But heads? PZ Myers on the 'Atheist Buts' and 'God Buts' (the DLC of theology)

[BurtWorm]

The entire essay is a gem of atheist reasoning (if you're interested in that sort of thing):

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/MQ7KNgollU8/kings_and_queens_of_the_ther.php


...

Greg Epstein, one of the most conciliatory members of the Atheist But brigade, even goes so far as to praise Rick Warren's awful little book.

Epstein argues in his forthcoming book, "Good without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe," that morality does not depend on a judgmental deity and that nonbelievers can lead meaningful, even purpose-driven, lives. But they can also learn from people of faith, such as California megachurch pastor and "Purpose Driven Life" author Rick Warren, Epstein says.

Warren's best-selling book basically says that "you have to have a purpose in life bigger than yourself, and that not everything is all about you," said Epstein. "And he's absolutely right about that. But he's wrong in saying that you have to believe in Jesus Christ and if you don't you're going to hell for eternity."

Have you ever read The Purpose Driven Life? (You can read the first seven chapters for free, not that I recommend this drivel). It's ghastly. It is Rick Warren stating with absolute certainty the intent and needs of an omnipotent being, which just happens to be that the most important mission you have in life is to be his personal slave. Oh, and the unwritten subtext is that since Rick Warren has such clarity of understanding of this ineffable and inconsistent being, you'd best listen carefully to Rick Warren. It is a wretchedly evil little book that represents all the misbegotten inanity of religion: the claims of divine knowledge, the demands that followers be subservient to the deity, and the charlatanry of making promises of strength, prosperity, happiness, and immortality to everyone who obeys the words of the prophet.

Atheists should not respect this book, and they should not encourage others to appreciate its message…except in the sense of acknowledging the effectiveness of propaganda and the adept sleight of hand of the professional con artist. An Atheist But can babble about learning from Rick Warren, but an atheist will simply tell you that all you can learn is what not to do.

What the Atheist Buts are trying to do is occupy a middle ground, compromising with religion to find an illusory magic mean. They're all but indistinguishable from another group, the God Buts. These are people who don't use the word atheism at all, but instead preach a nebulous version of religion that has no relationship to any established religion — instead, they want you to accept the virtues of simply believing in…something. Anything. If you told them you worshipped the transcendant god personified by the earthly presence of Mickey Mouse, they wouldn't question you in the slightest. Deny god, though, and suddenly you're treated as shrill, militant, and strident.

One of the eminent God Buts is Karen Armstrong, who I've laughed at before. Another is Robert Wright, who is becoming increasingly shrill, militant, and strident himself in his criticisms of New Atheists. This is a telling point, too: these defenders of religion never seem to get as riled up about the ranting fundamentalists as they do a few outspoken atheists. Wright's latest is full of fury and claims that the atheists are doomed, also citing a familiar complain: atheists are hurting the cause!

...

[SidDithers]

1. Rec'd. I like PZ Meyers a lot...

and his last 2 paragraphs are spot on (again):

All the Atheist Buts and God Buts are missing the key point, too. We don't care if you think religion is good for you, or if you love your faith, or if you think rituals are lovely, or if believers have done good in history, or if a lack of praise for Jesus irritates the Baptists. That's not the issue. The central, fundamental question is whether anyone has any reasonable evidence for the existence of any gods, especially the gods that everyone is so busy propitiating. You haven't got any? Then we'll continue pointing out that you're chasing leprechauns, no matter how annoying you find it. It's the truth. Argue against that with evidence — anything else is fluff and noise.

They can't do that, though. They've decided that they can't compete on that ground, and instead have rushed to occupy a meaningless middle…an intellectually empty wasteland with no approximation to the truth, only a comforting distance from the real crazies of the devout. They're nothing but the lords of vapor, the kings and queens of the æther, too frightened by the retreating ghosts of old myths to join us in reality.

[jgraz]

2. Ick. I got no use for wuss-bag faux atheists.

:puke.

[silverweb]

3. Interesting.

He's certainly right about the offensive "absolute certainty" of Warren and other such religious dogmatists. However, I find the absolute certainty of Myers' himself in the opposite direction equally offensive.

We know next to nothing about the Cosmos and I, for one, am not about to fully embrace or fully rule out much of anything regarding what we, for lack of better words, call the spiritual realm. That's why I enjoy being a speculative agnostic.

[BurtWorm]

4. What we do know about the cosmos is that there probably are no gods

and definitely not ones in the sense humans propose--i.e., gods in our image.

Do you live in a state of perpetual wagering a la Pascal? ;-)

[silverweb]

5. I don't wager at all.

I just hold myself open to possibilities as new evidence and information come to light.

If an interdimensional craft landed on my street today and strange beings stepped out of it, I'd be wary and thrilled at the same time, but not really surprised, and would think, "These could be what people called gods and where so many myths started." Then again, religious myths could have been started by powermongers and/or schizophrenics. I don't think the truth is particularly simple.

I do not hold the same views of gods in our image that dogmatists do and I think we have a hell of a lot to learn about everything. That's why I say "speculative agnosticism."

On Edit: As an egalitarian, I also think that other individuals have every right to believe or question anything as they see fit -- as long as they do not try to impose their views on others (all dogmatists take note!). As Jefferson said, "...it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

[BurtWorm]

6. I think all God thought can't help but reflect us back.

No matter how you conceive of it, it's always defined by the limits of your imagination.

[silverweb]

7. Imagination is so important.

Einstein pointed that out. Using observable existence as a springboard, imagination and accumulated knowledge, alternately and together, are what bring us advancement.

[BurtWorm]

8. As far as imagination takes us.

Really, though, that's only so far. But for advancement, it's far enough usually.

[skepticscott]

12. And where exactly is that certainty

and why is it unjustified? (The fact that you find any of his statements offensive is irrelevant to their validity, btw).

Here's what Myers actually said in that essay:

The central, fundamental question is whether anyone has any reasonable evidence for the existence of any gods, especially the gods that everyone is so busy propitiating. You haven't got any? Then we'll continue pointing out that you're chasing leprechauns, no matter how annoying you find it. It's the truth. Argue against that with evidence — anything else is fluff and noise.

Tell me which part of that you have a problem with.

[rd_kent]

16. How do you find "I don't know and neither do you" offensive?

Because thats what he (and atheists in general) are saying.

[struggle4progress]

19. Chuang Tzu: See the fish swimming! How happy they are!

Skeptic: Not being a fish, you can't know whether they are happy or not
Chuang Tzu: Not being me, you can't know whether I know or not

[rd_kent]

20. Uh, ok?

Thanks for that.

[dmallind]

9. Taken as cited, he's not supporting the book

merely supporting the idea that you should have a purpose beyond yourself. Societal utility perhaps, or a subset thereof. Objectionable people can misuse accurate premises to draw wrong conclusions. That doesn't make the premise inaccurate. Epstein may very well like the book more than is warranted, but agreeing that we should seek a purpose beyond our own reward is not proof of that, abd does not make him a wishy-washy "atheist but". He certainly disagrees with Warren's purpose.

[laconicsax]

10. I prefer "faitheist."

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/we-have-a-winner/

[trotsky]

11. This even stands out among the volumes of fine work by Myers.

This part bears repeating too:

Unfortunately, Wright's message is that we can't challenge religion.

All the great religions have shown time and again that they're capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don't feel threatened or disrespected. At the same time, as some New Atheists have now shown, you don't have to believe in God to exhibit intolerance and incivility.

Flip it around; that's an admission that the religions feel intolerance is justified when they're not coddled and respected. That's part of the problem, too. I don't respond well to extortion from god-bothering zealots, sorry. What the New Atheists (who are the same as the old atheists) have shown, though, is that they can be subjected to generations of intolerance and to continued denigration by people like Wright, who think their call for atheists to be silent and modest is a liberal attitude, and yet we manage to cope without resorting to violence or threats to shut up our critics. That's something the apologists for faith need to learn, too: religion should be strong enough to stand against academic rudeness and mockery without this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism. It's easy to be tolerant and civil when you've compelled everyone to be agreeable with you; the challenge is to do the same when you're being denounced.

OK I have to quote this beauty of a paragraph too:

All the Atheist Buts and God Buts are missing the key point, too. We don't care if you think religion is good for you, or if you love your faith, or if you think rituals are lovely, or if believers have done good in history, or if a lack of praise for Jesus irritates the Baptists. That's not the issue. The central, fundamental question is whether anyone has any reasonable evidence for the existence of any gods, especially the gods that everyone is so busy propitiating. You haven't got any? Then we'll continue pointing out that you're chasing leprechauns, no matter how annoying you find it. It's the truth. Argue against that with evidence — anything else is fluff and noise.

[struggle4progress]

13. Some excerpts from the Robert Wright piece that Myers is sneering at:

The Anti-God Squad
Why even some of the most zealous non-believers may abandon the crusade against religion.
BY ROBERT WRIGHT | DECEMBER 2009

... If you're a Midwestern American, fighting to keep Darwin in the public schools and intelligent design out, the case you make to conservative Christians is that teaching evolution won't turn their children into atheists. So the last thing you need is for the world's most famous teacher of evolution, Richard Dawkins, to be among the world's most zealously proselytizing atheists. These atmospherics only empower your enemies ...

And there's a subtle but potent sense in which New Atheism can steer foreign policy to the right. Axiomatic to New Atheism is that religion is not just factually wrong, but the root of evil, which suggests that other proposed root causes of the sort typically stressed on the left aren't really the problem. Sam Harris, in discussing terrorism, wholly dismisses such contributing factors as "the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza," "the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships," and "the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world." The problem, Harris states, is religion, period ...

Dawkins, for example, has written that if there were no religion then there would be "no Israeli/Palestinian wars." This view is wrong -- the conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land -- but it's popular among parts of the U.S. and Israeli right. The reason is its suggestion that there's no point in, say, removing Israeli settlements so long as the toxin of religion is in the air ...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_anti_god_squad?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

[BurtWorm]

14. It is not axiomatic among atheists that the Israeli occupation of the WB, etc.,

is not among the root causes of the I/P conflict. But every scientist knows there are proximate and ultimate causes. Would there be anti-Semitism without religion? We don't know, to be fair, but to be faithful to the truth, anti-Semitism among European Christians, which had the ultimate effect of driving European Jews to migrate en masse to Palestine, is one of the more underrated causes of the Middle Eastern conflict. If you scratch the surface of many of these proximate causes, you find the ultimate cause of religious difference.

Many atheists (I can't speak for Sam Harris) have vastly more nuanced views than Wright and other media figures acknoweldge. It's rather difficult for media figures to acknowledge nuance in op-ed pieces.

[struggle4progress]

17. Wright is directly quoting from Harris' book "The end of faith," page 109

Searching for "endemic poverty" in the searchbox here will bring up the page:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Lr8ytqlY9NgC&dq=site:books.google.com+%22The+end+of+faith%22+%22Sam+Harris%22&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=GqqhFPnkSZ&sig=YcbpijS3chC2XuybHulk4EmKBYk&hl=en&ei=noEmS_TOEc2XtgfyxvHPBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

One finds similar assertions in Dawkins' "The God Delusion," where Dawkins holds out the promise that a world free of religion would also be free of suicide bombers. This is unsurprising from him, of course, since Dawkins wrote and directed "The Root of All Evil," where one finds him dutifully reciting "For good people to do evil things, it takes Religion." Dawkins, unfortunately, exhibits enormous intellectual dishonesty when promoting his views; he has coyly complained, for example, that "The Root of All Evil" (a project over which he had editorial control) was named that by someone else, to create controversy (as if Dawkins had some allergy to controversy). In making his claim about suicide bombers, he did not bother to investigate sociological facts:

Prof. PAPE: .. Actually, the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. They're not a group that most of the listeners will have heard too much about because even though they're actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, carrying out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they're not attacking us and they're not attacking our allies ... Tamil Tigers .. assassinated .. Premadasa, a president of Sri Lanka. That's the only time that a suicide attack has actually assassinated a sitting president ... Rajiv Gandhi, when he was running for prime minister in 1991, a Tamil suicide attacker .. assassinated him ... But they are not religious ... They're actually anti-religious ...
Tamil Tigers: Suicide Bombing Innovators
May 21, 2009
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104391493


The dishonesty of "For good people to do evil things, it takes Religion" is even more profound, as the quote postdates the very well-known 1971 prison experiment at Stanford, which demonstrated many people will behave badly if placed in a context where they are expected to behave badly: see, http://www.prisonexp.org/

Wright's point has nothing whatsoever to do with the private beliefs of various atheists; it has to do with the potential political consequences of this constant ideological and anti-analytical refrain. Harris, for example, in "The end of faith," effectively promotes a rightwing view, as is obvious even to some who obviously wanted to lend him a sympathetic ear:

... After having declared all religions irrational, divisive, and inciters of conflicts that threaten the destruction of civilization, Harris turns to a vitriolic and selective polemic against Islam. This permeates the entire book ... "Any honest witness to current events," Harris writes, "will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetuated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments" (146). This assertion may be difficult to swallow for an "honest witness" old enough to remember Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and all the rest; not to mention the "morality" of withholding crucial evidence about weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion of Iraq. Harris offers no criticism of the war in Iraq, and in fact vindicates it as an essential part in a new crusade that reaches far beyond simply the repression of terrorists. "We are at war with Islam" ... He goes so far as to justify torture in the interrogation of prisoners -- citing Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School -- who (it so happens) appears as one of three blurb-ists on the back jacket of the book. Interwoven into Harris' main argument are sarcastic references to Edward Said, denunciations of Ghandian pacifism, and a ferocious 5-page assault on Noam Chomsky ... Its ideological thrust is a projection of Western imperialist visions ... Harris rather subtly invites them to focus their transcendental hopes on the global -- and neo-liberal -- free market upon which our upcoming World Order (presumably) will be based ... but only after the cleansing "war with Islam" has been brought to satisfactory conclusion.
Faith in the "War with Islam"
by Alexander Saxton
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/saxton191006.html

[BurtWorm]

18. Wright's error is to mistake private views for an atheist ideology.

There is no atheist ideology. Sam Harris speaks for himself. Richard Dawkins speaks for himself. If either of them is guilty of promoting a right-wing agenda--which is a dubious claim--then that's their agenda, not atheisms.

What makes Robert Wright think Noam Chomsky or Edward Said aren't/weren't atheists, by the way? Or that Dershowitz is one. Do any of these men's views stand for all of theology's or atheism's ideology, or is it just self-identified atheists whose views stand for a whole-attitude-toward-God's ideology?

[trotsky]

21. Where do you get your B.S.?

the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. ... They're actually anti-religious

Not so.

The Tigers — which include 5,000 to 10,000 guerillas — are fighting to secede from the the island country of Sri Lanka. Tamils originally immigrated to Sri Lanka from southern India and make up 10 to 15% of the population, compared to the majority Sinhalese, who constitute about 75%. In 1972, the Sinhalese-controlled Sri Lankan government declared Sinhala and Buddhism the official language and religion. The Tamils, who practice Hinduism and have their own language, took this action as an affront, and Vellupillai Prabhakaran founded the Tigers soon after.

Source: Time

The dishonesty of "For good people to do evil things, it takes Religion" is even more profound, as the quote postdates the very well-known 1971 prison experiment at Stanford, which demonstrated many people will behave badly if placed in a context where they are expected to behave badly

Actually, the Prison Experiment helps prove the point. Religious devotion provides that context more than anything else, and provides the individual with an iron-clad, undisprovable justification.

[trotsky]

15. "Axiomatic to New Atheism is that religion is not just factually wrong, but the root of evil"

Outright falsehood.

"This view is wrong -- the conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land"

Yeah, that secular strip of land with no oil, little arable land, and no resources that coincidentally happens to hold important holy sites for the big three monotheistic religions. :eyes: