can once and for all lay aside this messiness.
But he doesn’t say that either. Really - read the book. All this straw man stuff is pointless, because you’re disputing something that doesn’t exist.
I have read the book. I own it including Hitchens, Dennett, Harris and others. I guess it’s a matter of interpretation. You are quite right though. Dawkins does believe that one day science will be able to answer all of these questions if humans do not destroy each other over religion first. His theme is almost a plea to give brilliant people and evolution enough time to unravel some of these mysteries. They may not be as mysterious and complicated as we all are assuming it is.
I am an agnostic and will remain so because it is the only logical position for a man to take. We don’t know....plain and simple.
Can you think of anything that you know for certain? How do you know that your body is not hooked-up to the “Matrix”? ... are you “agnostic” about that too? For practicality sake, the term “agnostic” should be reserved for hypotheticals for which there exists at least some bit of evidence or a known mechanism… otherwise the word “agnostic” is a meaningless term; it would describe both Mother Teresa and Carl Sagan equally at the same time.
To paraphrase Sam Harris:
The terms “Atheist” and “Agnostic” make about as much sense as the terms: “a-astologist” and “astrolo-gnostic”.
Personal god claims are no different in kind than Astrology claims
Try this little exercise out:
Re-write the arguments and statements from this thread with “Astrology” in place of “God”:
“I am an astrolo-gnostic and will remain so because we don’t know....plain and simple.”
“I say that science and Astrology exist in two non-overlapping magisteria, as such, science has nothing to say about Astrology.”
“If an astrologer claims that Astrology is real, and science shows that one of his claims about Astrology is wrong, that doesn’t mean that Astrology is not real, it just means that the person making the claim about Astrology is wrong, mistaken, or maybe lying.”
“Dawkins tells us that science can answer the question of Astrology to a high degree of certainty: it simply can’t.”
“Dawkins is misusing science by claiming so strongly that Astrology is a delusion.”
Who here would respect the reasoning used to defend these above positions about Astrology?
HERE is a fine example of why the War Party needs the likes of Harris/Hitchens to market their racist filth to imperialism’s liberal intelligentsia.
It’s exactly the same ‘clash of civilizations’ garbage, but Harris & Co. have a special talent for wrapping it in the appropriate ‘secular humanist’ camouflage.
Agnostic simply means that a person has not chosen a side because there is insufficient evidence to make a logical decision. I understand that we may all be in the Matrix. In fact I believe we are in the a figurative Matrix but that is not the point. Humans are limited by our senses. It is pointless to have a discussion whereby we discount what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell (although smell and taste are basically one sense), just because we are unsure if we are experiencing actual reality due to our primitiveness. We have to go with what we know. The alternative is to become religious and know nothing.
The real perversion of terminology is atheist. “A” means not so atheist should be what is called non-theist. The proper term for what is called atheism should be a-deist, someone who doesn’t believe in any creator, regardless of any theism. Nonbelievers is the proper term to group all of these together but religious people are not nearly as nuanced in their view of us as we are in our appropriate, but possible overly respectful, view of them. How many times have we all heard “Have a blessed day!” or “Thank God”? Some will argue this is making a mountain out of a molehill but these are the cues that helped to drive nonbelievers into hiding in the first place. Now that we’re out I suggest we do everything to stay out because there are over a billion of us worldwide and our numbers are growing. See for yourself.
HERE is a fine example of why the War Party needs the likes of Harris/Hitchens to market their racist filth to imperialism’s liberal intelligentsia.
It’s exactly the same ‘clash of civilizations’ garbage, but Harris & Co. have a special talent for wrapping it in the appropriate ‘secular humanist’ camouflage.
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Agnostic simply means that a person has not chosen a side because there is insufficient evidence to make a logical decision.
Technically you are right, but in the practical use of the term you’re wrong. The “atheist” term is improperly burdened with the notion of 100% certainty in a way that the “theist” term is not.
When a person says: “I believe in the existence of a god”, we label that person a “theist”. Simple as that.
We don’t interrogate them about whether or not they are 100% certain that a god exists, we simply call them a “theist”.
When a person says: “I do not believe in the existence of a god”, we should similarly label that person an “atheist” (if anything at all). They should not have to endure some special interrogation about whether or not they are 100% certain, and if not 100% certain, be labeled “agnostic” instead of “atheist”.
If interrogated, wouldn’t a great number of “theists” also acknowledge some degree of uncertainty about their belief? Should they all then be labeled “agnostic” as well? That might make more sense technically, but for practical sake, it can be assumed that no one knows one way or the other.
Atheism is very much akin to fundamentalist Christianity because they both claim to know what is unknowable for humans at this stage of evolution. In fact we may never get there because there is no guarantee that evolution will take us to higher levels of existence. Sometimes species remain where they are and sometimes they regress. Either way humans are ill-equipped to speculate on any afterlife other than conjecture that one of human consciousness is not likely.
There is so much wrong here, I don’t know where to start. First off, atheism does not require, and very few atheists profess, certainty. Dawkins is an atheist and he discusses this in terms of probability, which is exactly what you do in that quote.
I really don’t get why people have this need to push positive atheism into some sort of bad place, especially people who are themselves a-theists, people with no god. Positive atheism, new atheism, isn’t about god or no god. Its about human knowledge, and the fact that there is no evidence to suggest, no rational argument to even hint, no logical construction to support the possibility that a god exists.
Hedges, by insisting that god claims are somehow beyond science and that morality is somehow beyond evolutionary psychology and that the twentieth century was somehow filled with more carnage than the 19th, is simply making unsupported statements that sound comforting, but don’t stand up under scrutiny.
Grothie and the new atheists, as Hedges was quick to point out, know nothing about the Middle East except the Western propaganda they’ve heard in the mainstream media.
Hedges may have been quick to point it out, but since Hitchens has traveled extensively in the middle east and reported on it, Hedges would be flat wrong.
I haven’t read this whole thread, so this may have been brought up already.
I waited in vain for your guest to explain exactly what he meant by the term “fundamentalist.” According to him, it seems to be equivalent to “divisiveness” and “dehumanization.”
That’s all fine, in the sense that we should be against those things. But I’m bewildered as to what it has to do with fundamentalism. Wikipedia links to a definition of fundamentalism that says: “Fundamentalism, in religion, refers to a belief in the infallibility, and literal interpretation, of a doctrine or holy book.” That’s pretty much in line with how I’ve always understood the term.
If Harris and Hitchens are fundamentalists, exactly which written works are they fundamentalist about? I’m not aware of some sacred text that they both work off of. While their philosophies are similar to one another, as far as I can tell, they developed them independently; and they likely have wildly different opinions from each other about several individual topics. Even more so from Dawkins and Dennett, who I’m pretty sure are opposed to the Iraq war. Surely this is a complete mischaracterization of what makes a position “fundamentalist.”
Also, WTF does Hedges mean to include as part of the term “new atheists” (which I think is kind of a stupid concept to begin with)? Is it only the five guys who have written bestselling books? Whom are they supposed to lead or represent? Do I get to be a “new atheist” by doing a podcast and a cable show? Are you one (DJ)? From my vantage point, it looks like a lot more atheists are against “holy war” than for it, so how did we get stuck being grouped in automatically with everything that those two guys, Harris and Hitchens, believe politically? Harris also has some fairly wacky opinions on meditation and Buddhism, but that doesn’t mean it’s a built in trait of “new atheism.”
Notice how we never attack Europe for their oil. It’s always a group of nonwhites.
Always? We haven’t attacked anybody “for their oil” at least not noticeably. You are aware that gas prices have more than tripled in the last 7 years, right? If we went to war for oil, where’s the oil?
You may have noticed that there are non-white oil producing nations with whom we are NOT at war. And white, non-oil producing nations where we have troops stationed. We may not have noticed that Vietnam doesn’t have much oil, Korea doesn’t have any, Germany is bereft of petroleum reserves, Serbia is an oil free zone and yet we’ve been at war in all of these places in the last century, and we’ve demonized many of those people whether they were white or not.
No one can deny that there is a lot of racism in America. No one can deny that American politics is frequently racist. But its asinine to suggest that we’re “always” attacking some poor group of non-whites to get at their oil, as if that’s the cornerstone of most, or even ANY, American military action.
