Religion
You big meanie!
Here’s a quick article from foreignpolicy.com that has Sam Harris going all Modest Proposal-like on Karen Armstrong.
I like Ms. Armstrong. She is extremely knowledgeable about religion and seems to represent, to me at least, what I think most people believe “True Religion” (copyright pending) stands for.
She apparently believes all of the extremists and fundamentalists of all faiths are mere perversions of what religion really means, based on her reply to Harris:
Religious traditions are highly complex and multifarious. Like art, religion is difficult to do well and is often done badly; like sex, it is often tragically abused. I hold no brief for witchcraft or the superstitious trading of body parts. Like many religious people, I do not believe in demons. I abhor violence of any kind, be it verbal or physical, religious or secular.
I have written at length about the desecration of religion in the crusades, inquisitions, and persecutions that have scarred human history. I have also pointed out that, driven by political humiliation and alienation, far too many Muslims have in recent years distorted the traditional Islamic view of jihad, which originally referred to the “effort” required to implement the will of God in a violent world.
In other words, if your religion offends or hurts somebody, you ain’t doin’ it right. Religion is so complex that we screw it up all the time. You can thank Jehovah or Yahweh or Allah or Xenu or whoever you pray to for that.
She then goes on to chastise Sam Harris for being a meanie:
Historically, this kind of attack only serves to make religious fundamentalists more extreme. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens have flung down the gauntlet in their spirited — some would say intemperate — manifestos against religion. They cannot be surprised if people challenge their critique in the way that I attempted in my article.
In the past, theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Rahner, and Paul Tillich enjoyed fruitful conversations with atheists and found their theology enriched by the encounters. We desperately need such interchange today. A truly Socratic dialogue with atheists could help to counter many of the abuses of faith that Harris so rightly deplores.
Like I’ve said before, the only difference between us “new” or “aggressive” atheists is that we are no longer burned at the stake, beheaded or otherwise made dead for having the audacity to remind religious people of some of the teeny-tiny inconsistencies in their beliefs. Indeed, our simply existing reminds religious people that their god believes in atheists because he created so many of us.
The non-religious are still discriminated against and marginalized, and that in itself is enough to cultivate justified outrage on our part. We have the same rights as all others and, after having had enough inane drivel and bombastic nonsense preached and forced on everyone by the religious for millennia, we are tired of its fruitless and harmful endeavors and feel some critical and (gasp!) harsh words might be in order from time to time. It’s simultaneously the best and least we can do since atheists don’t typically kill you for believing stupid shit. We just point out the stupid.
No public debate or dialogue between religious and non-religious leaders will fail to offend some peoples’ sensibilities. Karen Armstrong is either missing the point here or is moving the goalposts.
I understand her desire to convince people of the goodness, thoughtfulness and purity of religion in general. I believe this nostalgia for the “good ol’ days” is near and dear to many a bleeding heart. I also believe there really never was a good ol’ day when religion was good for you without baggage or misrepresentation on its part. This is the no true Scotsman fallacy.
Ms. Armstrong does a good job of disguising these problems in her writing most of the time. She is one of the more nuanced apologists out there. And I do now feel the need to label her an apologist based on her recent campaigns to reincarnate her fallen god. That’s another sleight-of-mind trick on her part. Her deserved respect for her lengthy and in-depth work on religion helps to bolster her “new” or “aggressive” pro-god agenda, whether she means this to happen or not.
I’m no faitheist, but I do see merit in civility between the religious and non-religious. Unfortunately, our ideas of mutual respect in discourse are not equal. Most religious people seem blissfully unaware of how offensive some of their beliefs and practices are, or they are apparently too pious to speak out against their more fundamentalist brethren. They also do not realize that for centuries atheists didn’t speak out not because they were afraid to upset people, but because they were afraid of what the faithful would do to them when they did speak their mind. It is a big irony that the Karen Armstrongs of the world call for more civility on the part of atheists when the favor is not returned. False piety deserves no respect. The religious know no more about our origins and universe than the non-religious do. In fact, it is quite often that the religious know less about material reality. All the atheists do is point out unwelcome facts; whether this is done with wit, insult or no loaded intent at all.
If anybody needs to do any growing up during modern debate, it is the religious. Have you seen the tactics used by modern apologists? Besides every logical fallacy under the sun being regularly and predictably trotted out, they insult, they delay, they muddle, they confuse, distort and deride. The only thing they can be counted on not to do is actually show any evidence for whatever jumbled nonsense it is in their frontal lobe that they call “god”.
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The You big meanie! by Jake Doelling, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Btw, here’s a great response to Karen Armstrong’s original article
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/god_0
that provoked Sam Harris’ exchange, by ORMONDOTVOS:
“Casuistry…
Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead.
Karen Armstrong is a competent theologian, as Ben Bernanke is a competent economist. Neither one of them should be allowed into an evidence-based discussion, such as “How do we move humanity forward using evidence-based theories?” because they both refuse to ground their commentary in cognitive science, which is the replacement umbrella for their disciplines (really, a terrible word, since neither IS disciplined by reality!).
What Ms. Armstrong cannot allow into her axiomatic structure is that religion is a reaction to lack of knowledge (her comment about religion arising with human characteristics purposely avoids the easily understood explanation that humans understood little of their environment, and yes, did have an urge to understand it, or much more accurately, CONTROL it.
Religion has always been a reaction to uncertainty, solving not the problem of uncertainty, but our human nervous reactions to it. Hence, the concept of opiates: life without understanding hurts, so we’ll fake some understanding and apply it to politics to keep down the questions that destabilize society.
So, as usual, Ms. Armstrong is irrelevant to FP, with its accent on reason and strong evidence. It’s nice of FP to put up this article so we can show our chops at understanding why the real question is:
WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE SOURCE OF RELIGION SO WE CAN SUPPLANT IT WITH BETTER FOREIGN POLICY THAT SATISFIES THE HUMAN NEED FOR CONTROL THROUGH UNDERSTANDING.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself!