Evolution Author Goes After “Angry Atheists”

One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion.

‘beneficial aspects’ of religion? Does he mean this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop_8

Or this?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-6162918-504083.html

Or maybe this?

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1883598,00.html

Or perhaps he meant this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Anti-Homosexuality_Bill

Religion doesn’t provide any practical benefits that cannot be produced by Atheists.

I love the bait-and-switch, too. First, complain about Dawkins. Then, provide examples of where Hitchens has said something you don’t like. Keep a tally of how often this happens; it’s a not-so-clever favorite tactic of the anti-“New Atheist” crowd. They make superficial arguments based mostly on the titles of the books without bothering to talk about what Dawkins and Hitchens have actually said or written about.

I also loved this bit:

They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the “secular utility” of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.

Well, aren’t you a special little cub scout! Ignore for the minute the fact that they do, in fact, discuss the real-world (i.e. ‘secular’) benefits of religion and how they’re achievable through actually entirely secular means. You’ve got some nasty windmills to fight!

“Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven’t had a reply yet.”

The Bible doesn’t say that non-believers cannot make ethical statements or perform ethical actions. In fact it assumes the opposite: men and women are made in God’s image and have a sense of morality and conscience. He probably hasn’t had a reply because no-one disagrees with him.

David Sloan Wilson went off the deep end long ago. He is personally out for Richard Dawkins because Dawkins showed that Wilson’s ‘group selection’ is trivial and mostly wrong.

Wilson recently wrote an angry tirade 15 part series where he rants all about how the world is wrong about ‘group selection’. He is one angry piece of work.

So what? ‘Angry Atheists’ annoy him sometimes. Big deal! They annoy me sometimes too, and no doubt I annoy them.

Hell, there’d be no point in having comments on blogs if we didn’t annoy each other from time to time.

I think that you are misreading his point. He is not saying that you have to thave religion to get the effect but that people who are religious can get the effect through their religion. Very different points. Also, I am very disappointed, Hemant, that you imply that preaching bigotry is part of religion. To be honest, that is a bigoted statement. Some religions preach bigotry, but not all do.

I am slowly converging to a position that the word bigotry is unhelpful. Is it bigoted to tell parents that their unbaptized children go to limbo. So parents who are unlucky are in agony because they “failed to rescue” their child? Is that bigotry or not?

Religion is actually by definition bigotry. A certain world view is held without any ability to move it. It’s infallible hence other opinions are uncritically labeled as wrong or bigoted.

That very much shows how unhelpful bigotry is in a debate. Finally any argument involving bigotry as word is per definition ad hominem because it’s about the person not about the opinion.

Re: the bigotry comments

I think Hemant probably meant that exclusionist religion (only certain paths lead to heaven) is bigotry, and would probably agree that universalism/pluralism isn’t, so long as it allows everyone equal status. Quakers, for instance, believe that everyone has “that of God” in them, and the liberal Quakers don’t think anyone is going to Hell for not sharing their beliefs (or missing out on Heaven).

A *lot* of religion in the US is exclusionist though, and it’s hard to remember not to equate religion with that attitude, since it’s so prevalent (and gets all the attention).

JulietEcho, very good point. Most atheists I know ultimately are enlightenment humanists. It’s all about granting each other equal right to express our views. We don’t really deny anybody from holding any view. That is pretty much the definition of a non-bigoted stance I think. It’s not about what opinion one holds, but if another opinion is allowable and can be critiqued.

JulietEcho, I think that you said it well (and better than I).

As David Sloan Wilson is an atheist, he’s not personally concerned the he’s missing out on “the beneficial aspects of religion.” He’s above that sort of thing and doesn’t need a sectarian security blanket to make himself feel good. However, he’s really quite concerned that some of his fellow atheists are unkind enough to point out that the security blanket is a tissue of myths or lies. Wilson really can’t abide that. He prefers to pat believers on the head and say, “There, there now. I happen to believe that your belief is nonsense, but I respect it.” That surely makes the faithful feel loved and is ever so much nicer a response than that of those supposedly “angry” atheists who campaign against irrationality. Those atheists are just mean to the people Wilson prefers to patronize.

