[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

Matthias Wasser matthias.wasser at gmail.com
Sun Mar 28 13:14:15 PDT 2010


On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:


>
>
> Dawkins is a loyal participant in that most right-wing of intellectual
> projects, the attempted absolution of imperialism for its crimes. In *The
> God Delusion*, he urges his readers to "[i]magine, with John Lennon, a
> world
> with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers ... no Indian partition, no
> Israeli/Palestinian wars ... no Northern Ireland 'troubles.'" Elsewhere in
> his odious little book, he confidently asserts that "[i]n Northern Ireland,
> Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists'
> respectively" and informs us that "without religion, and religiously
> segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. The warring
> tribes would have intermarried and long since dissolved into each other."
> Trying to pin all the nastiness in the world on a single social force is
> always a fool's errand, but attempting to do so with religions seems to
> take
> one to particularly reactionary, not to mention, ridiculous, places.
>

I still don't think that (or his sympathy for evolutionary psychology) make him subjectively right-wing, though. Naive, sure.


>
> As for Harris, he's an apologist for torture and a
> nuclear first strike, and probably the biggest creep of the bunch, even
> more
> than Hitchens.

Harris believes in reincarnation. I'll never stop finding that funny.



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