On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:06:02 -0400 Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com>
writes:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> wrote:
>
> Dawkins is not a right-winger. He was, for a
> > long time, a member of the British Labour Party,
> > at least until he got disgusted with Tony Blair
> > over Iraq. (When he was a grad student
> > in the US back in the 1960s, he was active
> > in the antiwar movement).
>
>
> Dawkins is a loyal participant in that most right-wing of
> intellectual
> projects, the attempted absolution of imperialism for its crimes.
Alas, that is a project in which a great many liberals and social democrats (and yes, Dawkins is one of those) have long participated in, and indeed, have usually taken the lead in.
> 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."
Dawkins is not really wrong in citing the differences in religion in Northern Ireland as being a key ideological force in demarcating the boundaries between the Nationalist and Loyalist communities there. Where he goes off the rails (like most liberals) is that he fails to discern the material forces underlying that, namely British colonialism, which has long used the Loyalists in Northern Ireland to maintain its rule there.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> 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.
> (We
> also witness Parenti take a halting stap in this general direction,
> with his
> ludicrous suggestion that occupied Afghanistan, whose constitution
> states
> that "[t]he sacred religion of Islam shall be the religion of the
> Islamic
> Republic of Afghanistan" and "[n]o law shall contravene the tenets
> and
> provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan," is
> something other
> than a theocracy.)
>
>
> > Dan Dennett calls himself an
> > old fashion ACLU-type of liberal. Hitchens,
> > as we all know, went neocon after 911.
> > Harris is a liberal in the same sense as his
> > friends, Alan Dershowitz and Marty Peretz
> > are "liberals," from which you can
> > draw whatever conclusions that you wish.
> >
>
> I haven't read Dennett on religion, but have the vague impression
> that he
> belongs to a different class of thinkers altogether - that he makes
> a
> conscious effort to avoid absurd claims, as most of us do, but New
> Atheists,
> as a rule, do not. 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.
>
> --
> "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
> mægen
> lytlað."
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>
>
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