It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
Actually, the chances were pretty good. When it comes to foreign policy, a right-wing bias afflicts not just Hitchens's world view, but the whole ideology of "new atheism," especially as seen in the work of Hitchens allies Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.
Atheism has little intrinsic ideological bent. (Karl Marx. Ayn Rand. I rest my case.) But things change when you add the key ingredient of the new atheism: the idea that religion is not just mistaken, but evil -- that it "poisons everything," as Hitchens has put it with characteristic nuance.
Consider Dawkins's assertion, in his book The God Delusion, that if there were no religion then there would be "no Israeli-Palestinian wars."
For starters, this is just wrong. The initial resistance to the settlements, and to the establishment of Israel, wasn't essentially religious, and neither was the original establishment of the settlements, or even of Israel.
The problem here is that two ethnic groups disagree about who deserves what land. That there was so much killing before the dispute acquired a deeply religious cast suggests that taking religion out of the equation wouldn't be the magic recipe for peace that Dawkins imagines. (As I show in my new book The Evolution of God, zero-sum disputes over land and other things have long been the root cause of the ugliest manifestations of religion, ranging from Christian anti-semitism in ancient Rome to bloodthirsty xenophobia in the Hebrew Bible to the Koran's gleeful anticipation of infidel suffering in the afterlife.)
The Israeli and American right join Dawkins in stressing religious motivation in the Middle East, and there's a reason for that. The people there whose political grievances are most conspicuously caught up with religion are Muslims. If the problem is that Muslims are possessed by this irrational, quasi-autonomous force known as religion, then there's no point in trying to reason with them, or to look at any facts on the ground that might drive their discontent. And there are facts on the ground in the West Bank that the Israeli and American right don't want to talk about. They're called settlements.
And so too with discontent throughout the Muslim world: If religion is the wellspring of radicalism, why bother paying attention to any issues in the actual material world? Why, for example, would you do what President Obama has done, and address a longstanding Iranian grievance by admitting that the US played a role in a 1953 coups that replaced Iran's democratically elected leader with a dictator?
Sam Harris has been explicit in rejecting material explanations of Islamic radicalism. In The End of Faith, while discussing terrorism, he pondered such roots causes as "the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza...the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships...the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world." He concluded: "We can ignore all of these things, or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf, because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism."
Yes, and the world is full of people who smoke and never get lung cancer. So, by Harris's logic, there's no chance that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer -- and we never should have investigated that possibility!
People are survival machines built by natural selection. (This Dawkins gets.) When they sense threats to their interests, they can not only get violent, but wrap themselves in a larger cause that justifies the violence. Here they're as flexible as you'd expect well-built survival machines to be: that larger cause can be religion, yes, but it can also be nationalism or racialism. Hitler whipped up more fervor with the latter two than the first. Whatever's handy.
Of course, when religion is handy, special problems can arise. If there were no belief in paradise, there would be few suicide bombers. Then again, there might be less charity. Whether belief in posthumous rewards has on balance done more harm than good is an empirical question whose subtlety Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens don't exactly emphasize.
Anyway, the question is how to reduce the number of suicide bombers. And I have to wonder: If some Jihadists are motivated partly by fear that the west threatens their religious culture, is the optimal counter-terrorism strategy to have know-it-all westerners tell them their God doesn't exist?
The history of the Abrahamic faiths suggests not. Making Jews, Christians, and Muslims feel threatened by other cultures has often brought out the worst in their religions, whereas doing the the opposite -- putting them in "non-zero-sum" situations, where win-win outcomes are possible -- has brought out the best.
Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris should of course write what they want, even if it's likely to increase the amount of religious radicalism in the world. But if they're going to style themselves as soldiers in the war on terror, that will just go to show that the "God delusion" isn't the only kind of delusion.
Afterthought: It's logically possible for "new atheists" to highlight the Israeli settlement problem on grounds of justice or international law, notwithstanding their implied belief that addressing the problem won't do much good until religion vanishes. And here Hitchens, commendably, has been on the right side of the issue, even if he hasn't invested much energy in it since his turn to the right.
Robert Wright is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and, most recently, The Evolution of God
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Chris Stedman: 'Evangelical Atheists:' Pushing For What?
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The main theses of the afore mentioned authors from your article are, in a word, irrationality; of which religion, superstition, God, Vishnu, Thor et al. are symptoms only. In fact, war could arguably, in general, be thrown in this pile do to irrationality's strong link to fear. But arrogance, Robert, arrogance is what over shadows all religion et cetera in the ontology of the inexplicable. The ignorant expressing knowledge of the unknowable, how is that for arrogance? This, I think, is why Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, plus many others, including myself, link 'religion' and war -- that is, irrational world views do not lend themselves to rational discourse therefore violence ensues. Can you feel the power of irrational arrogance in the tone of this comment? Wanna kick my ...?!
Just to make a point.
In the case of the israeli-palestinian conflict, I think Mr. Wright has created a false either-or choice.
In Mr. Wrights view, religion and conflict is not a causal relationship at all and he cast the new atheists as saying that there is a direct relationship between religion and political conflict...Both positions Mr. Wright presents create this false either-or choice.
Religion is not singularly responsible for the israeli-palestinian conflict. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Ben Gurion and israeli history knows this.
But just because the search for a jewish state did not start out as a religious movement, doesn't mean the israeli state has not become a religious movement. And the palestinian movement, while about nationalism for the Palestinians, is about religion for the Arab nations and groups who support them.
Religion may not be the sole driving factor in this debate but it has become a major one (especially with the likes of gushemonem sp?). Religion acts as a sort of "fallback" mechanism in which when all other paradigms of conflict have been explored and solved cosmic conflict is impossible to solve.
When "we deserve this land because no other place in the world would accept our people" becomes "we deserve this land because god says so" then the conflict has escalated past reason and makes it impossible to solve.
Hitchens has actually argued that some of the people responsible for the Iraq war (of which he is still proud) are atheists - he has tried to claim Karl Rove as an atheist. In any case, the father of the NeoCons, Leo Strauss, was an atheist.
If you believe there was a Garden of Eden with a talking snake... Where is the evidence?
If you believe moses split the red sea and the Jewish People wandered the desert for 40 years... Where is the evidence? (really? 40 years and not one piece of archaeological evidence.)
If you believe a virgin had a baby, that baby when older turned water to wine, walked on water, raised the dead, and was resurrected himself... Where is te evidence?
We Atheists love to debate the issues, not just religious issues, but all issues. I like that.
Who is more moral, a person who does good to get a reward and avoids evil out of fear of punishment, OR a person who does good and avoids evil because they know it’s the right thing to do? They know it’s the right thing to do because they have derived their ethics from within. Atheists (speaking for myself now) derive their ethics logically, from basic observations of human activities and interactions (with themselves and with their environment). Basic observations and logical interpretations of human behavior dictate that it is wrong to steal, for example, and that people are happier and more productive if they cooperate and help one another.
HHDD do not claim to be “soldiers” in any kind of conflict (well maybe Hitchens does). It’s YOU who is trying to style them as “soldiers in the war on terror” – although you conveniently leave out Dennett and many other prominent modern atheist authors. If HHDD have done nothing but to open people’s eyes to the fact that faith and religion are not, and should not be, above criticism and question, then they have succeeded.
Absolute, 100% nonsense. The Tamil Tigers, an utterly secular organization, practically invented the idea of suicide bombing.
The common denominator of suicide bombers is not a belief in paradise, but a belief in the despair of any positive change happening in this world.
The Tamil Tigers being a secular organization hardly makes them atheist.
That's like saying the Unitarian Universalists are atheists.
Maybe you are wrong to think that atheists are an overwhelmingly left-wing group, thus your apparent confusion. Maybe it depends on how you define left-wing. Left-wing politically, socially, economically, etc? Maybe left vs. right is all relative and atheists are travelling up the center. Or maybe you can’t pigeon-hole atheists. You are definitely wrong to suggest that all atheists follow the words of HHDD.
Debating the religious vs. secular origins of the Israeli-Palestinian wars means little today – what matters is what fuels the fire today, and that is unmistakably, mostly religion – even if you try to hide “religion” behind the word “culture” – their cultures are largely defined by their religion.
To say that, “Atheism has little intrinsic ideological bent” followed by mentioning Marx and Rand, is just dishonest. Here’s another generalization, which is really just an extrapolation of my views: few modern, enlightened atheists would identify with these two historical characters.
Rand is selling more than ever. Few call themselves Marxists these days, but to say that there are few Randian atheists is misleading.
http://wamu.org/programs/dr/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3133438412578691486