“No one — including Dawkins — denies that religion offers benefits like community and hope.”

I think you are missing the point when Wilson says, “They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the ‘secular utility’ of religion.” It’s not so much that he’s saying that religion is a good thing, but rather that the New Atheists are letting their biases against religion skew their understanding of what current science has to say about religion. For example, Wilson criticizes Dennett for writing Breaking the Spell for treating “the scientific study of religion as a task for the future, as if no firm conclusions can be drawn on the basis of current knowledge,” and continues on to say, “This stance gives him maximum elbowroom to interpret religion as primarily a delusion (as implied by the title), like the parasitic worm that commandeers ants by burrowing into their brains (the first example of the book).”

In other words, Wilson thinks that Dennett has particular ideas about religion that he wants to sell, and avoids the scientific studies that might throw a monkey wrench into those ideas by, for example, showing religion to be adaptive and not just a spandrel. He has similar criticisms of other New Atheists. Now whether those criticisms are accurate is another story, but that’s the gist of what Wilson’s been saying.

J. J. Ramsey, the problem is that the debate is on the wrong level. The question to be posed is this: Would our world evolve better with or without religion? Isn’t Wilson ignoring the evidence that non-religiousness almost everywhere in modern liberal democracies lifts all desirable dimensions of social life. Lower crime rates, lower abortion rates, higher levels of literacy and so on.

So if the argument is about evidence, there is plenty of evidence that even today, with an evolutionary perspective one can argue that perhaps a hypothetical history that doesn’t use religious mechanisms would performed equally or perhaps better, and that from now on we can also hold the hypothesis.

The evidence that religion is benefitial and has contributed to socio-political evolution doesn’t speak at all about valid criticism of religion and the relative merits of how society could evolve best.

The “secular utility” of religion may well not outway the utility of a purely secular world.

But that is the problem with social science in general, we do not have a ground truth, we just have one, actual historic evolution. To equate that evolution with the best possible outcome is a fallacy.

J. J. Ramsey, the problem is that the debate is on the wrong level. The question to be posed is this: Would our world evolve better with or without religion?

That’s one question, but there are a few others:

* How the heck did we get religion in the first place?

* Why are people religious?

* Heck, what does “religion” mean, exactly? Is it an actual phenomenon or a label we use to describe a mish-mash of phenomena that really aren’t that related?

If you don’t have good answers to those questions, you’ll have a dog of a time figuring out how to get rid of religion or at least mitigate its more negative effects.

Isn’t Wilson ignoring the evidence that non-religiousness almost everywhere in modern liberal democracies lifts all desirable dimensions of social life. Lower crime rates, lower abortion rates, higher levels of literacy and so on.

Judging from what Wilson had to say about the book Sacred and Secular, which discusses the factors leading to a society becoming religious or secular, I’d say no.

If you don’t have good answers to those questions, you’ll have a dog of a time figuring out how to get rid of religion or at least mitigate its more negative effects

Exactly how I feel. if we remove religion, the tendency towards idolatry and bowing down to something and oppressing others who disagree is still there. Witness last century which can be interpreted as some making an idol out of their political philosophy and sacrificing others to it. They decided their philosophy was more important than reason, and abandoned reason and even science.

It is easy to say religion causes this or that, but isn’t it also true we create religion and god in our own image? If so, are we the core problem? Religion didn’t pop into being on its own, we made it, and we had reasons to do so. Maybe it was to control others, maybe to explain things.

Should the death of religion be our goal? Or should it instead be the adoption of reason and the scientific method? If we do that will not religion end on its own?

That’s one question, but there are a few others:

* How the heck did we get religion in the first place?

* Why are people religious?

* Heck, what does “religion” mean, exactly? Is it an actual phenomenon or a label we use to describe a mish-mash of phenomena that really aren’t that related?

I’d love to do anthropology of religion, but is that really the debate here? We can start with Feuerbach, I have no problem with that. Feuerbach already gave quite interesting hypothesis what utilitarian reasons promote the adoption of religion and there is a wealth more in the area. None of this proves that religion is essential. In fact better solutions can be found if one understand the actual diverging utilities encoded in religious mandates and optimize them directly.

Furthermore dogma gets in the way. A utility 2000 years ago may well be mal-adaptive today. If we first have to fight absolute truth to change it, there is a direct hinderance because of religion.

Judging from what Wilson had to say about the book Sacred and Secular, which discusses the factors leading to a society becoming religious or secular, I’d say no.

I appreciate the pointer. I’d agree with Wilson in the article, except that rather than comparing wines, he is comparing apples and oranges. Hitchens and Dawkins address something different things.

I cannot see Wilson’s argument addressing the trends of revisions going in in the US today. See the new christian revisionism and fundamentalism is new. The christian coalition and moral majority, and the “faith” label on politicians is a trend of the last 30 years. I understand Hitchens and Dawkins to be counterreactions to this.

And these attempts to increase and promote religiosity is real. I see what we see on the Texas school board today as the direct outcome of the christian revival in the 80s. Just check which universities the people on the board went to, and you’ll understand that this isn’t just lunacy.

To mix that with prediction of long-term transitions in society as is studied and proposed in Sacred and Secular is conflating global religious study and societal development with rather local but socio-politically important US issues.

Where will “teaching the controversy” go if there is no opposition to it, or people speaking to the root cause for it even existing, religion?

Hitchens is better compared to Mark Twain, Thomas Paine and George Orwell. He is a social and political comentator with literature as his domain.

And Dawkins is a somewhat more confrontational version of Carl Sagan and but less outspoken than a Thomas Huxley. He is a defender of scientific method on the popular level.

They are not Feuerbach, Durkheim or Weber, who are sociologists, and philosophers.

It’s almost like saying that the promotion of the Theory of Evolution was hindered by Thomas Huxley, rather than critically protected against interlocutor and attempt to remove it as a persistent outcome.

Hitchens and Dawkins leave a purely secular world there as outcome by defending that option.

Finally, the hypothesis of gradual change. Is it true? I do not know. But what I know is that some of the most important shifts in belief structure often were sadly associated with drastic events. 30 year war, French revolution, US war of independence. But some chances came about in an invisible backdrop like the emergence of science through Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. These were not revolutions but hidden gradual changes that found ways to be in an intolerant world.

Which one is right? This is the question. And unlike Wilson my position is, I don’t know. At least I certainly do not have enough evidence to denounce Dawkins or Hitchens as being wrong for promoting a secular world view and overtly criticize what they criticize.

But ultimately I think that Wilson simply misjudges the role they play and what they actually say.

Truth be told, I think that if there wasn’t such a movement to oppose the study and acceptance of evolution, then Dawkins probably would never have gotten involved in these lines of debate.

Basically, they went and pissed in his pool, then get all shocked when he’s angry about it.

Gibbon,

I’ve said it elsewhere on this blog, and I’ll say it again. Modern atheism is the rejection of group thought and action.

Mate… you’re talking shit. That’s total nonsense.

Sacred and Secular is a sociology and political science book.
Wilson is right, if you think of Dawkins and Hitchens’ book as texts of sociology of religion they are not great wines. I just reject that there is even a sensible comparison.

But to your point:

authors of Sacred and Secular were actually using science and reason to deal with religion

Let’s actually look at the body of work of Dawkins. No, he doesn’t study religion as an object using science. He is not a sociologist of religion. He counters apologetics by religious people with science. He is a professor of public understanding of science, with his expertise being in natural sciences. These are plainly different domains.

He uses plenty of science, but on a different plane. He uses science to address misuse of science by religious advocates.

In a court proceeding that tries to evaluate the merit of ID, would Sacred and Secular help win the case the that ID is not something we should teach to children? I would say no. However Dawkins books directly addresses the point and directly helps that case.

So let me claim this again: These are different domains!

Look I disagree with Dawkins on plenty of things. I actually dislike how he treats agnosticism for example. But these blanket attacks against a whole book without going into the details of the position I find as best unfair. And comparing them against genres that they simply never tried to be is unfair as well.

Wilson wittingly or unwittingly places himself with Eagleton and Craig Lane. All attacking Dawkins on things he doesn’t try to do or positions he doesn’t actually hold.

As for Hitchens, he is no scientist. By this argument, should we reject the thinking of Orwell and Twain? I reject that motion as plainly silly. Hitchens brings plenty of good reasoning and valuable insights, as did Orwell and Twain.

Plenty of good is happening from atheists. We get no credit. In fact I volunteer regularly but I do it silently, because I don’t want to do it to boast. I do it to help. I don’t need to solicit donations after all.

And people forget that some of the most generous philantropes are atheists.

It’s easy to say that we do not practice what we preach. One people don’t even look at what we practice!

As for friendship, the deepest friendship is the one you have with someone you disagree with.

Not really. The first statement is not a statement of ethics, it’s a statement of jealousy. But here is how an atheist can say this:

“Do not have any God before anything.”

But let me give you more. An atheist is perfectly fine to say the following:

“Do not have any God before the one God. If that one God exists at all.”

So if the precondition is met, fine, have it. It’s still not an ethical position but one of exclusion. It’s an onthological question of other supposed Gods with respect to “the one God”.

The second statement has a perfectly secular analogue:

“Keep one day of the week free of working obligations so people can rest and take care of family”.

Doesn’t require god at all.

There is no such thing as the ethics of faith, but there are lots of evidence that in fact the assumption of ethics of faith in practice leads to unethical things.

Prayer healing for example.

Er, it’s half a chapter in the God Delusion on memes and religions. And again Dawkins is a popularizer of memetics. Eminent and expert enough in that he actually coined the very term in 1976. I think he is perfectly clear that he isn’t writing a scientific study but explains how memes might work evolution of religious ideas.

And he himself has joked that some think that was too much memetics in the book and some thought that was too little.

If we are arguing if half a chapter of a popular exposition of a book is comparable to a book that is full scholarship on the topic, well I think we are close to silly season.

Sure one can “call him out” on it, I’m just not going to agree that that’s sensible.

The standard that you promote I simply cannot justify. By what you state only experts can ever speak. I find that too stringent a criteria.

By that standard we can never write books that are for popular consumption. All has to be a scientific study. Look if I read Hawking’s Brief History of Time as an authoritative book on cosmology I’m in for disappointment. In fact Hawking does quite a bit of unscientific speculation in that book too! And he talks on theologicals matter without doing theology.

Hawking’s book is bad, if you look at it the wrong way. You have to judge the book on what it tries to do, not what you think it ought to have done.

I have lots of issue with Hawking’s book too, but I wouldn’t be found confusing it for Misner, Thorne, Wheeler.

I stick to my position. You are comparing two things. I’m happy to accept this as a disagreement.

Ramsey, you are leading me around the block. You bring on memes, I respond, then suddenly it’s not about memes.

Let me take your charge seriously and go into depth with Wilson.

Here is the charge:

“if New Atheists are going to expound on sociology of religion (or anything else for that matter) they should do their homework and know what the heck they’re talking about.”

So you are saying Dawkins misquoted, misrepresented or undercited something in the God Delusion as a popular book on the subject of atheism? If you do, please cite, or retract.

I have issues that he doesn’t cite Feuerbach, but that’s about it. Feuerbach is undercited in most anglo-saxon literature on the topic in general so I cannot hold this against him specifically.

How about Hitchens. What did Hitchens not do, on the topic he covers, that he should have done? Please quote or retract.

I think you are in mud slinging territory to be honest and let me argue in detail why I think that. Let us look at how Wilon argues, and keep in mind the very standards you have told us to uphold:

http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/2009/10/atheism_as_a_stealth_religion_4.php

Most of his analysis of Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens are not scholarly. He quotes the most extreme things by Hitchens (and yes he is a provocateur) and not his most conciliatory.

In both his blurbs on either Hitchens and Dawkins he has to go to sources outside their main books, God Delusion and god is not Great to find some dirt. And that is justification for dismissing them.

Scholarly? Scientific? Hardly. Did he do his homework? Well not from the blurbs he wrote he didn’t.

And yes I happen to think that telling children that there is a hell where they go to if they don’t pray every day is child abuse. But let’s not take my context. So Wilson attacks Dawkins for the child abuse thing. But Wilson twists it when he claims “which will require setting up a vast foster care system staffed by rationalists”.

As if all foster parents, even the religious ones are in the spectrum where Dawkins placed his concern. For the lack of Wilson’s own scholarship he does not quote where Dawkins actually says it and in which context:

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/118

It turns out that he actually quotes psychologist Nicholas Humphrey who actually proposed the idea. Humphrey of course studied in detail the context and has written extensively on the psychology of supernatural beliefs. Dawkins cites this:

http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/1998WhatShallWeTell.pdf

For Humphrey (not Dawkins) to come to his judgment he in detail discusses actual cases. Enough to tell Amnesty International about it and quality enough to get it published in a peer reviewed journal. Geez, who didn’t do their homework and don’t know what they are talking about?

We are to belief that Dawkins view on religion as child abuse is unreflected and doesn’t consider context. Really?

So being ignorant of Dawkins context for his claims, then making exaggerated and unfounded claim about possible impact on the foster system we are to belief that Dawkins is wrong? That is knowing what one is talking about and scientific? I’m sorry. It’s not and Wilson does not engage in a scientific critique of Dawkins’ views. Frankly it is not even clear he read Dawkins article on the matter.

Wilson basically parrots the charges against Dawkins by his most shallow detractors, without checking context. Scholarship? Hardly.

With Dennett at least he engages on his main text, but rather than engage with it on Dennett’s term, as primarily a text in the philosophical tradition.

I disagree with Dennett’s presctiptions too, but I’m not going to be found to think of Wilson’s argument that “I doubt that this policy would have a meaningful impact on the worldwide problems associated with religion.” Is any more scientifically solid than unstudied assumptions by Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett.

But no, we have to belief that the new atheists are angry, ineffective, silly and dangerous! Yes, and that by taking extreme quotes, pulling things in a different context and so forth. And then we have to buy that really these three authors are unscholarly, ideally without checking the arguments brought against them.

No you won’t be seeing me nodding my head to this.

There is too much legitimate criticism of all three to allow that kind of unserious dirt-slinging to stick, let alone be called reason and science.

But I have to commend Wilson, unlike Eagleton he left enough traces of his opinion that one can actually check if he hold up to his own demands. But he ends up being no better than Eagleton in a stereotypical knee jerk reaction against the New Atheist, charging them in ways that are neither fair nor honest.

I don’t for a minute think that the benefits of religious organisations outweigh the flaws.

So to be clear – if we could disolve the catholic church tomorrow – I’d be all in favour. I might even do a little dance. If we could disolve the Baptists and Islam the following days – I’d probably even do a full choroegraphed dance routine, with jazz hands and tap dancings.

But if you can’t see that their are some good things come from religions – then you’ve become as blinded by dogma as the religious institutes that are so irritating to sensible people.

Soup Kitchens? Almost universally run by religious groups. Immunization programs in the third world? Almost universally run by religious groups. Centralized education including litteracy? A concept pioneered by religious groups. The core moral tennets that western culture revovles around? Almost universally derived from religious texts.

Clearly – some good stuff has come out of religion. Still, the overwhelming majority of charities in the world have some kind of religious kick to them.

And it’s a damned shame that all those good things come lumped with the virulent stupidity of homophobia and gender bias, and a damned shame that they’ve become so integrally tied to isolationism and cultural insularism and in so many cases racism. It’s horrific that of all the things that people could have used Jesus to group around – strong nuclear armament is such a prevalent choice.

But that doesn’t change the fact that branding religion as universally negative is ignorant and a product of dogmatic obsession with a cause rather than rational clarity and reasoned purpose.

And if you think Dawkins isn’t genuinely branding anything that has a religious connoitation as ‘Evil’ – even if it’s something completely benign in practical implementation – or no more harmful then the secular equivalents – then you haven’t read enough of his writing.

Dawkins says a lot of interesting things, but it’s hard to even try and argue that he’s rational and reasonable in his views on religion.

duhsciple: Quote a statement that you think demonizes and we can talk.

As you say we should be suspicious of demonization. I happen to suspect that new atheists are blanket demonized as aggressive. So let’s evaluate the evidence.

duhsciple,

Logically, atheism doesn’t motivate anyone to do anything. A lack of a belief can’t motivate anything. At best, lacking a belief would remove motivation to do something bad.

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticism of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is. [Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea]

Of course, I am against fanaticism. But is that all there is to these faiths?

It’s off topic but yeah I don’t at all agree with Hitchens on the wars and how he portraits the opponents of the war, including Moore and Sheehan. The Michael Moore quote you mention makes more sense in the context of his longer article: http://www.slate.com/id/2102723

Hitchens really is an heir of Orwell who also had no sympathy for pacifism. And I’m very much in a different camp than him on that.

But let me bring that back to the point of demonization. I think that Hitchens does demonize some people he dislikes. But if one is honest in evaluating people we should not do the same. We can agree with some parts of what people say and disagree with others, rather than whole-sale buy all or nothing.

I happen to agree with most of Hitchens assessment with regards to religion and overall he has been very friendly and kind making his point, points that are harsh for true believers for sure, but fair points regardless. Heck apologist debaters keep inviting him and I have yet to see a debate where he is rude or aggressive (in my definition of those terms).

So to label Hitchens aggressive in his position is often overreading his rhetoric rather than his actual arguments. So yes, he says he is anti-theistic, but if you listen to the points he makes he is actually pro-coexistence as long as people don’t meddle. He doesn’t have any real issue with moderate enlightened forms of religious beliefs.

But it’s easy to take the subtitle of his book and his proclaimed anti-theism and surface reading of his spiel on celestial dictatorship and north korea to paint him as aggressive, when a true picture is actually more more sensible.

With Dawkins it’s even worse. Dawkins is the more gentle person. He loses patience every now and then and he like to be in the spotlight, but he makes some really strong points and usually is solidly researched (at least I don’t know of any serious gaffe).

I completely disagrees with his probability model of atheism and think he is flat wrong about what agnosticism even means but again we can look at arguments without having to demonize the person.

Yet he too is demonized over the child abuse thing without people considering the context.

Take Harris. I literally had people tell me that he wanted to exterminate all believers. It’s an extreme and unjustified interpretation of his book the End of Faith, where he does argue that the world will be better without faith.

Very often people simply fail to separate faith and the faithful and assume an anti-theist will come out to slaughter them. Yes that would be aggressive or worse.

And apologists help. D’Souza literally conjures up Holocaust images when arguing against Atheists, amplifying the fear that all atheism leads to totalitarian mass murder. Sure we ought to be afraid of the new atheists!

There are whole books quoting how bad Hitchens and Dawkins are. Pull a stern quote out of context and it becomes horrifying. This is how that works.

That doesn’t mean we have to cheer every word of any of these men. Let’s judge their views on their individual merits. That’s what it means to not demonize.

And with my criticism of Wilson, it only applies to that point. I have not read enough what else he says and his individual points too deserve to be judged on their individual merits.

Gibbon,

When people talk about religion they’re talking about things connected to supernatural beliefs. Religion has been about the supernatural for the entirety of history. It might be difficult to study religion, but studying reality often is. You don’t study the oceans but forget about the water.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that Mohammed was a fraud, he was definitely self-serving and plagiarising enough to be a fraud. Perhaps he was the Joseph Smith of his time. However, while selectively picking out parts of the Qur’an you like, you may want to stop and read all the theology that’s there. Jesus may have been against wealth, but he was also against planning for the future, families, and warned that judgement day was soon. From the same scripture you mention, if you take it seriously, these people were batshit insane. If it’s an elaborate ruse, dressing up reform, then as Jefferson found out when he tried to make his version of the Bible, the gospels contain very little of secular concern.

There’s no guarantees, but there doesn’t need to be. I’d suggest there’s good reasons and evidence to believe that less religion, and more enlightenment, things would be better. That should be enough.

I stand by my comment about modern atheism involving a rejection of the group, because it seems pretty clear to me that atheists tend to be far more independent minded people than your typical theist/religious person. There is a pattern here: the secular atheist type favours basic rights and freedom of thought, while the religious type, particularly the conservative ones, prefers community participation and group thought. Why else would you have someone like Richard Dawkins making the admission that organising atheists is like herding cats?

No you misunderstand this. Lack of belief simply is no organizing principles. It is much more sensible to organize for a positive cause. Atheists still organize in other groups, habitat for humanity, doctors without border, amnesty interantional, ACLU, … there are many causes to organize around. It’s just that supernatural belief disappears as organizing principle. Dawkins tries but I think it is indeed hard, perhaps too hard to do, but not for the psychology of nonbelievers. We socially organize just fine.

But yes you do need independence from group think to reject beliefs that a dominant culture brings to you, but that’s something different.

Aj

When people talk about religion they’re talking about things connected to supernatural beliefs. Religion has been about the supernatural for the entirety of history. It might be difficult to study religion, but studying reality often is. You don’t study the oceans but forget about the water.

This is an apt demonstration of the legacy of the Protestant Reformation. This idea that supernatural beliefs lie at the heart of religion did not exist before Protestantism. The idea first took form when Protestants made the argument contrary to the Church of Rome that being a Christian was a matter of individual faith and not a matter of ritual practice. Of all the major religions only Protestant Christianity is mostly orthodox, the rest, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Catholicism are primarily orthoprax religions. They’re centred more on their practices than on their beliefs.

The only reason that most people today, outside the community of religious scholars, believe that religion is centred on supernatural belief is because of the importance that Protestant Christianity has played in the shaping of the western world. If those Christian reformers of the 15th century had never argued that faith must come before practice in Christianity, then the Reformation would not have happened and all of European history after that would not have occurred, which would mean that you would not be arguing that religion is about supernatural beliefs.

If it’s an elaborate ruse, dressing up reform, then as Jefferson found out when he tried to make his version of the Bible, the gospels contain very little of secular concern.

What Thomas Jefferson attempted was not reform, rather he trimmed the Christian Bible like an arborist would trim a tree. He tried to make relevant only that which could be understood in the language of the Enlightenment, and he did so without any translation of the text while cutting out large chunks of it, and which could not be understand according to Enlightenment philosophy. Any person who desired to understand what scripture said would today approach the text with the full historical context of the document in mind. You can’t understand what the Qur’an says if you don’t take into consideration 6th century Arabia and the events of the period; you have to divorce your self from more recent influences to a considerable extent, which includes ignoring the influences of Protestant Christianity.

There’s no guarantees, but there doesn’t need to be. I’d suggest there’s good reasons and evidence to believe that less religion, and more enlightenment, things would be better. That should be enough.

Actually the experiments with Enlightenment philosophy over the last 300 years, and the experiments in the 20th century with zero religion, prove that less religion and more Enlightenment principles is not the answer, and doesn’t even come close.

Hitch

Atheists still organize in other groups, habitat for humanity, doctors without border, amnesty interantional, ACLU, … there are many causes to organize around.

None of which exclude anyone other than atheists, and none of which create a close-knit self-regulating community in the way that religion does.

Dawkins tries but I think it is indeed hard, perhaps too hard to do, but not for the psychology of nonbelievers. We socially organize just fine.

And yet atheists have not been able to organise into a social movement nearly as effectively as religious communities have. When was the last time an atheist movement managed to build up huge numbers and take control of one half of government in the first ten years of its history? Note: the Religious Right did that in the latter half of the 1970s. What are the chances that atheists in any western nation will have gained control of a major political party by the year 2016?

But yes you do need independence from group think to reject beliefs that a dominant culture brings to you, but that’s something different.

Well it’s not actually. If what you reject is the beliefs that brought the group together, then logically you are rejecting that group. Atheists may be forming their own groups, but that first requires rejection of other groups, ones which are built on the idea that by definition atheists reject.

Neil Schipper

Did your course touch on how religion tends to swing between tolerant and fundamentalist forms as resource constraints driving inter-community competition wax and wane?

Actually, while the Religious Studies courses I have taken so far have not really covered the relationship between resource control and religious conflicts, I have gotten that impression from the first year course on Modern European History, although not quite in those terms.

Wilson is probably campaigning for a Templeton prize.

It’s been a while since I posted here, but I have to agree, there are no benefits to religion. One can get the same thing without religion. You don’t need religion to have a happy, fulfilling, and satisfying life.

