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.
Cassandrasays – exactly. My godless daughter came to my baptism, age 9, and spoke quietly to me beforehand about how she wasn’t going to sing the hymns because it didn’t feel right for her. She stood up for her beliefs and was exceptionally polite about respecting mine. She doesnt need these athiest leaders – she is more mature than them already.
Religion is detrimental to public discourse in that it allows people to elevate their feelings and opinions to uncontestable facts. Once you say “God says so,” that can’t be proven or disproven, so the discussion is effectively shut down. It lets harmful and ridiculous ideas–Women are only for having babies! Gay people should have different rights than straight people! It’s very important to kill lots of brown people in oil-rich countries!–be treated as if they had merit.
What the New Atheist guys made me realize is that you don’t need religion to pull that graft. You can do the same thing, even advance exactly the same bigoted ideas, under the guise of rationality. It takes a little more cleverness to rationalize your feelings rather than blame them on God, but not really all that much. It’s just that instead of “God says so,” you say, “I say so, and I am a rational person, so this is a rational idea.”
In general, I’ve found, when people say they’re rational, what they really mean is that they don’t have the self-awareness required to tell when they’re being irrational.
After all, there are plenty of non-religious ideas that can’t be proven or disproven. I can’t scientifically disprove “women aren’t funny.” Or “abortion is bad.” Or “the world would be better without Muslims.” Or “people should laugh at my jokes instead of Al Franken’s.” Or, yes, “religion is more harmful than rape.” I mean, how would you even measure that?
LOL yeah, that pretty much desribes him! I wrote preaching to the choir in some haste (I’m at work) and should have clarified that it’s a really small choir – not at all “atheists in general,” more like “atheists who are also antitheists (with a possible subset of people who like being dicks about other people’s beliefs)”.
It’s the “you’re delusional” BS that pisses me off. Yeah, these dudes are SO much mind-readers who know what’s going on in other people’s heads and who can just write off others’ experiences and interpretations because Oxbridge academic.
The unit of measurement seems to be “number of upset feelings per day that this gives me, the most rational man in the world”.
QFT.
Some belated thoughts on Hitchens. Hitchens was an eloquent writer and a sharp polemicist with an impressive array of knowledge and a good memory. He was also a hack.
Like some other people here, I used to like Hitchens a lot, maybe 20 years ago. After 9/11, he became pretty much insufferable.
The reason he was a hack was that at some point he just decided to coast on his ability to string phrases together (and pop in erudite references from time to time). All of his writings were obviously just dashed off without a lick of research or thought. I’ve read book reviews of his in which it was abundantly clear he hadn’t actually read the book in question; he’d just glanced at it, maybe skimmed the intro, and tried to cover up his lack of work by riffing on shit vaguely related to the book.
His book on religion was little more than a stream-of-consciousness rant, with him spewing forth various thoughts he’s accumulated on the subject over his life (whether they had any relevance to the issues he was supposedly dealing with or not). He had a good memory, but clearly did zero research, and the book is an incoherent mess. Though as always he could toss out a few clever phrases and classical references from time to time to disguise the lack of substance.
In the end there wasn’t much more to him than the contrarian persona he developed early in his career.
Careful, David, you’ll have Skyrimjob going into total meltdown if he’s still here. 😀
@ katz
It seems to be the same sort of mental mechanism that allows dudes to insist that women are too emotional while they’re in the middle of a screaming tantrum and posting one 500 word comment after another about how much something has hurt their feelings.
“Haterade?” HAHAHA, oh, what trenchant criticism of those who don’t like Hitchens, Skyrimjob.
Are we sure this little turd isn’t our Boston baby?
Haterade, the fizzy drink that keeps you hatin’ on them interleckchual giants …
@ hellkell
The name seems to fit, given that it combines an interest in geek stuff with thinly-concealed bitterness about something he’s never had the opportunity to experience.
Cassandra: oh, snap.
He’s posted here a few times since I’ve been on site (post-Bostonite) with a few dubious comments, but I don’t think he’s been spotted as a returning troll … though this thread certainly went into troll meltdown at speed!
That having been said, no reason to assume it’s the same guy, since angry petulant young men with an interest in geek things, truckloads of resentment about not getting as much sex as they want, and a tendency to get really upset if anyone says anything that’s not ass-kissy about their idols aren’t exactly unusual on the internet, or even on feminist blogs. If we were to create a guide to types of trolls that feminist blogs attract that would be its own category.
True enough, there’s no shortage of those types.
Actually a catalogue of trolls with general types might be a fun project, since the current trolls are getting a bit boring.
It could be another Big Book of Learnin’ type of project.
Skyrimjob reads like just the sort of person who put me off so many atheist sites – too many of that sort of troll on there. “Religion sucks! If you don’t think exactly like me you’re delusional and irrational!” Yeah, yeah, heard it all before.
Sad to read Harris said such a dumb-ass thing. I used to think he was kind of hot…
I’ve read book reviews of his in which it was abundantly clear he hadn’t actually read the book in question; he’d just glanced at it, maybe skimmed the intro, and tried to cover up his lack of work by riffing on shit vaguely related to the book.
I had a long post on God Is Not Great that got eaten, but it basically boiled down to this, only with the Bible and the Koran. The whole book reads as if Hitchens has no idea that anyone in the 5,000 years previous to Christopher Hitchens has ever studied these texts or written scholarship on them. He treats himself to paragraphs-long victory laps for noticing things that occurred to me when I was about twelve–and I’m no genius theologian, just a kid who paid attention in CCD.
Honestly, I like some of the stuff he wrote over his career, and he could certainly be entertainingly bitchy when he got his dander up, but I can’t get behind the sexism, the racism, the neocon militarism he fled behind after 9/11, or the general douchiness.
Hi all! Long time lurker here. ^_^
I hope to maybe clarify why some atheists might be so…”reactionary” in there atheism and why they band together online and look up to people like Dawkins and Hitchens.
@CassandraSays
I also started having doubts about religion at 8 years old. Like you, I came to these conclusions on my own. I didn’t come out and say it though. Had I done so, my family would not have reacted like WeeBoy did. I’m pretty sure I would of been met with a slipper beating and maybe being sent to some church seminars and Sunday School until I took it back. My family is not religious, but they are deeply spiritual. And coming out as an atheist would be one of the worst things I could do. It would be more well received that I come out as another religion than to come out as an atheist. Coming out as gay would be met with more understanding.
I think some of the atheists online who cry persecution may come from a similar situation. Only being surrounded by other religious and spiritual people, it felt like I was the only person who thought this way. I thought that maybe something was wrong with me, that is, until I discovered the growing online atheist community.
I don’t think it’s fair to minimize what some atheists may go through because you’re in a part of the world where being an atheist is A-okay. In America, it really kind of sucks. As my moniker suggests, I’m from Brooklyn. I can only imagine it’s that much harder in the Mid West.
That being said, as a feminist–I have a growing dislike for the online atheist community and for people like Dawkins and Hitchens.
Brooklyn, were you around when people were talking about Atheism+? It might interest you.
Katz,
Yeah! I discovered Atheism + here. And I’m so happy I did. =D
Whoops, I used my word press login. (which is on moderation) =P
Katz,
Yes. I actually discovered Athiesm+ here ^_^
Sorry I’m late to the Hitchens hate-fest, but I gotta say he was a stupid asshole. I didn’t notice his misogyny one way or the other, but his writing was terrible. He tried to be Bertrand Russel, but he didn’t have his wit or knowledge.
I read G-d Is Not Great, and it was just embarrassing. He lacked any formal knowledge of philosophy, so his arguments were poorly constructed to begin with, but he also didn’t bring out any of the big guns he could have used. Not once did he mention documentary hypothesis. I’m more used to formal arguments on G-d, but they’re usually written by people who know what they’re talking about so he didn’t impress me by comparison.
I’ve concluded that there’s a certain subset of white male atheists who are very similar in temperament and personality to the really evangelical, holier-than-thou vegans*.
(Puns fully intended. 😉