In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
Oh and just cause it’s in the post, A+ is a giant circle jerk, I don’t recommend any atheist go there unless they are into that sort of thing.
Probably waving his magic wand a lot. By himself.
I’m a he.
And I’m not saying that Hitchens is somehow above criticism, but he was in no way a conservative. He didn’t kowtow to ideology, though, so yes, he deviated from the liberal party line in a few isolated instances. Whether or not I agree with him on those deviations is not relevant. I wish more people had that kind of fucking integrity. Plus, he was one of the best writers of this generation, and I do think a lot of the Hitchens haters have sour grapes about it.
And where is this misogyny charge coming from? Is it seriously all over the women aren’t funny thing?! He was trolling, and by all measures trolling very successfully.
Conclusion, Hitchens was awesome.
Why would you assume that people here of all places are suffering from “sour grapes” about Hitchens being a good writer? Most of us like good writers. It’s some of the things that he believed that we take issue with.
Honestly, there are very few circumstances in which “you’re just jealous” as an argument as to why someone doesn’t like something doesn’t make the person saying it look kind of childish.
Yeah, Hitchens was a childish, petulant misogynist who was utterly convinced of his own superiority to pretty much everyone on the planet. If you like his writing, good for you, but don’t pretend that makes him a liberal darling or that it makes people who don’t like him ‘jealous’. There’s a pretty good roundup of why I’m not so keen on him here. You don’t have to share my reasons.
Was he trolling when he said that “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.”?
You do know that saying wildly offensive and generally arseholeish things – even if you don’t believe them (and we all know he did believe it) – in the name of ‘trolling’ doesn’t excuse the fact that you’re being an utter tool, right?
This is something one hears frequently… and well, it’s true if one has a very narrow definition of religion.
Buddhism, originally, taught that the gods are themselves subject to birth and rebirth (although they’re powerful and incredibly long-lived) and can’t save you from this cycle – only your own efforts can do so. So, if one defines religion as believing that god or gods can save you, it wasn’t a religion to start with. Nowadays many buddhists (at least in the west) don’t believe in gods at all, so if one defines religion as belief in god/gods, it’s not a religion.
Still, as long as one believes in reincarnation and the possibility of escaping reincarnation through reaching enlightenment, my linguistic intuitions tell me it should still be labelled a “religion”… I’d agree it’s just a “belief system” if you remove that too.
Btw: Didn’t Dawkins have this super-wide definition of religion according to which communism counts as one?
So the many Buddhists who DO believe in gods, devas, ancestors, or spirits get declared “not a religion” because of those who don’t? Or is Buddhism a religion to some and not to others?
I would say that non-Buddhists who declare Buddhism “not a religion” might be operating on a very Western-centric definition of “religion”, but that opens the question of whether the very concept of “religion” is western-centric. And of course, as a non-Buddhist myself, I have to acknowledge that my opinion that it at least looks like a religion is probably not worth much, either…
“Religion” is very much a Western concept. One of the best evidences of this is in China and Japan. If you ask them whether or not they’re religious, most of them will laugh at you. If you ask them whether or not they’re atheists, they’ll laugh at you again.
Both countries have a (relatively) small population of atheists (larger than the US, I think, but not by much), but an even smaller population of “religious” because they don’t have a concept of religion, at least not like we here in the West do. What they understand is spirituality and philosophy, and that’s how they identify.
Nathan, dude, that comment was so steeped in “mystery of the Orient” style racial and cultural stereotypes that reading it felt like jumping in a time machine. Knock it off.
(Buddhism and Shinto? Both actual religions.)
Meanwhile, we have the people who go on and on about how ~brilliant~ he was and what a ~great writer~ he was whenever his sexism is brought up.
That’s another thing – historically speaking a lot of great writers have been very sexist. This is not a new concept.
It’s pretty funny to see someone getting upset that not everyone liked Hitchens given the whole “contrarian” persona that he deliberately cultivated.
@CassandraSays…
Um… huh?
That’s what I’ve learned in pretty much every single one of my Cultural Anthropology classes, starting with Intro, then Anthropology of Religion, Development of Ancient Civilizations (while talking about Ancient China and the development of spiritual systems there… we didn’t get to Buddhism, however), and Anthropology of the East.
This is what they’re teaching in Anthropology courses in college.
I think what you’re missing here is the difference between what people think you mean if you say to them “are you religious?” and whether or not an answer of “no” actually means that they don’t practice a religion.
Just because a religion’s rituals and the way that people follow it doesn’t look like the Abrahamic religions doesn’t mean that it’s not actually a religion, and that people aren’t actually following it. I can see why, say, Zen might confuse Westerners from that perspective, but if anyone can look at Tibetan Buddhism and say “that’s not a religion” then I think they have some very odd and limited ideas about what a religion is.
(I actually had a version of this conversation once with a friend who was raised Zen Buddhist, in Hokkaido. Apparently from her perspective “being religious” means “going to the temple all the time like Mom does”, so she’d answer “no” to your question, but she still identifies as a Buddhist and leans on her religion during difficult times.)
@CassandraSays
Oh I see what you’re saying.
I’ve just been taught that it was us (Westerners) who came up with the whole concept of religion in the first place (well, actually, ancient Egyptians, if I’m not mistaken, came up with the basis, but it was generally defined much more recently, at least as an anthropological concept), and so while, yes, according to definition, Tibetan Buddhism is a religion, it’s practitioners wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as such or call it such(?). They would just say “I’m a Buddhist” as opposed to “I’m a religious Buddhist”.
At least, that’s how I’ve understood it…
Maybe I’m being taught wrong. Always possible. Any racism is entirely unintentional on my part and I apologize for it.
Anthropology isn’t inherently a racism-free discipline, especially given that it has historically involved finding an exciting foreign Other and trying to explain their culture in terms of Western categories.
China and Japan are industrialized countries whose people have had ample contact with the West, our pop culture, our religions and our definitions thereof. I don’t know much about China, but in Japan people definitely have a concept of religion and the differences between them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent all that effort trying to stamp out Buddhism, and they wouldn’t have more New Religious Movements than almost any other country (indeed, the term was coined by Japanese scholars).
In my experience that’s how a lot of Americans, especially younger ones, use the word. “Being religious” means being a Jesus Freak or going to church every Sunday. It’s why “spiritual but not religious” is such a common identifier here.
But see, that’s a totally imperialist perspective, the idea that if other people don’t do religion like we do, or don’t approach it from the same perspective, then they’re not actually religious. It’s taking our idea of what it means to be involved in a religion and imposing that frame on other people, which isn’t cool.
Also, if we were to accept this theory that that part of the world just doesn’t really do religion, explain why so many Korean people are Baptist.
@ emily
Yeah, in my experience that’s exactly how everyone who I know who’s Japanese sees “being religious”. They think it means doing lots of stuff, performing tasks/rituals, rather than being about what you believe or what you feel internally. By that standard, no, most younger people aren’t religious, just like they aren’t in Europe, but we still recognize that most Europeans are in some way involved in a religion, so it feels weird and creepy and racist to me to act like when people in Asia do the same it means they’re just not culturally wired for religion.
IME it’s actually pretty hard to find academic discussions of that part of the world over here that aren’t steeped in weird racist assumptions. It’s getting better, I think, but it’s still an issue.
Also ! You really can’t have a conversation about religious expression in modern China without taking into consideration the effects of communism.
Hm.
Both of you bring up a great point. I will amend that hole in my thinking.
That makes me wonder though if the concept of “cultural relativism” might be at least a little racist, then, cause it’s in the name of that we’re taught to understand that not everyone “recognizes” religion “like we do” (“we” being those of us in the West).
SO what you’re saying is that you aren’t familiar with criticism of hitchens for being sexist, but you’re sure that everyone who makes that criticism is just jealous. You’re of course clever enough to know better than everyone else who actually bothered to look into it for a moment.
Why would anyone care about what you think of anything? You’ve put your shitty reasoning ability on display for everyone in a mere two sentences.
Skyrimjob – you’re also assuming everyone admires Hitchens’s writing style. Wrong. I don’t, and I sure as hell am not envious of it. Even if I did, it doesn’t excuse the content.
Today I learned that if someone is a good writer they are beyond criticism.