Gibbon,

Despite several days late, I just have to do this. One last attempt to open Aj’s mind.

By what? Repeating dogma? No persuasion? No reason? I have an open mind, I can be persuaded with evidence and reason. I haven’t opened my mind so much that my brains have fallen out though.

Rituals do not typically become meaningless when the beliefs are lost, often the ritual can continue because it confers some benefit.

Meaningless as in no meaning, not as in purposeless. Are your comments some kind of game where you have to fit as much equivocation as possible?

Don’t twist my words. Of course Muslims believe that Mohammed was the Prophet of Allah, but they don’t believe that there was any divine or supernatural quality to him, Sunni’s especially, instead he is regarded as fully human. It is not his nature that is central to Islam, but rather his actions and the life that he both taught and lived, which Muslims try to emulate in following the Qur’an.

That’s rich coming from someone who only twists words. I don’t know what you think the prophet of Allah means, but I think it means a supernatural entity called Allah has interacted with you.

No doubt Jefferson was no idiot, but doing what you’re doing by interpreting millennia old scripture from the perspective of Enlightenment philosophy does not make sense of it. That perspective is telling you that religion is all about supernatural belief, but only when one understands the social conditions of Roman ruled Judea or 6th century Arabia without the influence of the Enlightenment hovering over you, can the respective scriptures and what they are saying be understood. Once you do that it quickly becomes apparent that the texts were not the nonsensical ravings of mean trying to create new ideologies, but rather attempts to reform society and the everyday practices of the people in them.

If you deny the fields of history and psychology. The social conditions don’t change that people believe in nonsense. If you actually take on the principles of reason from the enlightenment, then you would have to concede scripture was created by people, who like most people are and have been, were superstitious and ignorant of reality. And even of the religious founders that were frauds instead of crazies, their followers still believe in ghosts, aliens, gods, and unicorns. Your claims aren’t backed up by reason or evidence, you might as well be selling the same irrational nonsense as liberation theology that takes what you say on faith not reason. Are you a theist or a marxist?

Any place that has a decent quality of life as well as the opportunity to make a living, and that is not under the rule of authoritarian regimes; the last of those three being the most important. It has nothing to do with Enlightenment philosophy. The same phenomenon has played out in countless periods throughout history, both prior to and following the Enlightenment; where there was a prosperous and stable state. People in less well off regions tend to migrate to where the best opportunities and living standards can be found for no reason other than to improve their lives. Let’s not forget that in one period in history people who were less well off were migrating away from where the Enlightenment had the strongest influence: the Industrial Revolution. The consequences of it had people migrating to the colonies to escape the destitution and famine that the Revolution had produced.

Quality of life has nothing to do with the technology, knowledge, wealth, and jobs the Enlightenment brings? The Enlightenment had radical ideals of freedom, of greatest importance was intellectual freedom and freedom of expression, in great contrast to the centuries of religious tyranny. Lets not forget that most migration has been towards industrialized nations with the strongest links to the Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution was key to nearly every societal advancement Western societies enjoy.

Grant that I may not seek so much to be understood as to understand.

I appreciate listening to atheist perspectives. It seems like y’all are a very diverse lot, as are theists.

Peace!

I think its unfortunate that so many people have commented so vehemently about this topic without even touching on the reasons why an evolution author would be talking about the difference between theists and atheists. Perhaps its more acceptable be an atheist than to suggest that (some) people are fundamentally irrational and have a biological predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomenon.
In responding on this topic everyone else seems to assume that people are rational and that if you provide the right facts and arguments, a rational person will agree with you. Atheists have been attempting this unsuccessfully for centuries! Without having read “Evolution for Everyone”, I can only suppose that Wilson’s disapproval of “Angry Atheists” is based on the futility of using logic to persuade a believer of the error of their ways.

If I wanted to take a gods-eye view of evolution (pun intended), I would argue that we probably should want to increase the number of atheists in the population and decrease the number of theists. But natural selection produced different results. It might be interesting to try to find out why, and if the conditions don’t favor theists anymore, take some comfort in the knowledge that they will eventually become extinct.