[lbo-talk] The God Delusion

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Oct 24 03:30:10 PDT 2006


On 10/20/06, Sujeet Bhatt <sujeet.bhatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/20/features/IDLEDE21.php
>
> A passionate atheist's case against religion
> By Jim Holt The New York Times
>
> Published: October 20, 2006
> The God Delusion. By Richard Dawkins.
> 406 pages. $27. Houghton Mifflin Company.
<snip>
> It's all in good fun when Dawkins mocks a buffoon like Pat Robertson
> and fundamentalist pastors like the one who created "Hell Houses" to
> frighten sin-prone children at Halloween. But it is less edifying when
> he questions the sincerity of serious thinkers who disagree with him,
> like the late Stephen Jay Gould, or insinuates that recipients of the
> million-dollar-plus Templeton Prize, awarded for work reconciling
> science and spirituality, are intellectually dishonest (and presumably
> venal to boot). In a particularly low blow, he accuses Richard
> Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford, of
> attempting to "justify the Holocaust," when Swinburne was struggling
> to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God.
> Perhaps all is fair in consciousness-raising. But Dawkins's avowed
> hostility can make for scattershot reasoning. Moreover, in training
> his Darwinian guns on religion, he risks destroying a larger target
> than he intends.

It's self-defeating for atheists to attack other atheists for being insufficiently atheist in a country like this where self-conscious atheists are a small minority. To be sure, America has a way of making atheists feel beleaguered, and a beleaguered minority tends to become sectarian (compensating for the lack of popularity by competition for purity), but sectarianism in turn dooms the said minority to obscurity, as you can see in the culture of American leftists. So, we can't afford sectarianism like Dawkins's, attacking the late Stephen Jay Gould no less, whose contribution to popular scientific education was second to none.

Instead, we have to draw a political line in such a way as to make us irreligious a part of a political majority, marginalizing the most dangerous theists on the Right. To do so, we have to bundle together the irreligious, religious leftists, and the religious who are not leftists yet but are open to considering left-wing approaches on select key issues. Only by doing so can we hope to make any political progress here.

For that purpose, it is generally not advisable to debate theological questions with theists. For, after all, theology is only relevant to believers. Instead, we ought to approach all religions mainly as social phenomena, ways for people to organize themselves into social networks for the purpose of mutual aid and political mobilization, and study various theological views only in so far as they aid the understanding of religions as social phenomena. Once we understand religions in this way, we can then see which congregations have to be a part of any potential coalition on the Left. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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