Mises and "New Atheism"

[Taraz]

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There's always the fact that not all religion came from the Middle East (though I admit these are probaly what shows up the most), and some might not have the "follow us or die" theme.

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What is this in reference to?

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Though I must wonder how much intolerance and violence comes from the religion itself. I mean people will fight over any reason. I suppose there are violent and hateful ideas in a number of religion, but not of their followers necessarily adhere to it. The reason how I can take the Old Testament in the Bible seriously even though I do believe in it, is that the context of the times was harsh with a lot of uncertainty going on and thus the tone of everything sounds really harsh, and God is harsh as well.

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My contention is that not much intolerance and violence comes from religion inherently. However, ideological thinking and in-group/out-group dynamics do. So while religion lets people fall into these traps, many other things do as well. You can make the argument that religion provides no positive benefits and only allows people to fall prey to these negative aspects, but I believe this view is mistaken. As a matter of fact, even if this claim were true, I don't think ostracizing theists would go very far in changing minds.

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But I wonder:
Would the Crusades have happened if there wasn't Christianity or Islam?
Would Al Queda exist without Islam?
I'm quite sure there would still be conflict in the same places just because of people having clashing agendas, although the degree of the conflict might be diffrent.

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I agree. Religious strife has definitely been the cause of some conflicts, but it's hard to parse out how much has to do with religion and how much has to do with culture and ethnicity (especially since religion shapes culture to a large extent).

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Also Taraz:
How has religion gotten more tolerant? Have they gotten more tolerant towards other religions? What about atheists/ nonreligious people? Yes, there is a difference here.

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I think I misspoke when I said religion became more tolerant. I shouldn't have used the word "tolerant" necessarily. Basically religion was moving along with modernity and society. People were accepting the social change that was going on or at worst ignoring the change. There wasn't really an active campaign of conflict. Although the higher institutions (the Catholic Church for example) tried to ignore/dismiss modernity, most people simply lived their lives and didn't really worry about it.

I don't want to claim that there wasn't tension between science and religion, but it wasn't that big of a deal for most people. It had always been there and there was no general crusade to reject rationality.

[Taraz]

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One of my big gripes with the new brand of atheism championed by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens is that they don't offer an alternative. They seem to simply say, "don't believe in God, it's dumb." Even though I agree to a certain extent, you can't just ask people to abandon a major part of their life and not offer anything to fill it with. And, unfortunately, I don't think science will fill the void.

Anyway, I found an interesting quote for those of you who happen to be both ACists and "militant atheists". It may make you reconsider how you approach religious conversations:

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"An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be."

--Ludwig von Mises


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did you get this from the scientific american opinion? i read that and didn't like it.

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I was reading someone else's rather long blog entry that briefly referenced this scientific american article. I didn't actually read the article though. Here is the blog post:

http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry...and_atheis.php

[Copernicus]

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One of my big gripes with the new brand of atheism championed by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens is that they don't offer an alternative. They seem to simply say, "don't believe in God, it's dumb." Even though I agree to a certain extent, you can't just ask people to abandon a major part of their life and not offer anything to fill it with. And, unfortunately, I don't think science will fill the void.

Anyway, I found an interesting quote for those of you who happen to be both ACists and "militant atheists". It may make you reconsider how you approach religious conversations:

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"An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be."

--Ludwig von Mises


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did you get this from the scientific american opinion? i read that and didn't like it.

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I was reading someone else's rather long blog entry that briefly referenced this scientific american article. I didn't actually read the article though. Here is the blog post:

http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry...and_atheis.php

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I pretty much disagree with the article as well, even though it echoes my position that there isnt anything very new about "new atheism".

Tolerance is a virtue only when the differences are non-threatening to those holding different positions. Christians would remain tolerant of Islam as long as the practitioners of Islam are not a threat, but that tolerance is self-defeating when Islam or its practitioners become a threat.

Likewise science can be tolerant of religion as long as religion remains non-threatening to science. However, the rise in power of the religious right, and the willingness of government to accede to the demands of vocal minorities, does represent a threat to science. Much of scientific research depends on public financing which in turn depends on faith in science on behalf of the public. When science is pubicly called into doubt, as it is when creationists began to cloak religion in scientific garb, it threatenss to de-legitimatize real science. Also, by making science education the battleground, creationism threatens to contaminate logical thought in future scientists...if non-scientific thought is allowed to stand beside science on equal footing, it weakens science.

Of course the von Mises quote is just another in a long line of his unsupported and unsupportable proclamations. "Anti" positions, whether or not they alienate the other side, can and do succeed.



Cliff notes:It was creationism that fired the first salvo against science, and science should be expected to respond.

[zasterguava]

I've always considered atheism as a non-belief or absence of faith. It isn't really anti anything. I mean, when I was 5 years old I didn't believe in God; thus I was an atheist, or atleast an unconscious atheist. I was not against religion or the idea of a god. I am now but that merely makes me a antitheist atheist as opposed to a "new atheist".

The great thing about atheism IMO is it has no requirements other than absence of faith- not dislike or hatred of faith. This, and the advancement of science, simply makes atheism the rational stance. It is quite irrelivent that there are some atheist who are fervent in their view and wish to intefere with other peoples beliefs. What's important is that unlike religion, hatred and arrogance is not a component or requirement of atheism.

[Copernicus]

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I've always considered atheism as a non-belief or absence of faith. It isn't really anti anything. I mean, when I was 5 years old I didn't believe in God; thus I was an atheist, or atleast an unconscious atheist. I was not against religion or the idea of a god. I am now but that merely makes me a antitheist atheist as opposed to a "new atheist".

The great thing about atheism IMO is it has no requirements other than absence of faith- not dislike or hatred of faith. This, and the advancement of science, simply makes atheism the rational stance. It is quite irrelivent that there are some atheist who are fervent in their view and wish to intefere with other peoples beliefs. What's important is that unlike religion, hatred and arrogance is not a component or requirement of atheism.

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I agree as long as you arent lumping Dawkins in with "those who wish to interfere with other's beliefs". There are certainly others who would, but in the context of a thread on "new atheism" it is too to confuse those who wish to engage in legitimate discourse with a Joseph Urbanski.

[SNOWBALL]

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The fact that snowball doesn't enjoy smoking doesn't mean that people who "think" they do are merely brainwashed, or deluding themselves.

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I love smoking. I AM a smoker. I plan to quit soon, and I don't expect to miss it much. Hopefully, I'm not wrong.

[SNOWBALL]

Misfire,

obviously, I am not making an argument. I am asserting that Ayn Rand was not a philosopher.

1. She is not smart.
2. NOTHING she wrote was original
3. She fundamentally misunderstood Kant, Nietzsche, and others.
4. She had a poor knowledge of philosophy, history, economics, and politics, but proclaimed herself an authority on all those subjects.
5. Her literary style is god awful. There are NO serious literatry critics who would give a positive review of any of her works.

etc etc etc

[zasterguava]

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I've always considered atheism as a non-belief or absence of faith. It isn't really anti anything. I mean, when I was 5 years old I didn't believe in God; thus I was an atheist, or atleast an unconscious atheist. I was not against religion or the idea of a god. I am now but that merely makes me a antitheist atheist as opposed to a "new atheist".

The great thing about atheism IMO is it has no requirements other than absence of faith- not dislike or hatred of faith. This, and the advancement of science, simply makes atheism the rational stance. It is quite irrelivent that there are some atheist who are fervent in their view and wish to intefere with other peoples beliefs. What's important is that unlike religion, hatred and arrogance is not a component or requirement of atheism.

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I agree as long as you arent lumping Dawkins in with "those who wish to interfere with other's beliefs". There are certainly others who would, but in the context of a thread on "new atheism" it is too to confuse those who wish to engage in legitimate discourse with a Joseph Urbanski.

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Perhaps the way I worded it makes it sound as if I implying that "those who wish to interfere with other's beliefs" are doing something bad. I would certainly consider Dawkins as doing that and I applaud him. He writes, appears on tv and works to advance the scientific knowledge disputing the idea of a creator.. this certainly "interferes with other's beliefs".

Hitchen's: "Religion should be met with HATRED, CONTEMPT and RIDICULE."

My point was that although an atheist can be very much against religion as are Dawkins et al... it is not a requirement of atheism and thus any arguments as to whether or not it should provide an alternative to faith are futile at best.

[zasterguava]

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Misfire,

obviously, I am not making an argument. I am asserting that Ayn Rand was not a philosopher.

1. She is not smart.
2. NOTHING she wrote was original
3. She fundamentally misunderstood Kant, Nietzsche, and others.
4. She had a poor knowledge of philosophy, history, economics, and politics, but proclaimed herself an authority on all those subjects.
5. Her literary style is god awful. There are NO serious literatry critics who would give a positive review of any of her works.

etc etc etc

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Surely the above just qualifies her as being, in your opinion, a bad philosopher as opposed to not being a philosopher at all.

[Copernicus]

The thread is probably more SMP than politics, but wth.

"He writes, appears on tv and works to advance the scientific knowledge disputing the idea of a creator.. this certainly "interferes with other's beliefs"."

Again, I disagree with the characterization of his works as trying to interfering with other's theistic beliefs. He fully acknowledges that you cannot prove the non-existence of anything, and the beliefs of theism cannot ultimately be disproven, precisely because they are based on faith not facts.

His purpose is not to change those beliefs, his purpose is to not allow holders of those beliefs to erroneously conflate them with science.

Now you may argue that a creationist's "belief" that science supports the existence of god is a "theistic" belief, and that belief is what Dawkins is interfering with. I don't agree with the premise that it is a "theistic" belief though.

Science has rules, axioms, procedures and protocols that are precisely designed to replace "belief" with "knowledge". When a creationist attempts to use science, but does so improperly (albeit unwittingly, since we are discussing his genuine "belief")Dawkins isnt attacking the creationist's belief he is attacking the creationist's science. The bad science in creationism can be exposed without challenging the underlying belief in god.

Its a fine line, certainly, but it is an important one if science is to continue to be done free of the taints of superstition.