The Labour Humanist

What kind of atheist?

Don't tell Madeleine Bunting but according to this online test I am, apparently, "scientific" "militant" "atheist";

You scored as Scientific Atheist. These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, a lthough I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Militant Atheist 75% Scientific Atheist 75% Angry Atheist 42% Apathetic Atheist 42% Agnostic 42% Spiritual Atheist 25% Theist 17% What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Just for fun folks...I don't like the word atheist anyway, if I am an atheist you also better call me an a-fairyist, a-santaist etc as well.

The dodgy politics of Sam Harris

Arch cultural relativist Madeleine Bunting is attacking something called "new" atheism today. It's the usual weak stuff, but her attack on Sam Harris is, sadly, justified. For a more reasoned explanation of why the best selling "atheist" polemicist is spouting at best dodgy, at worst, vile politics check out this article by Meera Nanda on the Butterflies and Wheels web site. Short quote:

"In his rationalist Jihad on Jihadi theology, Harris’s motto seems to be (with due apologies to Barry Goldwater): “Extremism in the defense of reason is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of secularism is no virtue.” Harris can barely curb his enthusiasm for George Bush’s disastrous wars, announcing gleefully that “we are at war against Islam” – not at war against violent extremists, mind you, but against the very “vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran” (p. 109). He finds tortured justifications for torturing suspected terrorists in America’s Gulag. He goes even further:

some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them….Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” (p. 53, emphasis added.)

The villains who are beyond the pale of reason and who deserve to die are all Muslims. While he has some harsh things to say about Christians and Jews as well, he spares them the wars and the torture, for unlike the Muslim barbarians, they have had their reformations and their enlightenments."

Is Karl Rove an atheist?

Here's a fascinating thought, is Karl Rove actually an atheist and, indeed, is George W Bush not quite the fervent believer he is often portrayed? This article, if it eventually turns out to be true, is amazing stuff and would show the Bush administration to be far more cynical than even most of its critics would have believed.

Dawkins vs O'Reilly on Fox News

Here is a video of Richard Dawkins' appearance on Fox News last night with right wing ranting demagogue journalist Bill O'Reilly.

So we have 4 minutes to discuss life, the universe and everything with O'Reilly using his unique understanding of what an interview is supposed to be by attempting to berate his guest and quickly trying to move on every time the guest starts to score points:

The video is also on the Dawkins web site where it is debated, and more debate as well as a transcript available on evolutionblog.

A new flag carrier for political atheism

Step forward a slightly surprising flag carrier for political atheism - Matthew Paris - who has launched a rallying cry for the non-religious to make their voices heard in the public square. The article is in today's Times and is a response to the large number of critical emails he received after recently writing an article urging "intelligent Christians" to fight back against nonsense such as the idea that Pope John Paul II might have cured a nun from his grave. Paris says many emailers were basically telling him that if he didn't believe then he should "shut up" and stop writing about such stuff. This is a familiar line for Paris who recounts his time as a Conservative MP and how one Tory Chief Whip  who explained he never felt the need to tell anyone about his personal atheism in case it "astonished" some of his local voters.

Here is Paris' response, it's worth reproducing one large chunk of the article:

"How do we reply? An ad hominem response would be to remark that when the Church had the upper hand it was happy to persecute, imprison or behead non-believers and fight crusades against other religions. Now it has lost its boss status it simply asks us to keep our opinions to ourselves (but still wants laws to criminalise us for mocking its pretensions).

On the back foot at last, it discovers (first) a brotherhood between all its sects. Then as the situation deteriorates Christianity discovers within itself a respect first for Judaism (suddenly we are all “Judaeo-Christians”), then women with a Christian vocation, then for divorcees, and finally finds a common purpose with religions such as Islam, too (the “faith” community). Needs must.

And as the Devil (or falling church attendance) drives, these “members of the faith community” cease enforcing their moral imperatives upon a secular world and retreat into whimpering about their “freedom of conscience” to carry on persecuting the minority groups upon whose sinfulness they can still find a consensus. Freedom of conscience, my eye! If only there were an afterlife: Martin Luther would have loved Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s protests. They don’t like it up ’em.

As mainstream Christian church attendances fall farther still I predict that the Church of England, and finally the Roman Catholics, will be driven to conclude that they cannot even afford to make enemies of homosexuals, unmarried couples and family planners, and start welcoming them in too. I expect they’ll call it the “love community”. In truth it’s the “can’t afford to be choosy” community.

But there I go again. Getting passionate, fighting dirty. But we have a better argument than “you’d do the same to us if you could” — though they would, and until about half a century ago they did.

It is that they will again, unless we non-believers are watchful, and energetic and — yes — passionate. I hate ending up in scraps with nice Anglicans and thoughtful Catholics because the Church of England and intelligent Catholicism are not the problem. They are the best kind of Christians, but the best lack all conviction. It is the worst who are full of passionate intensity. Look at the evangelical movement in America, and to some extent, now, here. Look at the Religious Right in Israel. Look at fundamentalist Islam. What they share, what drives them, the tiger in their tanks, is an absolute, unshakeable belief in an ever-present divinity, with plans for nations that He communicates to the leaders, or would-be leaders, of nations. They are the very devil, these people, they could wreck our world, and their central belief in God’s plan has to be confronted. Confronted with passion. Confronted because, and on the ground that, it is not true.

Disbelief can be passionate. Sometimes it should be. Agnosticism can be passionate. A sense that we lack certitude, lack evidence, lack the external command of any luminous guiding truth, may not always lead to lassitude, complaisance or a modest silence. Sometimes it should provoke a great shout: “Stop. You don’t know that. You have no right.”

I hit you, earlier on, with a burst of the admirable David Hume. But he was not always right. “Opposing one species of superstition to another,” he wrote, “set them a-quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.” No, David. Listen instead to Nietzsche. “This eternal indictment of Christianity,” he said, “I will write on walls, wherever there are walls.”

We who do not believe must be ready with our paintbrushes, our chisels and our cans of aerosol spray. Disbelief can be more than an absence of belief. It can be a redeeming, saving force. "

What is equally interesting about Matthew Paris is that he is a Conservative. In Britain, the most prominent advocates of secular politics have always come from the left. What we may be seeing now is the ongoing growth of secular attitudes in the UK finally reaching the far bastion of organised religion - the Tories. Which can only be a good thing at the end of the day.

Youtube atheists and the inspiration of Peter Kay

A little something for the weekend. There is no point to this except amusement and perhaps even some bemusement. Anyway, for your viewing delight we have the "youtube atheists" joining together to sing their version of show me the way to Amarillo:

Hat tip to the Atheist Jew

A new level of tosh in the Guardian: Apparently atheists and secularists are all right wing capitalists

Now I only just said last week that we don't "do religion" on this blog - except where religion clashes with the cherished idea of secular democracy. I should have added one other category - where believers try and smear the character of us non-believers.

In the Guardian on Saturday was a column by someone called Nicholas Buxton which so infuriated me, I need to sound off a little. If I can crudely paraphrase Buxton, he wrote that there is no such thing as reality, just different social constructions and discourses, and that Christians like to construct life with special meaning whereas secularists and atheists are all in favour of globalised markets and the commodification of life.

It's a load of badly argued tosh, but contained within this text is the subtext that always drives me mad, that somehow Christians are better people because they've got "souls" and the rest of us are lesser members of society. I don't make any assumptions of the personal qualities, good or bad, of another human being purely based on their religion, or lack of. I thought it would be quite obvious that we should judge people on what they do and not on which belief they publicly ascribe to. But if a religious person wants to move way from that common sense and make personalised attacks on all non-believers, then we must retain the right to bite back.

I have always suspected that a number of theists would eventually abandon their centuries old claim to know The Truth after having just about all of it shredded by scientific advances, and instead resort to cultural relativism. You have your truth, I have my truth, and it would be unfair and aggressive to submit someone else's truth to any kind of scrutiny, or heaven forbid, demand evidence and rational argument to back up that truth. And this is exactly where Buxton is coming from.

Of course as soon as you use evidence to evaluate Buxton's arguments, they come crashing down. The non-religious are more likely to vote for left wing and social democratic parties than Christians. Social democrats, believe the markets should be made to work for people and not the other way around. The biggest force pushing global markets, trampling over democratic control, and turning every aspect of social life into a commodity - are the current incumbents of the White House -  who just about all happen to be...Christians. Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Buxton tries to claim that human life was in some way valued more before the decline of Christianity:

"Where once we were souls, we are now consumers"

Well I wouldn't fancy being a peasant in Europe when the church had its way and strongly supported for centuries a system of feudal bondage and slavery. Hardly a profound point to make, but the Buxton article is a gross re-writing of history.  Quaequam blog attacks the article on similar grounds:

"...the Church was a political body which was perfectly happy to treat the hoi polloi as so much fodder to work on its land and fight and die in its wars. Trendy lefty though I may be, I’m much happier being a post-Enlightenment ‘consumer’ than a pre-enlightenment ’soul’.

