Do you like how Dawkins, Hitchens et al. represent atheists?
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Yes, but the religions that Iceaura was referring to as atheistic had attached a world-view to the supernatural, a very codified sort of belief. Animism, for instance, or what we know about some of the native African traditions, places a lot more emphasis on supernatural goings-on than divine intervention. These beliefs were just as well developed as traditional European religions, it just suited the colonialists to see them as gross and foolish superstitions.
"Atheistic" goes too far, in my opinion, but there is a continuum of superstition and religion.
All you need to do is look at Catholicism, my own personal bane.
Are you familiar with Hannah Arendt's work on the subject? You're not precisely right (at least according to her.) She demonstrates a certain intellectual break between religious antisemitism and the antisemitism of the 19th century to the Nazis. The way that the Nazis targeted Jews is almost an accident.
I'm trying to find you a decent article online, because she is one of my very favorite dead people, but this is all I can find.
http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/modernity.html
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=570
You know, our dear SAM and that cheerful retard who runs around yelling have a point when they lay the atrocities of the 20th century at the atheist door. An over-inflated sense of the nation-state, the promise of science and pseudo-science, an anti-rational desire that runs parallel to that pseudoscience, the dominion of capitalism and capitalist ideology, frustrated imperialism, the weakened ties of family and place and a resultant attempt to ground the individual in the state, or in service to ideology, that is what coalesced into modern totalitarian states. The industrialized world has lost God, and there are those who want to distill the complications of the modern age into that notion.
Thank you, you're much more agile than I am. The inclusion of a God or Gods is not, in my opinion, that much of a big deal.
Nazi ideology was irrational: decidedly irrational, proudly irrational. The fact that they used pseudoscience to justify their actions says very little about science or evolutionary doctrine. They were simply heirs to the same intellectual tradition that used the Darwinian idea in service of imperialism.
Some pages back I demonstrated that the atheism of communist Russia was a historical accident - had the Orthodox Church thought to ride the communist wave and supported the revolution, Russian communism would have easily incorporated theistic ideas, as has happened since the earliest Christian communists to liberation theology.
Oh and finally this ought to settle a few things:
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ca_hitler.html
National Socialism is, in the end, a religion of power. Even the name ought to be a clue - the use of two very different ideologies to serve one end goal. Science is embraced when it is useful, for instance the Nazis claimed not to recognize the new ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics because they do not serve a totalitarian ideology, but used what they wanted of the evolutionary concept. Same with religion -
""Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." "
(The man had read his Nietzsche)
but the belief doesn't lead to atheism -
""We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out"."
It leads to some new amalgam - nature worship, power worship, the belief in the historical necessity (hah!) of the volk and the people's will. The Italian fascists, who actually had some good ideas, were much more explicit about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism#Syndicalism_and_the_.27Third_Way.27
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ca_hitler.html
National Socialism is, in the end, a religion of power. Even the name ought to be a clue - the use of two very different ideologies to serve one end goal. Science is embraced when it is useful, for instance the Nazis claimed not to recognize the new ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics because they do not serve a totalitarian ideology, but used what they wanted of the evolutionary concept. Same with religion -
""Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." "
(The man had read his Nietzsche)
but the belief doesn't lead to atheism -
""We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out"."
It leads to some new amalgam - nature worship, power worship, the belief in the historical necessity (hah!) of the volk and the people's will. The Italian fascists, who actually had some good ideas, were much more explicit about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism#Syndicalism_and_the_.27Third_Way.27
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Its more interesting to see the differences between his public declarations and private conversations. After all, he could not fail to recognise that alienating the church would decrease the support to him.
http://www.davnet.org/kevin/articles/table.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-Table-Talk-Private-Conversations/dp/184212028X
Which makes the Catholic Church's tacit approval even more criminal.
They had a good enough idea.
There are differences by timepoint; initially he was hesitant to push for an atheist state perhaps because he did not desire the development of a communist society or because he needed the support of the church. But I have no doubt, that if left to himself, he would have developed an ideology that was areligious as the national dogma, he was pretty convinced of the infallibility of his own ideas of racial superiority in that regard.
*Shakes head*
You're wrong to reduce Nazism to its racist ideas - they are only part of it. The whole is a mystic belief in the destiny of the Aryan people, a rejection of humanist/individualist ideals and the development of some totalizing pseudo-Hegelian "will." It's only atheistic in that it denies your God.
I think silent complicity in the face of a destructive force like Nazism deserves more than a remark about hindsight. WW2 was about as close to a total war as we've come as a civilization, and quiet agreement out of fear just does not cut it for an agency that claims to be moral.
Let alone to have a divine moral authority.
This, again, is well aligned with Dawkins's argument.SAM said:
Dawkins is not talking about personal belief in the heart of the powerful, after all. He is talking about the malign effects of obedience to the irrational and arbitrarily established - its easy cooption by an authority that could be, for all the difference it would make to Dawkins's argument, a robot. Hitler did not absolutely have to be the mystic and supernaturally motivated heir to a thousand years of theism that he was - although his sincere passion seems to have given him a charisma rarely equalled in modern times.
We do part company, there - I suspect the invention (or "rise") of a being incorporating the role of the spiritual in human affairs - making necessary a realm in which the being dwells, parallel and contemporary with our own; a world above, beyond, and most importantly apart from the world in which we live - is a very significant step.Xev said:
And here is, again, my own objection to Dawkins. He takes one side of the argument only, and however well-founded his observations of the effects of power backed by faith in the arbitrary and accountable only to the nonsensical, that is only half the story of the evils attendant upon divorcing the spiritual from the material.
But Dawkins is responding to a political crisis with political argument. He is not wrong to do so, and the odd mistakings of his arguments (as well as the virulence of the reactions to his basically calm and unsensational manner) reinforce my impressions of the apparent necessity of his approach.
So? The partial extent of the abuses well known to the entire hierarchy of the the Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, etc etc was more than enough to forbid complicity and support in sane human beings.SAM said:
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Its important not to ignore the most fundamental and important distinction between Religion and Superstition...this is something that Dawkins with his rather clunking opinionated view fails to distinguish.
The main concept behind all of Religion is the moral, sometimes known as "The Golden Rule" which instructs humanity to teaching to behave well in all their dealings with others. Do unto others..etc...love thy neighbour as thyself.etc etc..this point, is the polar opposite of Superstition which is primarily to do with how we should look after ourselves, not our neighbours. In the main its a compete reversal of Religion, in fact its more akin to science, it merely panders to a total self-centredness and its this selfish rather than selfless modern fad which makes it attractive to its main adherents..at its extreme slightly oddball Californians and people with far too much time to think about themselves. It is lazy thinking by Dawkins to suggest that two opposites are in fact one and the same but it conveneniently allows him to stigmatise the entirety of Religious concepts existent before the Old Testament and the Torah and to pass it off as mere superstition. It isn't!
Dawkins, lacks the subtlety to differentiate between age old Traditional moral codes (Religion) and mere self absorbed whim and fashionable fad (Superstition).
So you see religion as a codification of moral behaviour?
Dawkins is responding to a political crisis like Bush is responding to a political crisis. :shrug:
Both of them make equal amount of sense and will cause the same results to develop.
Codswallop. Behaving well when dealing with others has nothing to do with religion, despite theists claims our vile nature can only be tempered with the word of their god.
But, it seems even their so-called 'Golden Rules' mean very little to many theists who don't behave well to others, especially to those who don't share their beliefs or perhaps somehow defile their beliefs, in the case of homosexuality, for example.
No, Billy my boy, morals have very little to do with religion.
Seems superstition and religion ARE quite similar, after all.
There are quite a few conceptualizations of the moral - including, as Kant's Categorical Imperative does, that particular moral - that no one would normally classify as religions.billy said:
Areligious people often have strong morals, and predicting the actual morality of a community from its religious texts would not work very well in most cases.
At least in the case of theistic religions, the various supernatural beliefs identfiy religion far more reliably than the morality of its adherents. And all of these would be classifed as superstitions in different sociological circumstances, as far as I can tell.
I don't think you need to give up on actually criticising Dawkins's assertions and arguments completely. He is not unanswerable, IMHO.SAM said: