I thought this was a fascinating interview. Here’s a taste:
So here’s the flip side of that. You write about the “New Atheism” emerging from England, catching on here. How is it new and why does it seem like a dead end to you?
It seems to me that the New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic sterility.) Christopher Hitchens, most notably, before his death titled his atheist handbook as a deliberate affront to Islam: “God Is Not Great.” At the same time, he traveled the airwaves of America urging us to war in Iraq — and to maintain borders that the Foreign Office had drawn in the sand. With his atheism, he became a darling of the left. With his advocacy of the Iraq misadventure, he became a darling of the right.
Yes! Yes! When I read writers like Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, all I hear is the nattering voice of some entitled personage mansplaining why things like spirituality and intuition are absurd, since they can’t be measured and quantified. (It goes without saying that women are rather easily dismissed for thinking otherwise.) And of course I always enjoy the assumptions that go with these intellectual pronouncements. No, thank you.
It’s ultimately an argument over which belief system an informed intellectual consumer should buy into, and completely sidesteps the hard work of constructing your own beliefs and testing them against your life.
Religious fundamentalist: God took my child away for a reason.
New Atheist: There is no meaning. Man lives and dies.
No room for any alternative explanations. Bah, humbug!
Thanks to Colleen Kirby.
One of the problems of atheism is the same problem of libertarianism or liberalism in a broader sense: it is all things to all people, and there is no central doctrinal authority or “pope” of atheism. So you can say that you don’t like atheism because Christopher Hitchens is an ass, but he’s just a prominent atheist, not a spokesman for all atheists.
Another thing to consider is that atheists come in all stripes of the social ethical spectrum, from considerate and conscientious to homicidally sociopathic. Just like Catholics. Or Jews. Or Muslims. Lots of women are atheists too; I don’t think the way men express themselves–“mansplaining” or the way those *particular* men express themselves is relevant. I don’t know if Naomi Wolf is an atheist but if she gave a lecture, would it be “mansplaining?” She is persuasive, passionate, argumentative much like Dawkins. But most atheists don’t talk about their atheism, with anybody.
One thing I’d speculate almost all atheists have in common is a sense of disgust for the continual, constant disrespect for something that is a matter of their personal, private conscience. Imagine if someone accused you of being hostile for not worshiping the Great Pumpkin, or admiring the great wisdoms as received from the Great Pumpkin, or wanted to subordinate women because of the scriptures of the Great Pumpkin, or tried to legislate the Ten Commandments of the Great Pumpkin into law so you had to conduct yourself as a Great Pumpkinite.
Many if not most spiritualists/deists have a fundamental lack of respect for atheists. The hard work of constructing a belief system starts with realizing that just about everything you were taught as a child was complete bullshit, picking up the pieces, and trying to construct a conscientious code of conduct for the rest of your life, not based on pre-processed doctrinaire baloney, but struggling with every ethical dilemma on a case-by-case basis. That’s hard work. And it gets harder and harder to respect another person’s right to worship as they please when they fundamentally disrespect your wish not to worship anything. Dawkins merely articulates this frustration.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Dawkins ridicules anyone who doesn’t agree with his belief system, yes? See, I don’t really care what anyone believes, as long as it’s not anti-social. But atheists have created a whole vocabulary to anoint themselves superior (“brights,” anyone?) when they can be as full of shit as anyone else.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Dawkins ridicules anyone who doesn’t agree with his belief system, yes? See, I don’t really care what anyone believes, as long as it’s not anti-social. But atheists have created a whole vocabulary to anoint themselves superior (“brights,” anyone?) when they can be as intolerant and full of shit as anyone else.