You also only have to look around you to see that there are plenty of Christians who are perfectly happy to treat us as consumers. Brian Souter is hardly the poster child for corporate social responsibility. Thatcher, the vanguard of neoliberalism in the UK, was hardly famous for her atheism: Reagan and his spiritual heir George Bush are famous for their faith."

This article was published in the Guardian on the same day the newspaper lead its front page approvingly with a quote from Gordon Brown and his concern about celebrity culture: "It is a remarkable culture where people appear on television and are famous simply for the act of appearing on television." I don't think it's being too harsh to say that Buxton may have some talents, but writing insightful opinion pieces isn't one of them. It seems his only apparent qualification for getting prime space in a national newsaper is, ahem, that he appeared on a TV "reality" show called The Monastery.

Buxton previously wrote for the Guardian that a life without religion would give us no reason to get up in the morning and instead we should just give up and jump off the edge of a cliff. Hmm, interesting insight into his state of mind!

Update:

Unsurprisingly Buxton has been well and truly trashed in the comments section on the Guardian web site. It was also good to see the philosopher Stephen Law join in the "debate":

"Buxton is here more or less quoting from Rowan William' Dimbleby Lecture in which Williams claims that only a religious tradition makes "possible a real questioning of the immediate agenda of a society, the choices that are defined and managed for you by the market." Buxton would have us believe only the religious ever really question our shallow commercial culture. They alone are the "free thinkers".

As an atheist philosopher who has spent half a lifetime asking such questions as whether there’s a God, whether life has meaning, what makes things right and wrong, whether there may be life after death, and whether there is anything beyond the material, I find it surprising that Buxton and the Archbishop would pretend that it’s only from the perspective of a religious tradition that such questions ever get asked.

The great religious traditions do not have a monopoly on addressing the most fundamental and challenging issues. They share that honour with the secular, philosophical tradition (which is of course, also older than theirs).

And one advantage of a more philosophical approach to such questions (which certainly doesn’t rule out religious answers, of course) is that it doesn’t prejudge the issue. Rather than approaching such questions in a genuinely critical, open-minded way, religious enquirers have often already made up their minds: they’ve already decided that only a religious answer will do. In the hands of the faithful, questions like “What is the meaning of life?” may be asked, not in the spirit of sincere, open-minded enquiry, but merely as the opening gambit in an attempt to recruit more true believers.

Let's have more philosophy, not more religion."

I don't "do religion", but I know someone who does

As regular readers might know this blog doesn't "do religion"...no honestly, it really doesn't! This blog does do the interaction, or perhaps clash is often the better word, between politics and religion, between the secular idea of an equal place for all beliefs in society and those who want to give religious belief special privileges. But we don't do religion as in looking at, and taking apart, the gaps and holes in the claims to truth from the main religions. I have personally, like millions and millions of others, left all that behind, it isn't required to make sense of the world in which we live, it's going back to old ground so to speak.

Now, if you do like that kind of thing, recently added to the links section is Stephen Law's blog. Stephen is the editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK.He has published several books and is currently senior lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. And Stephen does do religion!  From moral relativism to the "problem of evil" Stephen dissects the many weaknesses in religions' assertions. Well worth a read.

Also recommended if you want to see some atheist jousting with mostly Christian theology check the blog aggregator atheistblogs.

Christopher Hitchens in the dark with a dozen men coming at him who had all just been to a prayer meeting...

Christopher Hitchens was in his usual ebullient form this week at the Times/Intelligence2 debate "are we better off without religion?" Speaking for the motion were the heavy artillery of Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling and Hitchens. Speaking against and dodging the heavy shelling was Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey. The debate is engaging stuff and mp3 or podcast files of the speeches can be found here.

Christopher Hitchens began by recalling a recent exchange in Colorado Springs with an evangelical broadcaster who insisted he answer the following question, and insisted he answered with a yes or a no:

You are to imagine yourself in a strange city, at night, without friends, would feel yourself to be safer or less safe if you saw a dozen men coming towards you in the dark, if you were to know they had recently come from a prayer meeting?

Hitchens replied that through his work he had been in that situation several times...in…Belfast…Bombay…Beirut…Belgrade…Baghdad and other places.

You can see where this is going already can’t you!

Hitchens said in Belfast, everything socially and economically has been retarded for at least half a century by sectarian warfare, people killing their neighbours on the basis of what type of Christian they were. That one of the few things the different churches agreed on is that children must be separated into different schools and not be educated alongside children of other beliefs. In Baghdad – the parties of god have the Iraqi people "in their jaws" killing off any process of transition to a democracy. Promoting a religious duty to blow up the mosques of other types of believer. In Beirut – the constitution defines citizens by faith...the  president must always be a Christian, the speaker of the parliament a Shia, the vice president must always be a Sunni etc etc and just look at the consequences. In Belgrade there was the corrosive influence of faith in what happened in Bosnia. He talked of Bombay now Mumbai– a city nearly ruined by the sectarian partition of India

Hitchens was careful to say religion is not the sole cause of all these problems, but he posed a challenge: Who is not to say that the preaching of religion has not in all these cases gravely, deepened, poisoned and prolonged all these threats to civilisation?

Don't think that was the answer the evangelical broadcaster was expecting!

In defence of the Blasphemy Challenge

The "Blasphemy Challenge" has caused a few ripples in the US over recent months.  From a Brit perspective it's hard to see what all the fuss is about as being actively religious is only pursued by a declining minority.

For those of you who haven't come across this yet, the Blasphemy Challenge is simple, people are asked to record a short message damning themself to Hell and then upload it to YouTube. There are some exact instructions on how you are supposed to damn yourself to hell, as you must say "I deny the Holy Spirit". Apparently this is because according to Mark 3:29 in the Bible, "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." Jesus will forgive you for just about anything, but he won't forgive you for denying the existence of the Holy Spirit. Ever. So there you go.

The challenge has prompted fierce rebukes from the likes of fair and balanced Fox News.

Amanda Marcotte on Pandagon pulls together an interesting defence of the whole exercise. Firstly, those who are getting angry that the Blasphemy Challenge even exists are proving the point that religion gets special dispensation from mockery or challenge, that disbelief is more widespread than some in the US would like to admit, and finally that it has been a remarkable emotional release for some people who've been directly oppressed by religion.

"At first, I found the Blasphemy Challenge to be a little silly. As a hardcore, unrepentant atheist, I tended to think that blasphemy is a non-concept for non-believers. You really can’t blasphemize things you don’t believe in, after all. If I say, “Damn the unicorns!”, there’s no fear that some unicorn is going to come crashing through a window to spear me for taking his name in vain. Watching the videos, I get it, though. Half of it is that cheap thrill of speaking the truth and having some fun with it, and watching people get all flustered that you called out their comforting lies. The other half of it is that it shows, in a very straightforward way, that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that people call god a lie all the time and god doesn’t come out of the sky and strike them down."

"Or should I say, nothing supernatural to be afraid of. As that video shows, (See below) the young woman is unafraid to call religion a lie, but she’s quite afraid of being overheard by people who know full well that scary stories about hell give them power to control others. The real danger of blasphemy is not that god will get angry at you, but that you’ll expose the power mongerers for who they are, and show that they mostly enjoy the power that the lie of religion gives them over others. But of course, as this video shows, the people who don’t want to hear blasphemy that could cause others to question their power are all too willing to use non-supernatural means to surpress dissent against religion."

"Scapegoating of the sort that happened to me and Melissa is about random shows of power from the religious oppressors, to make people afraid to speak up. It’s because the Bill Donohues of the world know that the more blasphemizers out there, the more people realize you can do it, just experiment for a bit, and you’ll see that it’s not so scary disbelieving. In Julia Sweeney’s show “Letting Go Of God”, she talks about how she weaned herself into atheism, choosing not to believe for an hour today, two hours tomorrow, and it wasn’t very long before she scrapped the whole project and walked into the light, unafraid. For those whose “faith” is mostly a combination of fear of blasphemy and fear of the social stigma, then hearing atheists speak their mind out loud is all they’re pretty much going to need to let go. Maybe not the first 10 atheists they hear, but eventually they’ll see that it’s not so scary. And that’s a scary thought, because in a free society like ours, the second you quit the church is the second they lose power to control you."

The video Marcotte writes about is below and you can see a collection of Blasphemy Challenge responses on this page on youtube: