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[Maninthemirror]

Fascinating look at how the new Atheist or the 'new Antitheist' movement mushroomed from the original atheism into an offshoot which says its for liberal principles but espouses imperialism and social fundamentalism to create a war of civilizations. The same US vs them attitude of G.W. Bush words except for a differing agenda where violence is necessary and civil rights are rightfully removed for the sake of pushing their brand of how world should look like. Imagine a group which doesn't kill or tell its supporters to kill but asks its well organized and democratic supporting military to kill to further its view , the difference being the terrorists kill themselves and their immediate followers as they are undemocratic and savages while these people dont kill themselves and dont ask their followers to kill but use their own democratic system to espouse killing as necessary (essentially state sponsored terrorism)

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/new-atheism-old-empire/

Hitchens liked to claim that a single intellectual thread united his positions, namely opposition to “totalitarianism”: “The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy — the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”

But for all his pro-imperial bluster, it was Hitchens’ attacks on religion that finally garnered him international fame. These, too, he claimed, were fundamentally “anti-totalitarian,” analogous to resisting North Korea or Joseph Stalin. A leading light of the “New Atheist” movement, the former socialist spent his final decade at war with religion and at peace with imperialism.

At face value, and by its own understanding, New Atheism is a reinvigorated incarnation of the Enlightenment scientism found in the work of thinkers like Bacon and Descartes: a critical discourse that subjects religious texts and traditions to rational scrutiny by way of empirical inquiry and defends universal reason against the forces of provincialism.

In practice, it is a crude, reductive, and highly selective critique that owes its popular and commercial success almost entirely to the “war on terror” and its utility as an intellectual instrument of imperialist geopolitics.

Whereas some earlier atheist traditions have rejected violence and championed the causes of the Left — Bertrand Russell, to take an obvious example, was both a socialist and a unilateralist — the current streak represented by Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris has variously embraced, advocated, or favorably contemplated: aggressive war, state violence, the curtailing of civil liberties, torture, and even, in the case of the latter, genocidal preemptive nuclear strikes against Arab nations.

Its leading exponents wear a variety of ideological garbs, but their espoused politics range from those of right-leaning liberals to proto-fascist demagogues of the European far-right.

While Harris’s views are undoubtedly the most strident, there is certainly overlap with Hitchens and Dawkins. In a 2007 interview, Hitchens argued: “If you ask what is wrong with Islam, it makes the same mistake as [other] religions, but it makes another mistake, which is that it’s unalterable. You notice how liberals keep saying, ‘If only Islam would have a Reformation’ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.”

In addition to the blatant chauvinism of such a statement, it is not a remotely accurate historical claim and is arguably hypocritical, even on its own terms. Islamic fundamentalism — which no one, incidentally, believes to be a fiction — is insidious not because of its adherence to some ossified medieval tradition, but rather because of its eager and effective embrace of modernist dynamism.

Not to be outdone, Richard Dawkins has called Islam “the greatest force for evil today” (in the same breath, rather amusingly, as admitting he’s never bothered to read the Koran). At other times Dawkins has been even more vulgar, tweeting: “For me, the horror of Hitler is matched by bafflement at the ovine stupidity of his followers. Increasingly feel the same about Islamism” and inferring that then-New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hassan is unqualified to be a journalist because he is also a Muslim. Or, to take yet another example, “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

It is simply impossible to imagine the commercial and intellectual success of the New Atheist project in a pre-9/11 world without both rising anti-Muslim sentiments across Western societies or neoconservative geopolitics. It is against the backdrop of the war on terror, with its violent and destructive adventurism, that the notion of a monolithic evil called “Islam” has found a sizable constituency in the circles of liberal respectability.

Beneath its many layers of intellectual adornment — the typical New Atheist text is laden with maudlin references to Darwin, Newton, and Galileo — we find a worldview intimately familiar to anyone who has studied the language of empires past: culturally supremacist, essentializing and othering towards the foreign, equal parts patronizing and paternalistic, and legitimating of the violence committed for its own ends.

In The End of Faith Harris suggests that nuclear-first strikes may be necessary if the ostensible conflict between “Islam” and “civilization” escalates: “What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?…The only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.”

In an enthusiastic endorsement of the Iraq War, Harris described it as a noble and selfless crusade undertaken by the civilized West to defeat Islamic barbarism. In late 2004, he wrote in the Washington Post, “civilized human beings [Westerners] are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.”.

Hitchens also praised the use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan as “pretty good, because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too.”

On the subject of jihadists, he declared: “It’s a sort of pleasure as well as a duty to kill these people.” On another occasion, Hitchens stunned even sympathetic members of an audience in Madison, Wisconsin by saying of Iran, a nation of almost 80 million people: “As for that benighted country, I wouldn’t shed a tear if it was wiped off the face of this earth.”

The tendency to abhor the violence of its chosen enemies while relativizing and legitimating its own is an intrinsic part of any imperial or colonial ideology, and a consistent feature in the rhetoric of both Hitchens and Harris.

In extremely sinister fashion, Harris has mused about the birthrates of European Muslims and the supposed peril of their prolific breeding. The notion of a demographic “threat” posed by Muslims in Europe is easy to debunk empirically.

Even if this weren’t the case, the sordid subtext of these remarks is confirmed by Harris’s favorable treatment of far-right figures, who speak openly of the demographic dangers posed by Muslims. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris makes his sympathies explicit, declaring: “With a few exceptions, the only public figures who have had the courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European societies seem to be fascists.”

Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have all rejected the notion that there is anything racist about statements of this kind or the prescriptions that so often follow from them: “Muslims aren’t a race,” being by now a particularly worn phrase in the New Atheist rhetorical repertoire. Harris and Hitchens have also dismissed the term “Islamophobia” as a tool for silencing their arguments. According to the latter: “A stupid term — Islamophobia — has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible ‘message.’”

Given that “race” is an entirely social construct, with a history that involves the systemic racialization of various national, ethnic, and religious minorities, this defense is extremely flimsy. The excessive focus on Islam as something at once monolithic and exceptionally bad, whose backwards followers need to have their rights in democratic societies suppressed and their home countries subjected to a Western-led civilizing process, cannot be called anything other than racist.

The typical New Atheist text scrutinizes religious myths without attention to, or even awareness of, the multiplicity of social and theological debates they have provoked, the manifold ideological guises their interpreters have assumed, or the secular belief systems they have helped to influence.

Moreover, the core assertion that forms the discursive nucleus of books like The God Delusion, God is Not Great, and The End of Faith — namely, that religious texts can be read as literal documents containing static ideas, and that the ensuing practices are uniform — is born out by neither real, existing religion or by its historical reality as a socially and ideologically heterogeneous phenomenon.

Criticisms of the violence carried out by fundamentalists of any kind — honor killings, suicide bombings, systemic persecution of women or gay people, or otherwise — are neither coherent nor even likely to be effective when they falsely attribute such phenomena to some monolithic orthodoxy.

The ways in which the New Atheism serves imperialism are manifold. It bolsters the “clash of civilizations” narrative used to justify ventures like the invasion of Iraq and the need for repressive measures like state surveillance. Moreover, in presenting itself as a disinterested defense of reason, it lends such arguments a credibility they would lack in the hands of commentators from the political or cultural right. Finally, it shifts the focus from the social ills wrought by unjust economic arrangements to an external singularity called “religion.”

Beneath its superficial rationalism, then, the New Atheism amounts to little more than an intellectual defense of empire and a smokescreen for the injustices of global capitalism. It is a parochial universalism whose potency lies in its capacity to appear simultaneously iconoclastic, dissenting, and disinterested, while channeling vulgar prejudices, promoting imperial projects, and dressing up banal truisms as deep insights.

 

[ComputerMKII]

Oh man, I miss Christopher Hitchens.

 

[speculawyer]

You & he are conflating issues.

Atheism is a lack of believe in god. Period.


Hitchens' view on Iraq, Harris' views on Islam, Dawkins views on whatever . . . are their own and are nothing to do 'atheism'.


In fact those three disagreed with each other on several things and thus trying to weave it together as some common narrative is just stupid.


Do you think the UAE is part of their 'new atheism group'?

The following is the list of organisations designated as terrorist that has been approved by the UAE Cabinet:

:: The UAE Muslim Brotherhood.
:: Al-Islah (or Da'wat Al-Islah).
:: Fatah al-Islam (Lebanon).
:: Associazione Musulmani Italiani (Association of Italian Muslims).
:: Khalaya Al-Jihad Al-Emirati (Emirati Jihadist Cells).
:: Osbat al-Ansar (the League of the Followers) in Lebanon.
:: The Finnish Islamic Association (Suomen Islam-seurakunta).
:: Alkarama organisation.
:: Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM or Tanzim al-Qa idah fi Bilad al-Maghrib al-Islami).
:: The Muslim Association of Sweden (Sveriges muslimska forbund, SMF)
:: Hizb al-Ummah (The Ommah Party or Nation's Party) in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula
:: Ansar al-Sharia in Libya (ASL, Partisans of Islamic Law).
:: Det Islamske Forbundet i Norge (Islamic Association in Norway).
:: Al-Qaeda.
:: Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST, Partisans of Sharia) in Tunisia.
:: Islamic Relief UK.
:: Dae'sh (ISIL).
:: Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (HSM) in Somalia ( Mujahideen Youth Movement)
:: The Cordoba Foundation (TCF) in Britian.
:: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
:: Boko Haraam ( Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'Awati Wal-Jihad) in Nigeria.
:: Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) of the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
:: Jama'at Ansar al-Shari'a (Partisans of Sharia) in Yemen.
:: Al-Mourabitoun (The Sentinels) group in Mali.
:: Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan).
:: The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) organisation and groups.
:: Ansar al-Dine (Defenders of the faith) movement in Mali.
:: Abu Dhar al-Ghifari Battalion in Syria.
:: Jama'a Islamia in Egypt (AKA al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, The Islamic Group, IG).
:: The Haqqani Network in Pakistan.
:: Al-Tawheed Brigade (Brigade of Unity, or Monotheism) in Syria.
:: Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (ABM, Supporters of the Holy House or Jerusalem) and now rebranded as Wilayat Sinai (Province or state in the Sinai).
:: Lashkar-e-Taiba (Soldiers, or Army of the Pure, or of the Righteous).
:: Al-Tawhid wal-Eman battalion (Battalion of Unity, or Monotheism, and Faith) in Syria.
:: Ajnad Misr (Soldiers of Egypt) group.
:: The East Turkistan Islamic Movement in Pakistan (ETIM), AKA the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), Turkistan Islamic Movement (TIM).
:: Katibat al-Khadra in Syria (The Green Battalion).
:: Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen Fi Aknaf Bayt al-Maqdis (the Mujahedeen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem, or MSC).
:: Jaish-e-Mohammed (The Army of Muhammad).
:: Abu Bakr Al Siddiq Brigade in Syria.
:: The Houthi Movement in Yemen.
:: Jaish-e-Mohammed (The Army of Muhammad) in Pakistan and India.
:: Talha Ibn 'Ubaid-Allah Compnay in Syria.
:: Hezbollah al-Hijaz in Saudi Arabia.
:: Al Mujahideen Al Honoud in Kashmor/ India (The Indian Mujahideen, IM).
:: Al Sarim Al Battar Brigade in Syria.
:: Hezbollah in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
:: Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus (Caucasus Emirate or Kavkaz and Chechen jidadists).
:: The Abdullah bin Mubarak Brigade in Syria.
:: Al-Qaeda in Iran.
:: The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).
:: Qawafil al-Shuhada (Caravans of the Martyrs).
:: The Badr Organisation in Iraq.
:: Abu Sayyaf Organisation in the Philippines.
:: Abu Omar Brigade in Syria.
:: Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq in Iraq (The Leagues of the Righteous).
:: Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
:: Ahrar Shammar Brigade in Syria (Brigade of the free men of the Shammar Tribe).
:: Hezbollah Brigades in Iraq.
:: CANVAS organisation in Belgrade, Serbia.
:: The Sarya al-Jabal Brigade in Syria.
:: Liwa Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas in Syria.
:: The Muslim American Society (MAS).
:: Al Shahba' Brigade in Syria.
:: Liwa al-Youm al-Maw'oud in Iraq (Brigade of Judgment Day).
:: International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS).
:: Al Ka'kaa' Brigade in Syria.
:: Liwa Ammar bin Yasser (Ammar bin Yasser Brigade).
:: Ansar al-Islam in Iraq.
:: Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe.
:: Sufyan Al Thawri Brigade.
:: Ansar al-Islam Group in Iraq (Partisans of Islam).
:: Union of Islamic Organisations of France (L'Union des Organisations Islamiques de France, UOIF).
:: Ebad ar-Rahman Brigade (Brigade of Soldiers of Allah) in Syria.
:: Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front) in Syria.
:: Muslim Association of Britain (MAB).
:: Omar Ibn al-Khattab Battalion in Syria.
:: Harakat Ahrar ash-Sham Al Islami (Islamic Movement of the Free Men of the Levant).
:: Islamic Society of Germany (Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland).
:: Al-Shayma' Battaltion in Syria.
:: Jaysh al-Islam in Palestine (The Army of Islam in Palestine)
:: The Islamic Society in Denmark (Det Islamiske Trossamfund, DIT).
:: Katibat al-Haqq (Brigade of the Righteous).
: The Abdullah Azzam Brigades.
:: The League of Muslims in Belgium (La Ligue des Musulmans de Belgique, LMB)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=944350

 

[Azih]

You & he are conflating issues.

Atheism is a lack of believe in god. Period.


Hitchens' view on Iraq, Harris' views on Islam, Dawkins views on whatever . . . are their own and are nothing to do 'atheism'.

The article isn't talking about Atheism. It's talking about 'New Atheism' which is a pretty specific intellectual movement.

 

[Maninthemirror]

You & he are conflating issues.

Atheism is a lack of believe in god. Period.


Hitchens' view on Iraq, Harris' views on Islam, Dawkins views on whatever . . . are their own and are nothing to do 'atheism'.


In fact those three disagreed with each other on several things and thus trying to weave it together as some common narrative is just stupid.

which is what the article is saying. these new antitheists have moved beyond atheism which was against violence and into the realm of imperialism and espousing right wing fundamentalism to try and defend their liberal principles.

Whereas some earlier atheist traditions have rejected violence and championed the causes of the Left — Bertrand Russell, to take an obvious example, was both a socialist and a unilateralist — the current streak represented by Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris has variously embraced, advocated, or favorably contemplated: aggressive war, state violence, the curtailing of civil liberties, torture, and even, in the case of the latter, genocidal preemptive nuclear strikes against Arab nations.

did you read the article?

 

[Earendil]

Extremism of any kind is bad.

 

[Pickman]

Extremism of any kind is bad.

Except BMXing, because otherwise it's just a guy riding to work on a bike that's too small.

 

[Air]

Hmmm, I like articles like these, I'll read it when I get a shot. There are definitely a lot of problems with new atheism imo, I'm curious to see what the writers take is.

 

[Chairman Yang]

The article was pretty good until this part:

Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have all rejected the notion that there is anything racist about statements of this kind or the prescriptions that so often follow from them: “Muslims aren’t a race,” being by now a particularly worn phrase in the New Atheist rhetorical repertoire. Harris and Hitchens have also dismissed the term “Islamophobia” as a tool for silencing their arguments. According to the latter: “A stupid term — Islamophobia — has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible ‘message.’”

Given that “race” is an entirely social construct, with a history that involves the systemic racialization of various national, ethnic, and religious minorities, this defense is extremely flimsy. The excessive focus on Islam as something at once monolithic and exceptionally bad, whose backwards followers need to have their rights in democratic societies suppressed and their home countries subjected to a Western-led civilizing process, cannot be called anything other than racist.

As far as I can tell, the author of the article is saying that, because Islam has been considered a "race" by some in the past (with the author's definition of "race" including nationality, ethnicity, and religion), criticism of Islam is now racist. Criticism of any religion is now racist. He's deliberately conflating the commonly-accepted connotations of "being a racist" with his arbitrary definition of race as including religion.

In the next section, the author says that New Atheism's attack on religious beliefs as irrational is weak. The thrust of his argument is that, because religions have many different interpretations, internal debates, and aren't always taken literally, you can't attack any particular religion as being irrational. He also says that fundamentalism is caused by "social and material conditions" rather than any religious ideas, but doesn't provide any actual evidence for this.

Terrible article.

 

[Kinthalis]

Lol, what is this nonsense?

Where has Dawkins ever espoused nuking Arab countries??

That shit sounds like a right-winger chrstian nut job's wet dream.

 

[Maninthemirror]

The article was pretty good until this part:


As far as I can tell, the author of the article is saying that, because Islam has been considered a "race" by some in the past (with the author's definition of "race" including nationality, ethnicity, and religion), criticism of Islam is now racist. Criticism of any religion is now racist. He's deliberately conflating the commonly-accepted connotations of "being a racist" with his arbitrary definition of race as including religion.

In the next section, the author says that New Atheism's attack on religious beliefs as irrational is weak. The thrust of his argument is that, because religions have many different interpretations, internal debates, and aren't always taken literally, you can't attack any particular religion as being irrational. He also says that fundamentalism is caused by "social and material conditions" rather than any religious ideas, but doesn't provide any actual evidence for this.

Terrible article.

So the article was pretty good until 3/4 of the way down and the 2 paragraph which you dont agree with made it a terrible article? On fundamentalism the ascercion is that these new anti-thiests or new atheists ignore that social and material conditions contribute to fundamentalistic interpertations to get their movement or ideas going and put the blame solely on religion while then saying a resolution might be to be violent against the religion itself to curtail it rather than fix the social and material conditions that contribute to the fundamentalism

 

[Azih]

As far as I can tell, the author of the article is saying that, because Islam has been considered a "race" by some in the past (with the author's definition of "race" including nationality, ethnicity, and religion), criticism of Islam is now racist.

I think the argument extends to the present. Especially with Hitchens comments like 'If Iran was wiped out I wouldn't shed a tear'. At a certain point Hitchens' criticisms of Islam led him to make a horrific comment targeted at an entire nation of people and it's incredibly relevant to examine at what point criticism of a religion can bleed over to blanket criticism of a people. As Ottoman used to point out, as soon as he converted, he ceased to be thought of as 'white' by a lot of people he interacts with.

And in any case, even if that nuanced argument (religion being conflated to the race to the degree that imprecise, or deliberately malicious, criticism of religion is really a cover for criticism of the races that stereotypically are members of the religion) isn't acceptable to you then fine if it's not racist, then it is at least incredibly bigoted.

 

[danwarb]

Nah. People are right about some things, wrong about others. That's it.

I only espouse using science to improve government and economic systems, to make societies better for the people who live in them. It's better than fear and manipulation by oligarchy.

 

[Kinitari]

I don't think it's imperialistic to say "I think x country does y things poorly, and they shouldn't do it", or "I think x religion is a bad religion, and people shouldn't follow it". It's imperialistic to suggest that a government should go in and take over a country and implant it's own values.

That there are outspoken atheists who feel strongly about Islam and think it is a negative isn't in and of itself even indicative of any coherence in the 'New Atheist' movement, let alone an imperialistic slant.

Further, I think the idea that people bolstering actual imperialism unintentionally by criticising a location or a religion isn't the fault of those people.

Consider that genetics was used as justification for more than one massacare - it does not mean that people espousing that there are genetic variations or even those who suggest that genetics vary in aggregate between populations are to blame, even a little, for these actions.

 

[Mumei]

... You know, it seems like a lot of you either aren't reading the article, or aren't grasping that the article is criticizing a very specific sort of atheism. It's about the imperialistic views of luminaries within the quote-unquote New Atheist movement, and it's pretty well-substantiated and even-handed, and it even takes pains to clarify some of the differences amongst them while still noting the common threads. This isn't about atheism generally and it isn't suggesting that merely by being an atheist you are an imperialist.

 

[Azih]

Where has Dawkins ever espoused nuking Arab countries??.

Dawkins doesn't, but Hitchens did, and Harris does.

Kintari, the point is that Harris isn't unintentionally bolstering imperialism. He's doing it blatantly and deliberately.

HERE'S HARRIS (right from the article):

“What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?…The only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.”

“At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root.”

Some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary … But benignity is the key and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both

 

[sphagnum]

New Atheism is shit and the left has been hounding on these guys for a while. Kind of surprised to see Jacobin only writing about it now though.

 

[RustyNails]

Dawkins doesn't, but Hitchens did, and Harris does.

Kintari, the point is that Harris isn't unintentionally bolstering imperialism. He's doing it blatantly and deliberately.

HERE'S HARRIS (right from the article):

This guy is a scumbag.

 

[Mumei]

These criticisms of Harris and Hitchens in particular aren't new, either. I still remember this post on Pharyngula:

Then it was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy. Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now — Rudy Giuliani — and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons (something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties.

It was simplistic us-vs.-them thinking at its worst, and the only solution he had to offer was death and destruction of the enemy.

This was made even more clear in the Q&A. He was asked to consider the possibility that bombing and killing was only going to accomplish an increase in the number of people opposing us. Hitchens accused the questioner of being incredibly stupid (the question was not well-phrased, I’ll agree, but it was clear what he meant), and said that it was obvious that every Moslem you kill means there is one less Moslem to fight you … which is only true if you assume that every Moslem already wants to kill Americans and is armed and willing to do so. I think that what is obvious is that most Moslems are primarily interested in living a life of contentment with their families and their work, and that an America committed to slaughter is a tactic that will only convince more of them to join in opposition to us.

Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again.

This was in Madison, Wisconsin, which is (I'm guessing) the same event mentioned in the article where he was said to have, "stunned even sympathetic members of an audience" with his remarks about Iran.

 

[Karsticles]

This is the first I've even heard the term "New Atheism". Is it different from Dawkins' attempt at a "Brights" movement?

 

[Mengy]

You & he are conflating issues.

Atheism is a lack of believe in god. Period.


Hitchens' view on Iraq, Harris' views on Islam, Dawkins views on whatever . . . are their own and are nothing to do 'atheism'.


In fact those three disagreed with each other on several things and thus trying to weave it together as some common narrative is just stupid.

Yeah, I think I'd have to agree with Specu here.

... You know, it seems like a lot of you either aren't reading the article, or aren't grasping that the article is criticizing a very specific sort of atheism. It's about the imperialistic views of luminaries within the quote-unquote New Atheist movement, and it's pretty well-substantiated and even-handed, and it even takes pains to clarify some of the differences amongst them while still noting the common threads. This isn't about atheism generally and it isn't suggesting that merely by being an atheist you are an imperialist.

It kind of came across that way for me. Maybe I didn't fully understand it, it's possible.

 

[Funky Papa]

Hold the phone, I'm trying to find a list with the number of terrorist actions, wars and coups d'etat perpetrated or accentuated by this New Atheism™.

 

[Siegcram]

Oh man, I miss Christopher Hitchens.

Only thing I took away from this. Gone far too soon.

 

[Timeaisis]

When did atheism and liberalism get all mucked up and intertwined together? It's like you can't be one without the other, nowadays.

 

[PlayALLtheGames]

The article isn't talking about Atheism. It's talking about 'New Atheism' which is a pretty specific intellectual movement.

A buzzword that doesn't need to exist, at all.

 

[Mumei]

This is the first I've even heard the term "New Atheism". Is it different from Dawkins' attempt at a "Brights" movement?

There's some overlap. I can't remember when I first started hearing the term "New Atheist" but I'd guess it was in the early to mid-00s.

 

[RustyNails]

These criticisms of Harris and Hitchens in particular aren't new, either. I still remember this post on Pharyngula:



This was in Madison, Wisconsin, which is (I'm guessing) the same event mentioned in the article where he was said to have, "stunned even sympathetic members of an audience" with his remarks about Iran.

Goodness....I have never heard this before.

 

[Dennis]

Except BMXing, because otherwise it's just a guy riding to work on a bike that's too small.

Holy shit this is the best, how do I upvote straight into heaven.

 

[Azih]

This is the first I've even heard the term "New Atheism". Is it different from Dawkins' attempt at a "Brights" movement?

You can find it on wikipedia. It's a pretty recent but well established intellectual moment that arose after 9/11 with The End of Faith (2004), The God Delusion (2006), and God is not Great (2007) being considered seminal works to come from it.

 

[Ashes]

Hold the phone, I'm trying to find a list with the number of terrorist actions, wars and coups d'etat perpetrated or accentuated by this New Atheism™.

Do you support their stances?

 

[badcrumble]

The New Atheists also don't seem to understand that atheism's been around for a really long time and has been espoused by some much more thoughtful folks than they are.

They tend to adopt the idealist-engineer mentality, which is essentially that as Reasonable Men surely their opinions on international relations and foreign policy are for some reason worth hearing even though they don't have any sort of education in the subject.

 

[tokkun]

Hitchens argues earnestly that the Book of Genesis doesn’t mention marsupials; that the Old Testament Jews couldn’t have wandered for forty years in the desert; that the capture of the huge bedstead of the giant Og, King of Bashan, might never have happened at all, and so on. This is rather like someone vehemently trying to convince you, with fastidious attention to architectural and zoological detail, that King Kong could not possibly have scaled the Empire State Building because it would have collapsed under his weight.

This seems like a dumb argument to make. I'm sure Hitchens would be thrilled if people viewed the Bible as being a work of fiction on par with King Kong.

I get that it's supposed to highlight the not all sects use a literal interpretation of their holy texts, just as people should take a non-literal interpretation of movies. But this is a terrible false analogy. No one is claiming that monster movies should be the basis of how one lives their life. There is no reason to apply critical scrutiny to a throwaway piece of entertainment. But if you are talking about something that is proscriptive toward virtually every aspect of your existence, the standards are going to be different.

 

[Funky Papa]

Do you support their stances?

What kind of moronic question is that.

 

[Azih]

A buzzword that doesn't need to exist, at all.

Eh, it has more value and more utility than the term 'Islamism' as it far more accurately groups together a group of people with similar views.

 

[Ashes]

What kind of moronic question is that.

Stop deflecting and answer the question. That's the point of this thread.

 

[RustyNails]

What kind of moronic question is that.

I thought it was pretty straightforward.

