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.
Where the hell did Skyrimjob get the idea that Hichens is a great writer? He isn’t even a great atheist writer. His writing is steeped in self-love and brooding resentment that anyone might have different beliefs, likes, or dislikes than he does, or that they might not recognize his brilliance.
My parents keep buying me subscriptions of The Atlantic and he’s one of their many questionable staff choices. Here he is huffily whining about the existence of liberal comedians.
(For the record, I’d consider PZ Myers to be a good atheist writer.)
Hey, Skyrimjob, did you happen to read that Atlantic article? Because if not, here’s a quote for you.
If I too was a petty, childish person I might be tempted to call that little rant sour grapes on the part of Hitchens.
Katz, that was the single most boring article about comedy I’ve ever read.
@Emily Goddess, good point. I should say that if you define religious as believing in God/gods then lots of buddhists, at least in the west, aren’t religious.
Anyway, people who say they want to wipe out religion should make a clear definition to accompany that claim. Like, professor Torbjörn Tännsjö on our institution labels himself an atheist and is a member of Humanisterna (Swedish atheist organisation). Still, former arch bishop of Sweden K G Hammar once claimed that he considers Tännsjö religions, because he counts Tännsjö’s metaethical theory (Plato-inspired substantive moral realism) a kind of religion. Should his views be wiped or not?
It really doesn’t matter because there’s no definition that wouldn’t make that an asshole belief.
Going around Tumblr. Can I not simply enjoy a few Simblrs without MRAs INVADING MY SPACE?!?!?!?!?!? Some of these are direct results of living in a patriarchy, others are…..sigh.
>I would say that non-Buddhists who declare Buddhism “not a religion” might be operating on a very Western-centric definition of “religion”
They’re mostly using the western definition of Buddhism, which has been both informed by philosophers of enlightement and a rather small group of japanese Buddhists who successfully sold their specific brand of it to the european parts of the world.
>Being called a sexual deviant or a pervert because you were expressing your sexuality
Expressing your sexuality in a dance number accompanied by a song, like in a Broadway show, is never okay.
I mean other than when you’re actually in a Broadway production about your sexuality.
@Katz: I agree, but if they were being intellectually honest assholes they should clarify exactly what they mean by religion.
At my job, I’m basically the only theist. Some atheists you can have interesting conversations regarding religion with… while others just want to label me non-religious. Like my idea of God isn’t precise enough or anthropomorphic enough or whatever to count as a religious one. I think it’s analogous to fat-phobic people telling an obviously fat friend that “NOOOOO you’re NOT fat, you’re maybe curvaceous but not FAT!”.
I’ll have to take your word for it, but this wouldn’t surprise me. One of the things Buddhism does have in common with Christianity is that it is very old and comprised of a kajillion sects, each with its own theology or philosophy or local variants. We can’t extrapolate Buddhism from Zen or the Dalai Lama any more than one could extrapolate Christianity from the Methodism or the Pope. And Western understanding of Buddhism would be filtered through colonialism, racism, and the biases of whichever Buddhist was telling us about it.
It’s also important to keep in mind that not all Buddhists are monastics, so even if the literate clergy who spend all day thinking about theology and cosmology say Buddhism has no gods, that doesn’t change what the average Joe is doing – and outside of India, the average Joe is practicing a Buddhism that was introduced alongside the indigenous religion(s) of his area. The Japanese, for example, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinbutsu_sh%C5%ABg%C5%8Ddeliberately tried to blend them.
I’m an atheist, but I think that if religion were to be wiped out, like, if everyone in the planet suddenly woke up and went “Huh, religion is dumb, I’m not gonna do it anymore”, I suspect very little would change. Assholes who use religion as an excuse to be assholes would simply find another excuse, like for instance “the greater good”, that one’s always a crowd pleaser. Some of the awful entrenched religious groups would find their religious power removed, but they still have a lot of financial and political clout, so they could probably repackage themselves as something different and continue doing the crap they’ve been doing all along.
Continuing: There seems to be something of that in the Harris interview as well. He calls dogmatic communism a “political religion”, because they believed stuff for dogmatic, non-evidence-based reasons. So basically his definition of religion is being dogmatic and believing stuff for no reason. Now, this will probably exclude some people who self-identify as religious (he might wanna exclude Immanuel Kant for instance) but it includes loads of people who identify as atheists. The old Soviet dictators and their devote followers obviously, but also the more stupid members of the modern atheism movement who has no grasp about what science is, how it operates, what kind of things can or cannot be investigated by empirical means etc, but still worships this thing called science that they don’t know shit about.
He does make some good points about atheism not leading to moral disaster by pointing to Sweden and other countries where a large portion of the population is atheist. Religious people who claim that God is necessary to underpin morality are obviously wrong. And you know, if you DEFINE religion as “dogmatic beliefs for no reason” I totally agree that it’s a bad thing (although I wouldn’t want to narrow down “reason” to “epistemological reason”). I just can’t see why you would define it in that way.
It’s sort of like I agree with him that if you define free will as “godlike power to create yourself out of nothing” than no, we don’t have free will, but I can’t see any reason for the definition.
Which should keep them busy for a while. I did my undergrad in Religious Studies, and after we took the course on definitions of religion, our senior thesis project was to create and defend our own definition. It’s surprisingly difficult.
And anyway, if these guys took a second to define religion before railing against it, they might have to admit that their definition only fits a certain slice of the religious pie (typically the Abrahamic religions, or specifically Christianity with a side of the currently trendy Islamophobia).
I have the opposite problem. I’m pretty sure there’s no God, but I consider myself religious because I belong to and attend a church.
Whoops, broken link above. Try this
Hitchens was a hack. He may not have been a “Conservative”, but you’d have a hard time (apart from the tribal marker of his atheism making him an outlier) telling his views from that of any other neocon.
He wasn’t brilliant, he was facile. He took bog-standard arguments and dressed them up with pretty invective. As with William F. Buckley the charade of “genius” falls apart when you look past the method, and look at the message.
Kill Brown People? Check.
Torture People? Check.
Women suck? Check.
Even if my estimation is wrong, and he was a genius, Hitchens was an ass.
You know, it’s pretty funny when someone calls Hitchens a “hack” in prose so vastly inferior to Hitchens’ own that I’m reminded of cave scratchings.
Where the hell did Skyrimjob get the idea that Hichens is a great writer? He isn’t even a great atheist writer. His writing is steeped in self-love and brooding resentment that anyone might have different beliefs, likes, or dislikes than he does, or that they might not recognize his brilliance.
That’s wrong and ridiculous. Literally objectively wrong.
PZ Myers may be more in line with your political beliefs (the same is probably true of me), and his writing is adequate for what he does. But to mention his writing in the same breath as Hitchens’ is a cosmic joke.
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.
What are you talking about?! If you don’t like his style, fine (although I’d argue that even if it’s not your thing he objectively has an amazing command over the language). But, okay, I’ve got his collection Arguably open right now. It’s mostly insightful book reviews, superb essays on American history, and other assorted Americana. Plus, the women aren’t funny thing. Again, Hitchens was a LOT more than just a critic of Islam.
Oh, great. now we’re doing the literary version of the “Radiohead is the best band ever!” conversation we had with Mr Al.
I read Hitchens.
I liked Hitchens at the time.
Then I grew up and stopped being a teenager who resented the world and a lot of his cleverness turned out to be not-so-clever.
Funny, that.
This is literally the highest ratio of “words clearly not understood by the writer” to “words used in a single sentence” I’ve ever seen.
I read Hitchens.
I liked Hitchens at the time.
Then I grew up and stopped being a teenager who resented the world and a lot of his cleverness turned out to be not-so-clever.
Funny, that.
Yeah, what you mean is, you jumped on the annoying haterade bandwagon that pops up around anything popular.
Because the only reason people might not be instantly and forever enamoured of a misogynist blowhard is their instinctive hatred of popularity. Of course.
Ok, whatever, Christopher Hitchens was the best writer of all time.
Who gives a shit? What does that have to do with anything?
Oh no not the haterade!
I’ll grant that he had an interesting turn of phrase. That he used it to dress up bog standard stupidity and hatred does not make him a genius. The guy was a classic narcissist and whether you loved or hated him you just fed his monumental nd extremely fragile ego.
The use of the word “haterade” really adds to the overall sense of maturity here, don’t you think?
I actually liked Hitchens when he was in his taking down the cult of Mother Theresa stage. But then he either turned into a neocon or outed himself as one and I was just terribly embarrassed for him.