At 04:06 PM 3/28/2010, Joseph Catron wrote:
>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. 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. (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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