 

[John Kowalski]

Why does america keep fucking with ideological nomenclatures, i'm too old for this shit.

 

[Chairman Yang]

So the article was pretty good until 3/4 of the way down and the 2 paragraph which you dont agree with made it a terrible article? On fundamentalism the ascercion is that these new anti-thiests or new atheists ignore that social and material conditions contribute to fundamentalistic interpertations to get their movement or ideas going and put the blame solely on religion while then saying a resolution might be to be violent against the religion itself to curtail it rather than fix the social and material conditions that contribute to the fundamentalism

Absolutely. The article is basically saying "New Atheism" is bad, and talks about three major reasons why this is so:

If its imperialism and racism aren’t enough, New Atheism’s intellectual foundations are also exceptionally weak.

The arguments the article started with--that some prominent New Atheists have said things that reveal a desire for imperialism--were pretty good and pretty convincing. Once the article started talking about how criticizing religion is racist, or how criticizing Islam is intellectually weak (without actually providing any good points to support that), the article became terrible. In sum, despite some good points, the article was terrible.

New Atheists do not put the blame for fundamentalism solely on religion, and do not completely ignore social/material conditions. This is a common, and completely incorrect strawman argument.

 

[Funky Papa]

Stop deflecting and answer the question. That's the point of this thread.

Guilty as charged.

I also endorse pricking condoms for fun and the clubbing of baby seals on top of wholesale genocide of random ethnic groups that rub me the wrong way.

Now dear, were you accusing me of such thing?

 

[Parch]

Lol, what is this nonsense?
Where has Dawkins ever espoused nuking Arab countries??
That shit sounds like a right-winger christian nut job's wet dream.

They desperately want atheism to be an "organization" when it's not.
There are no atheist churches. There are no atheist preachers. Nobody is teaching anything and the opinions of one person does not represent everybody who calls themselves atheists. Theists can call it whatever they want and spin whatever they want to believe, but theists are trying to make atheism a group and now a sub-group that they can discredit and criticize.

Atheism is a lack of belief in god. Period.

Creating a label or claiming there's a "new atheistic movement" is a bunch of bull IMO. Whatever Dawkins or anybody else says is the opinion of the individual. They are not representatives and there is no "sub-group" of anything when there isn't any organized group to begin with.

 

[Sneaky Gato]

Yeah I've run into some of these guys before in College. The one kept with me the most though was advocating the destruction and banning of all religions and religious centers as he saw them as a distraction from what should be societies real goal, the conquest of the middle east so that more resources would be extracted, removing as many environmental regulations as possible so as to extract as much as possible, stopping all non scientific and engineering related government funding and redirecting it towards developing STEM fields. His reasoning is that the sooner the singularity and brain uploads were achieved it didn't matter about anything else. Anything that distracted governments from this goal, be it religion, art, politics, environmentalism was something to be destroyed and ignored as quickly as possible so as to refocus all of societies efforts on his bright transhuman future. For that was only way he saw that utopia could be achieved and the faster the better for anything less than utopia was suffering in his mind.

 

[Ashes]

guilty as charged.
I also endorse pricking condoms for fun and the clubbing of baby seals on top of wholesale genocide of random ethnic groups that rub me the wrong way.

I have no idea what you are doing here. At best, you're trying to justify your support, by suggesting that the opposition is abhorrent too. Which is the poorest form of defence you could have chosen.

 

[Azih]

Alright CY. Let's break the article down into its own headings then.

Empire’s Handmaidens

I take it you completely agree with this section at least and how Harris in particular is outright in favour of the civilized West 'civilizing' dumb Muslims by force and agree that this kind of thinking is dangerous and destructive?

The other three sections are:
Islamic Exceptionalism
Islamophobia and Race
Parochial Universalists

Do you not like all of them? I thought the Exceptionalism one was pretty good. I can see how the latter two you might have issues with though I think the whole article was excellent.

 

[Funky Papa]

They desperately want atheism to be an "organization" when it's not.
There are no atheist churches. There are no atheist preachers. Nobody is teaching anything and the opinions of one person does not represent everybody who calls themselves atheists. Theists can call it whatever they want and spin whatever they want to believe, but theists are trying to make atheism a group and now a sub-group that they can discredit and criticize.

Atheism is a lack of belief in god. Period.

Creating a label or claiming there's a "new atheistic movement" is a bunch of bull IMO. Whatever Dawkins or anybody else says is the opinion of the individual. They are not representatives and there is no "sub-group" of anything when there isn't any organized group to begin with.

Thank you.

On top of that, said "new atheists" are nothing but a fringe current and most decent people would be able to tell that their beliefs (which hold little to none real life influence) are outright toxic and undesirable.

The label itself is aggravating.

I have no idea what you are doing here. At best, you're trying to justify your support, by suggesting that the opposition is abhorrent too. Which is the poorest form of defence you could have chosen.

I know that irony doesn't quite get through the internets at times, but I would still expect better.

 

[Ninja Of Chaos]

Thank you.

On top of that, said "new atheists" are nothing but a fringe current and most decent people would be able to tell that their beliefs (which hold little to none real life influence) are outright toxic and undesirable.

The label itself is aggravating.


I know that irony doesn't quite get through the internets at times, but I would still expect better.

They have no idea what they are talking about in regards to foreign affairs (and nobody really pays attention to them on that regard), but how are their anti-religion stances toxic?

 

[Ashes]

They desperately want atheism to be an "organization" when it's not. Creating a label or claiming there's a "new atheistic movement" is a bunch of bull IMO. Whatever Dawkins or anybody else says is the opinion of the individual. They are not representatives and there is no "sub-group" of anything when there isn't any organized group to begin with.

There's lots of atheistic organisations. This idea that you cannot have an atheist organisation is absurd, and just flat out incoherent.

 

[Azih]

I don't know Funky Papa. Plenty of people were falling over themselves defending the ugly stuff Harris said when he was on Real Time with Bill Maher. Plenty of people defend Hitchens even though his rhetoric was flat out hateful. A lot of people insist that everything Dawkins says is reasonable and rational and that only overly sensitive nutjobs could ever take offense to anything he's said. Nothign wrong with an article pointing problems with them out in explicit detail.

Their flaws might be obvious to you but that hardly means that they're obvious to everyone when a large part of their schtick is to insist that everything they say is merely defending the good work of Darwin and Western civilization.

 

[Ashes]

I know that irony doesn't quite get through the internets at times, but I would still expect better.

You really ought not to play the ambiguous card when asked to clarify your position.

 

[Funky Papa]

They have no idea what they are talking about in regards to foreign affairs (and nobody really pays attention to them on that regard), but how are their anti-religion stances toxic?

Oh, I'm fine with being anti-religion as long as no violence or cohercion is involved. Alas, I'd rather stay away from those persons and decry stupid labels such as "new atheism" that serve nobody but those who oppose atheism. I believe I'm 100% in agreement with Parch.

You really ought not to play the ambiguous card when asked to clarify your position.

Your question was offensive enough not to entertain you with a straight answer. Also, I'd rather get told by a mod.

 

[Chairman Yang]

I think the argument extends to the present. Especially with Hitchens comments like 'If Iran was wiped out I wouldn't shed a tear'. At a certain point Hitchens' criticisms of Islam led him to make a horrific comment targeted at an entire nation of people and it's incredibly relevant to examine at what point criticism of a religion can bleed over to blanket criticism of a people. As Ottoman used to point out, as soon as he converted, he ceased to be thought of as 'white' by a lot of people he interacts with.

Islam and race are absolutely conflated by many people. That's why the "criticism of Islam is racist" meme has stuck around for so long. Sometimes, criticism of Islam IS driven by racism, just like criticism of Israel sometimes is driven by anti-Semitism, or criticism of Xbox One exclusives are sometimes driven by anti-Microsoft sentiment

The problem is that the author of the article then takes that further and says that any New Atheist criticism of Islam is automatically driven by racism. Believing this is silly for a number of reasons and immediately shuts down any criticism of the ideology of Islam.

And in any case, even if that nuanced argument (religion being conflated to the race to the degree that imprecise, or deliberately malicious, criticism of religion is really a cover for criticism of the races that stereotypically are members of the religion) isn't acceptable to you then fine if it's not racist, then it is at least incredibly bigoted.

The problem with the article was that the author wasn't making a nuanced argument. He was repeating the same memes that are regularly and rightly mocked by the New Atheist movement.

The article excerpts a New Atheist argument:

Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have all rejected the notion that there is anything racist about statements of this kind or the prescriptions that so often follow from them: “Muslims aren’t a race,” being by now a particularly worn phrase in the New Atheist rhetorical repertoire. Harris and Hitchens have also dismissed the term “Islamophobia” as a tool for silencing their arguments. According to the latter: “A stupid term — Islamophobia — has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible ‘message.’”

but then doesn't do anything to debunk it! The article literally does exactly what the New Atheist movement rails against.