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Originally posted by Lira (1) it doesn’t entail from the denial of the existence of God that all aspects of religious thought are going to crumble afterwards, so even if we did get rid of religion, no utopian age would ensue;

But I'd still argue (and I'm sure you'd agree) that it would be better to live in a world in which the conceits of religion are openly challenged than in a world in which they are not. That such a world will not be a "utopia" is of course true, but only in the sense that no possible world could ever be a utopia.

I think you're right in suggesting that there will be religions for as long as there are communities of human beings, but surely that's even more reason for religious thought to be held up to rigorous scrutiny by the dissenters, not less.

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(2) the option to live a godless life is mine and mine only – if everyone else had the same goals I have, then it would follow that I’d wish everybody became an atheist. This actually gives me a much harder problem to deal with: What goals should be worth pursuing?

That I advocate the truth of a certain idea is not to say that I will it as a particular "goal", much less that I think people who believe otherwise are somehow existentially misguided. I may think theists are "incorrect" in their claims, but - barring the more extreme cases - I'd rarely let my judgements pass any further than that.

To "live a godless life" is of course my choice - "mine and mine only" - and to choose for oneself is, as Sartre put it, to choose for all mankind. That's not to say that you would (or could) ever make choices for others on their behalf, only that you must recognise the importance of "authenticity" in choosing: what you wish for yourself you must also wish for all others in the same circumstances (which is why there's always a touch of inauthenticity - or "bad faith" - in the fundamentalists of one faith who denounce the otherwise identical rationale of a fundamentalist of a different faith).

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Let’s say I believe God exists. I don’t just imagine there’s an entity G – I assign a set of values and traits to this entity: He may be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving, or if I want to go for something really pessimistic, He’s just a cruel bastard having a laugh at our expense. Now let’s say someone hundreds of years ago believed (s)he received a message from this entity G which says we should not kill one another (let’s call it rule R1). Society takes this as one of its tenets and organises itself around similar principles, namely R2, R3 up until Rn. As these rules become deeply ingrained in social life, they’re slowly taken for granted.

Are you presenting this as an analogy as to how religious moralities are formed in the real world? Because I think you have it backwards: the rules come first, the Gods are introduced later to legitimise those rules.

The legal books of the Old Testament are a pretty blatant example of this. Many of the "laws" have direct corrolaries with laws from other Near-Eastern texts - primarily Babylonian, with some passages showing an almost word-for-word correspondance - that were penned hundreds of years before the name YHWH even came into existence. Some of the later layers of the OT (namely the "P source") demonstrate the re-interpretation of earlier Jewish myths to support the power of the priestly caste (Aaronid, specifically) with regards to sacrifices, temple worship, proscribed rituals and so on. In both cases, the human desire to impose rules (many of them being arbitrary and senseless) on others came first, the idea to claim the divine origin of such rules came second. At the risk of making a claim that I cannot possibly substantiate, there's probably not been a single "law" attributed to divine inspiration that cannot be better attributed to more terrestrial, human, political motivations.

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Now let’s say this entity G never existed – does it make all these rules void? No, not at all, it just opens makes them more vulnerable to criticism, otherwise you’d come to the bizarre conclusion that just because the entity G said we shouldn’t kill one another (R1), the absence of this entity G allows you to gleefully engage on a killing spree. You may even point out that this belief was around long before anyone claimed to bring a message from the aforementioned higher power, but this needn’t be the case. R3 could be a very accurate scientific predicted that turned out to be spot on – like how to cure all kinds of cancer. Would it be desirable to ignore this rule just because there’s no entity G? After centuries of social practice, would you even be able to tell the revealed rules from the former ones apart?! That’s unlikely, unless you’re a very good historian.

But who on Earth is suggesting that with the opposition to religion must come opposition to every position a religious person has ever articulated? That all religions have clear injunctions against the indiscriminate killing of human beings (though usually with pretty clear permission for killing people in basically every other circumstance) says nothing about the validity of religious claims, and everything about the universality of human experience. What it demonstrates is that moral claims should be made to stand and fall on their own merits - that is to say, judged against some objective criteria like "universal human sensibilities" - not on the basis of tradition or claims to divine justification. A good idea is a good idea, and a bad one a bad one, regardless of its origin. Surely no atheist would wish for anything more than a universal recognition of this simple fact.

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Now back to the real world: Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and I don’t believe in God. Does that mean any of us managed to break up completely from our Christian past? Not really, and this is what bothers me about their approach... I agree with John Gray when he says there’s something very similar going on when atheist proselytisers tell us how amazing the world would be if we all ditched God.

Oh come on, surely not? The promotion of a particular view or opinion does not instantly equate to proselytism, and it's always struck me as a very lazy argument to try to equate the "new atheists" with Christian evangelizers.

Firstly, Christian proselytism is firmly rooted in the concept of material conversions. The aim is not to engage in an open dialogue concerning the nature of our shared experiences, nor to express or justify its own world-view in any particularly sincere manner, but merely to convert as many brute numbers as possible. The reason for this is best likened to virology (the most successful religions will always be those that encourage reproduction if only for the sake of its own reproduction), but that's a little beside the point. The real point is that the methods and intentions of the "new atheists" are completely different from that of religious proselytisers, at least beyond the superficial (and completely meaningless) resemblence that both want to convince others that they are right.

(And again, let's follow that logic to it's natural conclusions: if simply having a strong opinion and wanting it to be heard is sufficient to denounce one as a "proselytiser" then we're going to find ourselves weidling the designation almost everywhere we look. Desmond Tutu was a fundamentalist proselytiser against apartheid, Keynes was a fundamentalist proselytiser against laissez-faire economics (and he even had the gall to retain certain assumptions of classicalist theory - what a fraud!) and Ghandi was a fundamentalist proselytiser against British imperialism (but even then he used the British language to express his opposition to Britain - how could he possibly claim that he represented a break with traditional British values when he himself used the same language?). Who in this dichotemic world of proselytisers and pluralists is not a completely objectionable hypocrite?)

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However, the reason why I feel the need to break up with their tradition is not because I think religion offers any sort of path to salvation, much less a true insight to whatever it is they are on about. I just don’t think everyone is out to seek the truth, or the natural truth at that (by natural I mean the truths about the natural world as opposed to a supernatural one). Some people would rather be happy than skilled at manipulating things in the world, the problems of having we all live under the same rules in a democratic society notwithstanding.

But like I said in my previous post, there's something very patronising about that. "These people are happy not knowing about the fragile epistemic foundations upon which all religions are based, let's leave them alone in case their poor minds explode with despair at knowing what our apparently superior minds can handle with complete ease". In the first place, that people might feel uncomfortable hearing certain ideas is no excuse to shelter them from said ideas. There are many people who are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that gay people are quite normal, healthy human beings, but I don't think that their irrational sensitivities are any reason to exclude them from having to hear any ideas to the contrary. Secondly, I think religious people are much more capable of handling arguments against the veracity of religious claims than you give them credit for. Just because not "everyone is out to seek the truth" that's not to say it's right to shelter them from it.

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In this sense, as I posted in that thread about God, as religion has its dogmas, the enlightenment has what I call rational axioms, namely “You shall be rational” and “You shall rely on evidence-based knowledge, not on faith-based knowledge”. As an heir of the enlightenment, that’s how I live. However, I’m hard-pressed to justify my adoption of these axioms:

But these aren't dogmas: enlightenment claims concerning the nature of the world evince their superiority not through any kind of rational circularity, but because they provided better (and more useful) explanations of the world around us. One can believe in the "rationalist dogma" of heliocentrism - that is to say, a belief borne (initially) of rational deduction - or the more intuitive assumption of geocentrism. Now of course we cannot say that either is absolutely correct - much less that the former will make you happier or more moral than the latter - but still: try getting a spacecraft to Saturn if you think the Earth is the centre of the universe.

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So, in the end, if I had to set the one goal I wish we all shared, it wouldn’t be the pursuit of happiness, the search for truth (I don’t even believe in a Truth anyway), or anything of that sort. I just think the liberty to do whatever we want without imposing our goals on everyone else should be the one axiom we ought to keep. Because, that itself, ironic though it is, is something that doesn’t just concern us, but the humanity as a whole.

But you seem to have this rather odd notion of a pluralistic "liberty" that is best maintained by everyone keeping their opinions to themselves and never saying anything that might "impose our goals" on anyone else: what kind of liberty is that?

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CORe Version: Unlike S.E. Cupp, I don’t think there’s anything desirable about the Christian right. Unlike Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens, I don’t think atheists need to save the world deconverting everyone.

Neither do I, and I'm pretty sure neither do they?

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I’m no bloody Hegelian.

Antithesis: Yes you are.

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http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/

Last edited by Renegade on Aug-07-2010 at 02:18